[jforman]

Let's say you're a startup trying to advertise on Google, and somebody has paid a bot network to fraudulently click on your ads. Now Google can't detect that those clicks are fraudulent, so you're billed for them.

Your channel efficiency unavoidably goes down, which increases your cost of customer acquisition because your other channels cannot pick up all of the slack.

Increasing the cost of customer acquisition is going to be bad for your business. You will either need to reduce costs (by hiring less, for example), or increase your prices.

[mhb]

This is a pretty status quo biased view. Maybe stronger privacy protection enables a startup search engine (or whatever) with a more privacy oriented funding method which wasn't thought viable before.

[jforman]

It's certainly possible new channels emerge to restore equilibrium, but I don't see Neeva (or whoever) replacing Google as a customer acquisition channel any time soon.

I think people are misconstruing me here. I'm not saying Google advertising is somehow fundamentally necessary to the economy. I'm just saying that it is straight up incorrect to think that there aren't legitimate downsides to removing their ability to police fraud.

[mhb]

I think there is a more charitable view of how people (I, at least) view what you are saying. There is a certainly a disadvantage to existing ad-revenue funded companies to not being able to identify their audience at the most specific possible level.

But there are also (potentially huge and beneficial) opportunity costs. We will never see alternative business models which are not viable in the existing ecosystem.

[jforman]

Agreed. Entrepreneurs always see opportunity in disruption, because you can always rebuild something better. Just don't @ me too hard for pointing out that the disruption is real and will affect the ecosystem (including startups!) as it is today.

[rndgermandude]

There are alternatives to fight ad fraud than unqiuely tracking users everywhere.

The tracking part isn't necessary for fraud detection not even for conversation tracking. It's only necessary for "personalized ads" aka spying on users.