“I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”
Ethan Zuckerman opened a recent article in The Atlantic with this apology to the internet. And as the man who wrote the code for the first pop-up ad, he probably owed us one.
“All of us have screwed up situations in our lives so badly that we’ve been forced to explain our actions by reminding everyone of our good intentions. It’s obvious now that what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble,” Zuckerman writes, before confessing, “we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad.”
But while he opened by confessing responsibility for one of the most annoying pieces of software to ever grace cyberspace, the bulk of his piece was spent giving a history of the web, showing how the current ad-based system was a flawed means of monetizing sites and giving a new, more hopeful vision of the internet.
Pop-ups are emblematic of a flawed premise at the heart of the internet as we know it, Zuckerman told The Atlantic. Drawing on his experience coding for Tripod.com in the early 1990s, he describes how the site tried various means of monetizing their product before settling on advertisement. He now deems this “the original sin of the web.”
Advertisement served an original purpose, he argues, allowing the internet to be “a web open to everyone,” including “free riders” like young people and people in the developing world. At the same time, targeted advertising has led internet users to expect surveillance of their browsing habits and made them complacent to the types of gross violations of privacy exposed by Edward Snowden, Zuckerman argues.
He acknowledges that “it is hard to image online advertising without surveillance.” It has led to clickbait and a centralized web, which favors large companies with tens of millions of users.
Zuckerman wants to do more than just apologize for the pop-up. He proposes several solutions which would provide an ad and surveillance free internet. Perhaps crowdfunding or site memberships or tiny payments per use are the answer. He isn’t certain, but wants to starts the discussion.
“[Twenty] years in to the ad-supported web, we can see that our current model is bad, broken, and corrosive,” Zuckerman concluded. “It’s time to start paying for privacy, to support services we love, and to abandon those that are free, but sell us—the users and our attention—as the product.”
