Terms of Disservice - Dipayan Ghosh

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businesses. This combined focus on software and so-called B2B services disqualifies them from direct inspection here. Again, there is no doubt that some of them operate key consumer services over the open web, Microsoft’s Bing search engine being perhaps the most visible example. But these services are as a general matter neither a core functionality nor a key contributor to the firm’s global revenues and, more important, they are not the commercial engine of these companies. By corollary, these ancillary services do not “matter” as much to the respective company. Glancing at the angles of advocacy pursued by these firms suggests as much. Microsoft, for example, has long been a proponent of privacy regulation, far more so than Facebook or Google, since the company does not make its lion’s share of profit off data and advertising.

      Some of the companies listed above are primarily B2B businesses that simply operate over the internet. (These firms are marked with an asterisk.) They are apparently doing little harm to democracies overall, particularly since their interaction with individual users is minimal. Thus I exclude them, too, from the core analysis here.

      Finally, of the remaining companies on the list, some interact with the individual user far less than others do. Airbnb, Expedia, and Uber fall into this category and are marked with a caret symbol in the list above. These companies might set cookies on your browser to infer where you live, what kind of internet connection you have, what sort of computer, mobile phone, and browser you are using, and what business or vacation destinations you search for over their platforms—all to the end of determining some measure of your propensity to spend money on their respective hotel, rental, travel, and housing services.

      But they do not compare with the platforms operated by firms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter in the level of individual interaction with the consumer. In every sense, these three companies are a world apart; they are highly dialogical with consumers, in that they participate in intelligent back-and-forth engagements in real time. The consumer scrolls through feeds, repeatedly hovering over certain links, engaging with certain posted videos, clicking through to view certain news articles, watching ads, and interacting with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, journalists, thought leaders, celebrities, and politicians. Meanwhile, the platform collects information about the consumer’s viewing habits or interactions. As much as Expedia might want to employ such practices to increase its ability to monetize the user’s experience with the company, it simply cannot compete on this front with the likes of Facebook. It has less material with which to engage with the end consumer and less of a platform over which to foster sophisticated dialogue through content curation, so attempting to do so would carry it so far away from its primary business that the firm’s core value proposition would suffer from the unwanted distraction of attempted individual engagement.

      Something important links the remaining firms in the list—specifically Facebook, Google, and Twitter—to one another. Yes, they are more dialogical with the user. But why? It is primarily because they enable any individual user to upload digital content that other users can see—they are, in other words, social media firms. They have outsize capacity to infer the nature of the user’s personality and to monetize that capability.

      What of the other firm in that list, sitting above all the rest: Amazon? It is a complex business and, strictly speaking, a combination of various of the preceding company types. Historically, it has operated more like Airbnb, in that it has operated services over the internet but largely has not engaged with the user in dialogue as YouTube or Facebook do. That, however, is changing. In 2018, Amazon broke away from the pack of firms that were orders of magnitude behind Facebook and Google in digital advertising revenue. It now sits in a clear third place, with more than 7 percent of the market.55 Reading between the lines, it must be that a corporate strategy of Amazon’s in recent years has been to infer users’ personal desires and preferences by showing the user appropriate ads—making the firm much like Facebook and Google in certain respects. On Amazon consumers engage with products and services that others (or Amazon itself) have posted, and in doing so consumers reveal details concerning their interests, which Amazon can then use to operate a robust ad-targeting platform. And while this is not the prime revenue stream for Amazon—a firm that, among other lines of business, operates Amazon Web Services, the most popular American cloud-service provider, ahead of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud56—its ad-targeting platform represents a major presence in the consumer internet industry.

      These are only my perspectives. Some might contend that I am incorrect about the boundaries of the “consumer internet industry” in certain respects. Others might suggest I have grouped various firms in the wrong way, that certain of them belong in another group, and so on. But there is an easy test of this: examine the policy advocacy objectives of the various firms, which can reveal a company’s underlying profitmaking interests in explicit terms. And there is no better way to examine this sort of advocacy than to look at the chief executives’ statements. American technology chief executives enjoy an admired and rarefied existence with the public, but when push comes to shove, they are also the company’s first and foremost corporate advocate. On behalf of their shareholders, they have to be. Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Sundar Pichai, and Brad Smith—their voices project their companies’ perspectives faster and further than any registered lobbyist ever could.57

      Note: U.S. total digital ad spending in 2019 = $129.34 billion; includes advertising that appears on desktop and laptop computers as well as mobile phones, tablets, and other internet-connected devices; includes all of the various formats of advertising on the platforms; net ad revenues after companies pay traffic acquisition costs to partner sites; *includes YouTube advertising revenues; †includes Instagram advertising revenues.

      Source: eMarketer, February 2019.

      It is useful to test the boundaries I have suggested thus far by examining some of this corporate messaging, and what better place to start than with the statements of some of the chief executives of these firms? Perhaps the name that springs to most people’s minds as Exhibit A is Tim Cook. Over the past two years, Cook, the chief executive officer of Apple, has proclaimed that he and his company stand for consumer privacy and that the firm does not use the personal information pertaining to its customers to such an extent that some internet and technology companies have done. In fact, he is even more explicit about this: he notes that monetizing the consumer’s personal data should have no place in the business objectives of Silicon Valley internet and technology firms. This should serve as our first critical data point: because Cook does not hesitate to reprimand Google’s ubiquitous collection of data, we should expect that Apple’s data-gathering practices would be far more acceptable to users and that it is not in Apple’s plans to craft a digital advertising network that would compete at the level of Facebook and Google.58

      This makes sense: Apple may wish to concentrate on its principal consumer devices and closed-source software ecosystem businesses. Nonetheless, Cook’s attacks against his internet-based competitors—made variously in op-eds, media interviews, speeches, and other forums—deserve deep inspection. Is he speaking from a place of earnestness as a business leader who cares about the typical Apple user so much so that he is willing to stand up for that individual’s privacy more than other corporate executives would? Or could it be that Cook has a distinct commercial incentive to make such statements?

      I would strongly suggest the latter.

      It is clearly not within Apple’s business interest to monetize consumer data to the extent that companies like Facebook have done. While Apple does collect inordinate amounts of data—particularly through its customers’ use of popular devices such iPhones, iMacs, laptops, and Apple watches, not to mention the firm’s proprietary software, including all of the Apple apps, such as Maps and Mail—Cook’s point is that his firm does not use that information to make money.59 Or, stated more precisely, Apple does not make money off this data by directing targeted ads to customers, although collecting the data itself is still in Apple’s business interests to monitor and improve the company’s product offerings. Given this, we can conclude that Apple is not a key member of the consumer internet industry.

      Thus it is clear we cannot interpret Cook’s withering critiques as some modern form of noblesse oblige; indeed, it is quite the

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