Ad-blockers may be convenient but they're not ethical - or unethical for that matter

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It had to happen didn't it. I mean the extension of the long war against commercial communication - advertising to you and I - into some sort of moral/ethical dimension. With the assumption that advertising is, by dint of its very existence and purpose, 'unethical'.

A new ad-blocking tool out today ensures that everyone can consume their favorite content while remaining on solid moral footing. The Ethical Ad Blocker Chrome extension, developed by internet artist Darius Kazemi, will block any webpage that contains ads, replacing it with a crude text page telling users to check out a list of auto-generating websites and non-profit organizations that give stuff away for free.

And the 'crude text page' says this:

Now it looks like Darius Kazemi is making a point that stuff really ain't for free but the reader might not get this. I'm sure most won't understand how looking at sites paid for through advertising without looking at the ads might be unethical.  Now I've no objection to ad blockers - lots of people use them, mostly because they find advertising annoying and intrusive rather than because they want to kid themselves they're living in some cool, hipster, 'no logo' ethical wonderland.

We know there is a free rider problem with ad blockers (by getting the content without advertising you are, in effect, avoiding the fee for using that content) but this is a problem for the advertising business rather than something essentially unethical. And it is the case that some websites - especially news websites - are simply overloaded with advertising making the reader experience unpleasant.

Advertising - and we're celebrating (if that's the right word) 60 years of UK TV ads - is a central part of our culture. I consider that protecting rights to advertise is no different in its essence to protecting individual rights to speak. Of course, just as with speech, I don't have to listen to the adverts and I'm entitled to tune them out (consider how you read a newspaper or magazine to appreciate this 'tuning out'). And we retain the power to punish liars, cheats and con-men.

There is a great deal of ignorance about advertising - from the misplaced idea that advertising increases aggregate demand through to the persistent belief that there is a thing called 'subliminal advertising' that makes us buy stuff we don't want to buy. Plus of course that Nancy Klein rubbish about 'no logo' designed to make wealthy westerners feel righteous while suggesting that none of the world's problems are their fault - rather we get to blame 'corporations' (and particularly the ones we don't work for who own big shiny brands).

It's perfectly possible for an advert to be unethical - it might misinform, mislead or exploit - but this doesn't make advertising unethical. The 'Dark Patterns' site discusses practices that are, at best, sharp and, worst, deeply exploitative (as an aside very few of these practices that have only developed since the web became widespread - but then web marketing is mostly just direct marketing on steriods) reminding us that the process of selling is fraught. And that we should pay attention when we're spending our money.

Advertising is essential. Not just because it pays for news, entertainment and so forth (there are, after all, other models here) but because without it we have no information about what we're buying. We are faced with product choice - unless, of course, your anti-ad stance leads us to Soviet-style empty shelves - but no information allowing us to make that choice. Without advertising our modern world simply doesn't work.

The problem (not the free rider thing this time) advertisers face is how to get information to you when you are a reluctant recipient of that information. Partly because, as you keep saying, too much of the advertising isn't relevant. So advertisers take two approaches - either they seek out new media to get their message, a general message, across or else they try to target that message to the consumers they know are interested in that information. Good practice in the first case leads to the ubiquity of styles, symbols and images linked to a given product - it's brand. And those brands are very much part of the wallpaper of western society: instantly recognisable, friendly and comfortable.

In the second case, good practice focuses on how well we target, screen and interact with the consumer. The idea is that we don't want to talk to people who don't want to buy our product so we try to screen them out. The problem is that there are a load of techniques we know raise response (if you want to learn about these read 'The Solid Gold Mailbox') and some are exploitative, even unethical. And while there are advertising rules plus a self-regulatory body, it still rests with us as consumers to pay attention when we respond to something.

The free rider problem on-the web (which this ethical ad blocker highlights) is a problem for the businesses that operate on the web - if there's no revenue who pays for those achingly cool loft offices and provides the pay allowing the workers in those offices to buy extravagantly priced beard grooming products or designer water. Long-term it's a problem for user - for you and me - because, as we all know, nothing much comes for free. If we beat down advertising the result ('be careful what you wish for') is likely to be less choice, more expensive products and an infinitely duller world.

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In which Zoe Williams (inadvertently) makes the case for voluntarism...

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OK perhaps that wasn't uber-statist Zoe's intention but her (or maybe The Guardian sub's) opening statement in a piece about tax is spot on:

Good policy can’t be devised on the basis that reasonable people must be coerced or conned into paying for our services

Sadly Zoe then goes on to gibber about how big companies don't pay enough tax and how she doesn't mind taxes just  "...the people who raise it, the people who spend it, and the way it is discussed". We get the usual Guardian caricature of the Tory (in the currently favoured figure of George Osborne) and a slightly ill-informed canter through some late 20th century political history.

But the statement is still there. If we are to have a system where some things are done collectively then there needs to be a system for people to share the cost of those things. Indeed Zoe describes the problem precisely:

It is impossible to devise good tax policy on the basis that reasonable people don’t want to pay it and have to be either coerced or conned into doing so. Deduction at source turns into the mug’s option while tax avoidance becomes the natural course of the prudent person. It is often said that HMRC doesn’t have the staffing levels to deal with avoidance as it currently stands, and that’s true – but actually the resources don’t exist in the world to police an activity that nobody believes is wrong in the first place.

So the question here is left hanging about like some bloke on the corner trying to look nonchalant because his date's 20 minutes late. So let's ask it a different way - can we have a system where people are happy to pay taxes? Zoe tries to make a moral argument - tax is an 'investment'. Now this is not only utter nonsense but fails to make the point, which is that tax is a payment for services recieved. And we coerce (i.e. make it illegal on pain of imprisonment not to pay the tax) because of the free rider problem.

Indeed it is that free rider problem - people getting the goods or services without paying - that is the biggest hurdle for voluntarism, for the idea that we can have collective action and the collective provision of public goods without the superstructure of the state. The answer, of course, lies in either preventing the non-payer from using said public goods (something that proved impossible when public goods were built with private finance by private investors) or else by making the charge low enough and the benefit great enough for it not to be worth nearly everyone's while avoiding the cost.

The problem with our current system is that many taxpayers look at how the money (or some of the money) gets spent and don't like it. This is the same whether the anger is directed at the government buying Trident nuclear missiles or at this:

The state will then proceed to piss this money – that I have earned – up the wall on various fake charities, foreign aid, quangos and an over-bloated third sector. These parasites will use this money to lobby the government to restrict further my liberties to live my life as I see fit  and campaign for the state to steal even more of my money.

We know that most people, regardless of political position, find the tax system unfair or excessive. And we know that European high-tax societies have a problem with tax dodging. Not just by high profile multinational corporations but by millions of ordinary workers:

 ...the latest estimates showed about 30 million people in the EU performed work that was not declared for tax. "Around half of all construction workers in Germany undertake shadow work; and over 80% of all Danes find shadow work acceptable – at least in some circumstances."

Somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the British economy is outside the tax system either because it is illegal (prostitution, drugs, smuggling and so forth) or because people prefer to be paid in cash. The assumption that Zoe and her sort make is that simpler and lower taxes wouldn't generate enough to sustain the system so therefore we should all grow to love tax.

The things that the Guardian reader thinks important - pensions, a welfare syste, high quality healthcare for everyone and a sense of social justice - are not things that need to be provided by a central state through the imposition of coercive taxation. Indeed all such systems do is create a different sort of free rider - millions of people who receive more in benefits from the state than they pay in taxes to that state.

Voluntary collective action, for all its problems with governance and with free riders, doesn't receive the attention is receives. Prior to the creation of national state systems of health, welfare and education such voluntarism did provide such services to nearly everyone, it's a myth that there was no health provision for the poor prior to the NHS, no elementary schooling prior to the Forster Act, or no provision for welfare prior to Lloyd George's Old Age Pensions Act. These things existed and provided for nearly everyone.

I'm not sure you could run an entire nation on the basis of such voluntarism but I do think that such institutions - friendly societies, mutual finance, worker and customer co-ops and the like - are diminished by government and that private investment will (as the turnpikes and railways show) be forthcoming even where the return on capital is compromised by the free rider problem. If there is a business benefit to building a railway from London to Birmingham, businesses will finance it even where the return takes the form of a positive externality rather than cash dividends.

So here's to Zoe Williams for inadvertently making the case for replacing much of what government does with voluntary, collective and collaborative action funded by the willing and benefiting everyone.

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Some thoughts on toll bridges and copyright

Driving home from City Hall this afternoon I listened to a sweet little interview with a woman who had bought a toll bridge.

Grahame Penny and Maggie Taylor paid £403,000 for the Whitney-on-Wye bridge between Hereford and Hay-on-Wye. The crossing, which comes with a two-bedroom cottage and 1.1 acres, was built in 1779 and was granted exemption from tax by an Act of Parliament as it was privately funded.  It brings in around £2,000 per week but the couple will have to pay for annual maintenance and any staff costs.

It seemed to me that this little property might help us to understand the debate that carries on about copyright and intellectual property. But more of that in a minute – firstly we need to understand that ‘property’ is not a thing but a ‘right’. The access to my house is across land in the ownership of others but that access is my property – I do not own the land but own the right to cross that land so as to reach my house. I cannot parcel up that right but I can, should I wish, sell it -  which is what Bradford Council does with the right to fish in Chellow Dene reservoirs.

Mr Penny & Mrs Taylor own a bridge across the Wye and are permitted by law to charge you for the use of that bridge. When you drive up and hand over the necessary 80 pence, you are permitted – you have bought the right – to cross the bridge. Just once – if you come along tomorrow, you will have to pay again to have the right to cross the bridge.

Similarly, when I go to the cinema I buy a ticket allowing me to watch a particular film once and once only. If I want to watch that film again, I have to pay again just as I do with the toll bridge. And the same applies to a host of other rights to make use of another’s property – railway tickets, amusement parks, football matches and theatrical performances all spring to mind in this regard. Indeed, we even have to pay to use the lavatory.

All of these are examples where the right to use a particular “resource” is granted to the purchaser on a limited basis – most usually one use but it could be unlimited uses for a given period of time or a pre-determined number of uses. Copyright operates under the same principle – when you buy something ‘created’ by someone else it could be for your exclusive use or more typically for your use alone. Just as your 80p gets you one trip across Mr Penny & Mrs Taylor’s bridge, the money you hand over for an e-book to go on your kindle give you the use of that work and no-one else.

Without this protection, how are we to prevent you taking that e-book and selling it yourself? Not just to Mrs Smith next door but to thousands of others – all of whom might have bought the book. Even worse, you may choose to simply give the e-book away to anyone who wants it completely destroying the opportunity for the creator to benefit from his efforts. And it doesn’t really matter whether the creator is a multi-billion dollar film studio or a penniless writer in a damp flat.

If the creator chooses to let you use his work on this basis that is his right. But to suggest that he should have his right curtailed because “information wants to be free” is to create a circumstance where a man cannot profit from his own creativity. There is a case for debating what is covered by copyright – is a musical performance copyright or merely the music itself, for example – but the concept is absolutely central to the success of service economies.

The problem is not one of principle – copyright remains important – but of enforcement. Put simply, the on-line world makes it more and more difficult to police copyright effectively. And, as we have seen with the music industry, this pressure results in a dramatic change in business model. It is safe to bet that the same problem will be faced by the book publishing industry (the journal publishing business started its change and began its debate some twenty years ago) and the film industry.

And the main impact of this will be to make the published, copyright-compliant product much cheaper. Which is as it should be – instead of paying several thousand pounds for a subscription to the Journal of Consumer Marketing, the library now pays the same price for access to over 100 journals in that publishers portfolio. And the same will apply with music, books and films.

But this is not about getting rid of copyright, it is about the business models needed in an environment where the comprehensive policing of copyright simply isn’t an option.

However, we still have to remember that the more free riders, the less likely people are to create. To return to our toll bridge, Mr Penny & Mrs Taylor face competition from free bridges elsewhere on the river but that isn’t an argument for removing their rights.  So why should that fact that the web has led to an increase in free riders mean that copyright owners should lose their rights?

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How the BBC licence fee amounts to subsidising middle class hobbies

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I return to this matter of the free rider. But this time, I am stretching the thinking a little to look at the extent to which certain groups receive far more value from the BBC licence fee than others. It has seemed to me for some while that, despite its efficiency as a tax (it is after all a near universal poll tax), the license fee presents some issues of equity.

At the heart of this is use – whether or not we get value from the license fee depends on the extent to which we make use of the BBC’s services. As I noted before with cinema popcorn and service stations, there is an implicit cross subsidy within the BBC's business model. And, as with those situations the cross subsidy is intended to ensure that some ‘free’ goods are provided. In the BBC’s case, these free goods are what is termed ‘public service’ and provision for ‘minorities’ (or rather a selected group of minorities – we have an Asian radio station but no station for gypsies, for example). And the biggest minority benefit goes to elite arts and culture.

This all seems perfectly fine until you appreciate that my friends who slump before assorted soaps, televised sport and reality TV are forced to subsidise grand opera, symphony orchestras and ‘up themselves’ late night arts discussions (and frankly such folk are more likely to be annoyed by this than they are irritated by Jonathan Ross’s package). Because of the ‘public service’ requirement (and limiting broadcast restrictions), my friends are contributing to religious programming, to earnest current affairs analyses and the development of a vast internet empire. I suspect that, given a choice, these friends would choose not to cough up for any of this stuff.

Which brings us to the free rider problem. Bluntly, middle class arty-farty types like me are getting a brilliant deal from the BBC – vast subsidies for our narrow, minority interests are achieved by transferring cash from people forced to pay for the license fee who would never pay for subsidising a ballet company. And these people will make some observations about these subsidies – like the fact that their chosen preferences either are too plebby for subsidy (not a lot of public subsidy for the Northern club circuit, I notice) or else are more than capable for paying their own way without support – the BBC aren’t subsidising rugby league, country and western or snooker.

So those of us who enjoy minority music, who want to watch a bunch of smug people pontificate about books we’ll never read or who want to watch god being bothered get this on the cheap because people who don’t want that stuff are paying the same price. And the BBC gets a further economic benefit from all this as those benefiting from this cross-subsidy (which is, generally speaking, from poor to rich) provide an articulate, media-savvy, well-connected lobby aimed at persuading the government to maintain the current poll tax. Plus, of course, reminding the poor saps being ripped off just how important the poll tax is to maintaining these vital cultural institutions.

As a result we have an ‘elite’ arts and cultural sector that is de facto nationalised (this is especially the case with music) – so dependent on continued subsidy that its leaders simply cannot envisage a sustainable model based on the idea that people pay an economic price to watch or listen. The very business model that makes London theatre profitable and allows for the continued extension of aging rock stars’ careers wouldn't work for Philip Glass or Newsnight Review.

I do not think the licence fee should be scrapped rather that a gradual reduction of its significance to the BBC is needed. The BBC’s business model should seek to monetise all those aspects of provision that are not clearly and definably a public service. Over time the license fee should whither to a small amount directed to clearly described and limited purposes – everything else should be paid for by the user, through advertising, using sponsorship or through other charges. I can think of no rational or moral case for carrying on with taking poor people’s money to subsidise rich folk’s hobbies – however much I may like those hobbies.



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Copyright, free riders and the New England turnpikes

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The problem really isn’t that copyright is a bad thing. As a right it’s not really much different from assorted easements, permissions and other non-physical property rights (I don’t own the drive to my house but I own a right to use it to access my house). So I defend it and the associated right for those who own the copyright to expect the law to be on their side.

The problem is the free rider. Or more importantly the inevitable avoidance of payment (and remember this isn’t a moral argument). As such the challenge for owners of digitised information is how to protect the value of their asset. At present the approach is to seek (or rather to persuade those who administer laws) to seek more and greater powers to identify and control those who are taking a free ride.

This is a short-sighted approach that is ultimately doomed to failure. I’m by no means an expert on the working of the Internet but it seems to me that those who wish to take a free ride are going to carry on doing so. Each endeavour to close the loop – to check the metaphorical ticket – will be defeated by technological creativity. And the ever more draconian measures demanded by the owners will be resisted because of the collateral impact on legitimate activity (or the legal manifestation of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum).

However, we should not dismiss a model simply because of free rider problems – there’s a strong argument for allowing the present system to continue and for alternative models of production, protection and payment to evolve. To understand this I recommend reading this piece by Daniel Klein on the New England turnpike companies where the author describes how – despite a huge double problem of free riding – investors still stumped up to buy stock in these companies. Although these investors became stockholders in a business it was a business that they knew would lose money. In effect their purchase of stock was a private payment to secure the supply of a public good.

It strikes me that ‘investors’ in music, film and software are aware of the free rider problem but recognise that without some willingness to purchase something that free rider problem will mean no music, film or software. Thus we accept the need to purchase. Those businesses that provide simple, easy access to the product in response to these payments are like the turnpike companies in that the purchasers of this access enjoy a smoother journey avoiding the need to travel round the tollgate on a rough, dangerous track.

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