by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer
This morning, the House Energy & Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices And Consumers’ Expectations.” If nothing else, it promises to be quite entertaining: With full-time Google bashers Jeff Chester and Scott Cleland on the agenda, the likelihood that top Google officials will be burned in effigy appears high!
Chester, self-appointed spokesman for what one might call the People for the Ethical Treatment of Data (PETD) movement, is sure to rant and rave about the impending techno-apocalypse that will, like all his other Chicken-Little scenarios, befall us all if online advertisers were permitted to better tailor ads to consumers’ liking. After all, can you imagine the nightmare of less annoying ads that might actually convey more useful information to consumers? Isn’t serving up “untargeted” dumb banner ads for Viagra to young women and Victoria’s Secret ads to Catholic school kids the pinnacle of modern online advertising? Gods forbid we actually make advertising more relevant and interest-based! (Those Catholic school boys may appreciate the lingerie ads, but few will likely buy bras.)
Anyway, according to National Journal’s Tech Daily Dose, the hearing lineup also includes:
- Charles Curran, Executive Director, Network Advertising Initiative
- Christopher Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer, Facebook
- Edward Felten, Director, Center for IT Policy, Princeton University
- Anne Toth, Chief Privacy Officer & Vice President, Policy, Yahoo!
- Nicole Wong, Deputy General Counsel, Google
That’s an interesting group and we’re sure that they will say interesting things about the issue. Nonetheless, because four of them have a corporate affiliation that fact will inevitably be used by some critics to dismiss what they have to say about the sensibility of more targeted or interest-based forms of online advertising. So, we’d like to offer a few thoughts and pose a few questions to make sure that Committee members understand why, regardless of what it means for any particular online operator, targeting online advertising is very pro-consumer and essential to the future of online content, culture, and competition. As Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg has noted, “Advertising is the mother’s milk of all the mass media.” Much of the “free speech” we all cherish isn’t really free, but ad-supported!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.