Tim Wu
Net neutrality is the principle that the service providers who control or access, who own the pipes, should not favor some content over another. It's, you know, an even playing field for stuff on the Internet, and, you know, I think it's very important to the medium that it have a rough quality among contents. Everyone has their shot.Collection: Thinking
Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically, it sometimes happens that the only way to preserve freedom is through judicious controls on the exercise of private power. If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.Collection: Believe
History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel-from open to closed system.Collection: Technology
We have just decided we have to have everything for free. And I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.Collection: Thinking
In the media, traditional media like print, we had boundaries. You know, we had spaces that ads didn't leave. They stayed where they were on the page. They didn't float around over the text. And we're kind of lost on the internet. We don't have any barriers. We have a demand for growth that is insistent.Collection: Media
I wish more of the web had stayed nonprofit. But the advertising model took over and I think has delivered us to where we are, along with the development of content, which is designed to do nothing else but make you click on it or share it. And I think it's kind of a low goal for content, and I think that's taken us to our current abyss.Collection: Taken
The most interesting thing about Google is its founders hated advertising.Collection: Interesting
More than anyone else, Adolf Hitler completely understood the union between government propaganda and between - and advertising, that they were in some ways the same thing.Collection: Government
I am the most concerned that we end up in a situation where your - everything is known about you and so therefore, not only Google, but Google, Facebook, Twitter - the whole set of companies - essentially knows all your weaknesses and therefore how to manipulate you in subtle ways in order to have you do things you might not otherwise do.Collection: Order
The best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation.Collection: Innovation
Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.Collection: Mind
When you think about normal advertising, it's just like, hey, here's a car and, you know, we don't know if you're looking for a car or not. So Google promised that mental state, and then were able to prove that delivering the message at the exact right moment would make someone click on something. So they pioneered the idea that advertising could be profitable on the internet, that a specific, very micromental state could be targeted. And they established the primacy of the click, which has haunted us ever since.Collection: Thinking
Advertising just keeps getting heavier and heavier and heavier. It doesn't have any natural limit, and we haven't found the place for the limit. And I think it's really important, therefore, that some of the revolts that are undergoing right now, you know, whether it's ad blockers or other things, are people trying to set some lines so that we say, you know, this far but no further. And this is where it ends.Collection: Thinking
Take back the web because it is a situation that really isn't working for anyone.Collection: Situation
When you pay for stuff, it has more of your interests in heart.Collection: Heart
Let's say you're someone's phone, and you notice that your owner is drinking coffee at certain times of the day, just very subtly indicating where the local coffee shop is which happens to have paid, you know, whoever makes your phone at the right moment. I think we're in a future where frankly we are possibly facing little tiny bits of manipulation in all of our waking hours, if we don't have that already.Collection: Drinking
The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson's idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, “a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical one.Collection: Breakup
I'm afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring because you're afraid to express yourself.Collection: People
If you really care about content, you should pay for it.Collection: Care
Starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads.Collection: Ideas
There's always going to be a tradeoff between trolling and anonymity, and I guess that's the way life will be. And you can manage it, but you can't cure it.Collection: Way
I think Google is the most successful attention merchant - profitable attention merchant in the history of the world, most successful advertising-only based company - most profitable. They started a very idealistic, beautiful company in many ways, but they didn't have a business model.Collection: Beautiful
You have to think back to the '90s. The computer was this terrible-looking thing that was trying to compete with the television. And it was this idea of email and chat rooms and this kind of stuff that first people - got people there.Collection: Thinking
Socialization would be the most successful thing to bring mainstream audiences to online computers.Collection: Successful
The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.Collection: Breakup
We're going to put Hulu ahead of you, unless you pay up.Collection: Pay
Right now it is illegal for a service provider to censor or block a site because they don't like it or to privilege someone who pays them extra money. So it's basically a level playing field. I think it was a great victory. It doesn't solve all the problems of our time, but I think we've gotten a much better place.Collection: Block
The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.Collection: Blessing
Advertising always corrupts the goal of the search engine, which is to try to give you the most important stuff, not the stuff someone paid there to be there.Collection: Goal
BE THE MEDIA is uplifting and empowering.Collection: Uplifting
If we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable.Collection: Swings
In fact, the big steps forward for advertising, especially after World War I were when government just began employing the tools of advertising for its own purposes to get people to join the army and other things.Collection: War
We already have our phones, but other wearables, and those technologies are going to want to know when you're deciding things and then offer some kind of input subtle or less so on that moment.Collection: Technology
One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.Collection: Leader
Facebook, when it began, like Google, was very resistant to advertising. They knew, like all - Mark Zuckerberg, like all good engineers, knew that advertising makes the product worse. But, you know, over time, they've been forced to increase the advertising load more and more and more. And the way they advertise is they - it's subtle but they know everything, you know, about everybody on the site.Collection: Zuckerberg
When you decide to like something, I mean, you may feel you're sort of innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you're delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that, you know, you'd essentially like to be advertised to by this company.Collection: Mean
There's always people - it doesn't take many - who have a different psychological makeup than most of us who really get joy out of provoking. They don't always believe the things they say, they just like to watch people go crazy. You know, I knew people like that in elementary school - bullies of one kind or another.Collection: Crazy
Trolling is an ancient problem. It's been around as long as there has been media.Collection: Media
There is this inherent human instinct that the usual way you control trolling is you force people to use their real identities. So there's less trolling on Facebook, for example.Collection: Real
I think you spend 50 percent of your mental energy trying to defeat ad systems.Collection: Thinking
All business models have something challenging about them, but the problem with the attention merchant business model they have is they need to keep increasing the amount of ads they deliver to people and therefore make their product worse.Collection: People
I don't think anyone at Google feels happy about it, but they've been in some sense, you know, enslaved to their business model, and so they have to satisfy their advertisers.Collection: Thinking
I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.Collection: Thinking
Movies you pay for - well, sometimes they throw some ads at the beginning now - but generally you pay for ads. And that business model - actually, much more ancient, paying for stuff - is much more straightforward in terms of the incentives of the people who are then giving you the stuff.Collection: Giving
You know, the only reason net neutrality is controversial is because it's complicated.Collection: Neutrality
Google has you at a very specific mental state that is, looking for something. And what they've always been able to say is, we deliver your message at the exact time someone is, say, looking for fishing hooks or looking for marriage counseling or looking for a lawyer for a particular problem. And here we have our customers telling you what is in their heart and soul. It's something that, you know, advertisers have wanted for decades.Collection: Heart
I'm kind of calling for a - I'm not the only one - you know, a revolution of some kind where we try to take back the web or start something new because, you know, the dominant medium of our time is in a desperate state and it doesn't have to be like that.Collection: Trying
There's always going to be merchants who need to get their message out, but things have gone way too far.Collection: Needs
Hitler understood the demagogues' essential principle to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion.Collection: Principles
Now, he doesn't control the media, but Donald Trump has been incredibly successful in having his face appear everywhere. You cannot go a day without seeing that face somewhere maybe 10 times.Collection: Successful