Boston Review published an article by Matthew Cain titled How Capitalism —Not a Few Bad Actors— Destroyed the Internet that is well worth a read.

The race to commercialize the Internet is over, and advertising is the big winner. This is excellent news if you are an executive or major shareholder of one of the handful of companies that dominate the $600 billion global digital advertising economy. For almost everyone else, advertising’s good fortunes have meant the erosion of privacy, autonomy, and security, as well as a weakening of the collective means to hold power accountable.

This is because the industry’s economic success is rooted in its virtually unrestrained monetization of consumer surveillance. Digital advertising technologies are widely distributed but largely operate under the control of a few giant companies whose monopoly-like market power has, among other ills, unleashed a wave of manipulative communication and deepened a revenue crisis among the nation’s most important journalism outlets. For the ownership class of Silicon Valley, digital advertising has been a gold mine of epic proportions. For democratic society, it is gasoline on a fire. Constant surveillance is the essence of the $600 billion digital advertising economy.

The deep problem is surveillance advertising: a business model based on persistent and invasive data collection. At its core, surveillance advertising uses data to try to find ever more effective ways to predict and influence people’s behaviors and attitudes. Of course, advertising is old; companies, politicians, and other groups have long been interested in knowing and influencing many kinds of publics. Today’s regime of surveillance advertising on the Internet is not so much a new development as an acceleration of long-standing social trends at the intersection of technology, marketing, politics, and capitalism at large.

As Cain points out, it didn't have to be this way. Back in the 1990s, the Web was like the Wild West. It did feel like a liberating force. It did have a lot of potential. But then it became dominated by corporate interests, like practically everything around us. What to do about it? I have to agree with Cain that public policy is about the only possible solution and, taking into account how politics works in the USA, that is a long shot. In the meantime, perhaps the Privacy Tools Guide may be of some help. {link to this entry}

Yes, I know. Returning to the same topic, once again. I recently learned of the existence of The Browser Company, which is working on a new, supposedly very innovative, browser, difficult as that may be to believe. And, while perusing the news about it, I came across a piece from The Verge on Darin Fisher, the project lead for the Arc browser. Apparently, he was a software engineer with Netscape, then moved onto Firefox and Mozilla, and then Google Chrome. In other words, we are dealing with someone with plenty of experience developing browsers and, more to the point, dealing with the companies that make them. And, to me, that is precisely the most interesting part of the article. For example:

But the even more intractable problem, at least for the Chrome team, is that building a great web browser isn’t Google’s only goal. Chrome exists in large part to put a search engine front and center, which Fisher describes to me as like “a brick wall” for all kinds of browser innovation. “Anything we did that helps you get back to what you were doing, it means you weren’t searching, right?” Fisher says. Better tab management means less searching; sending you straight to the page you want means fewer search results and fewer ad impressions. Making you close your tabs and reopen them all the time isn’t just acceptable for Chrome; it’s a victory. Fisher and his team had lots of UI ideas and new features, but “all these good ideas die on the floor.”

(...)

In some ways, though, mobile represents an even harder surface on which to make progress. Because Apple and Google so tightly control their operating systems, there’s no way to build a Chromium browser and ship it to people’s smartphones. Android and iOS are both so focused on native apps that they seem to have largely left the browser behind. But here, too, there’s energy in the other direction. As Apple, in particular, continues to lock down the OS and try to extract even more revenue from developers and users, the web is an increasingly useful solution. Microsoft built game streaming that works in Safari; you can pay for apps in a browser without giving Apple 30 percent.

In general, I'm excited about the fact that there are so many browsers out there right now. On the other hand, I'm not so excited about the fact that the vast majority of them rely on Chrome's rendering engine, which means that we are perhaps closer than ever to a semi-monopolistic situation. Sure, on the surface, it looks as if there are many browsers. But many of them rely on the same rendering engine underneath which, in turn, is controlled by Google. Scary. Anyways, I signed up to give this new browser a try. But I continue supporting Firefox, and using it daily. Mainly because I believe in what it represent. Well, also because it is good technology, to be honest. {link to this entry}