There is something so wonderfully easy about reading this column in a physical newspaper. You turned the page and here it is, with few annoyances or distractions, in an ultra-high-definition typeface that was custom-designed with pleasurable reading in mind. Or — wait — are you reading this on a phone? Did you follow a link from Twitter, or Facebook? Or maybe you are on a train, or a plane, or you are trying to use your laptop on your cousin’s crappy Wi-Fi connection out in the countryside somewhere. In which case, there is a pretty good chance that even getting this far is some kind of minor miracle.
Web-based articles, these days, are increasingly an exercise in pain and frustration. In many ways, the experience of reading such things is worse today than it was in the early days of dial-up Internet. Because at least back then Web pages were designed with dial-up users in mind. They were mostly text, and even if they used images, the text always loaded first. Today, by contrast, everything is built for a world where everybody has a high-bandwidth supercomputer in their pocket. That is not because we all do have high-bandwidth supercomputers in our pockets, although the Web technologists who are building these sites generally do, and have a tendency to forget about everybody else. Rather, it is a function of misaligned incentives.
When it comes to the economics of online publishing, the first thing to remember is that job No. 1 is not to get the news to you. Rather, it is to monetize you, by selling you off, in real time, to the highest bidder. This happens every time you click on a link, before the page has even started to load on your phone. Once upon a time, if you and I both visited the same Web page at the same time using the same Web browser, we would end up seeing the same thing. Today, though, an almost unthinkably enormous ecosystem of scripts and cookies and auctions and often astonishingly personal information is used to show you a set of brand messages and sales pitches that are tailored almost uniquely to you.
That ecosystem raises important questions about privacy and just general creepiness — the way that the minute you look at a pair of shoes online, for instance, they then start following you around every other Web site you visit for weeks. Whether or not you value your privacy, you are damaged, daily, by the sheer weight of all that technology.
Apple blogger John Gruber started off a new debate about these issues recently when he noted that a 537-word text post on the Web site iMore.com weighed in at 14 megabytes. (Fourteen megabytes of text should correspond to about 7 million words, or about 10 times the combined length of the Old and New Testaments.)
Gruber blamed iMore.com, but really it is not the Web site’s fault, since to a very large degree the owner of the Web site you are visiting does not actually control what you see, when you see it, how you see it, or even whether you see it. Instead, there are dozens of links in the advertising-technology chain and every single one of them is optimizing for financial value, rather than low-bandwidth user experience. Many pages, if you are on a slow connection, simply time out; they never load at all.
This is the tragedy of the commons. It is your bandwidth and you are paying for it, but everybody else is clogging it up with stuff you never asked for or wanted. The result is a hugely degraded user experience — bordering on the completely unusable, in many situations. Is there anybody who can fix this problem? Well, there is one potential white knight out there: Apple. The new iPhone operating system, out this summer, will allow easy, simple content blocking . This move is being sold as a response to privacy concerns, but it is sure to improve performance as well — at least on iPhones, and at least for people who have installed the right plugins.
More broadly, though, ads’ thirst for bandwidth seems destined to increase relentlessly, whether or not bandwidth itself increases quickly enough to meet that need. Already many Web publishers have started to force their viewers to sit through a video ad not just before they watch video content, but even before they read a text story.
Online ads have never got less annoying over time and you can be sure that mobile ads are going to get more annoying as well, once Silicon Valley has worked out how to better identify who you are. The move to greater privacy protections might help slow the pace with which such technologies are adopted, but there is no realistic hope that Web sites will actually improve from here. If you want to avoid the dreadful experience of the mobile Web, you will only have one choice — which is to start reading your articles natively, in the Facebook or Apple News app.
However, it will not be Facebook and Apple who killed the news brands. It will be ad tech.
Why is Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not a “happy camper” these days regarding Taiwan? Taiwanese have not become more “CCP friendly” in response to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) use of spies and graft by the United Front Work Department, intimidation conducted by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Armed Police/Coast Guard, and endless subversive political warfare measures, including cyber-attacks, economic coercion, and diplomatic isolation. The percentage of Taiwanese that prefer the status quo or prefer moving towards independence continues to rise — 76 percent as of December last year. According to National Chengchi University (NCCU) polling, the Taiwanese
It would be absurd to claim to see a silver lining behind every US President Donald Trump cloud. Those clouds are too many, too dark and too dangerous. All the same, viewed from a domestic political perspective, there is a clear emerging UK upside to Trump’s efforts at crashing the post-Cold War order. It might even get a boost from Thursday’s Washington visit by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. In July last year, when Starmer became prime minister, the Labour Party was rigidly on the defensive about Europe. Brexit was seen as an electorally unstable issue for a party whose priority
US President Donald Trump is systematically dismantling the network of multilateral institutions, organizations and agreements that have helped prevent a third world war for more than 70 years. Yet many governments are twisting themselves into knots trying to downplay his actions, insisting that things are not as they seem and that even if they are, confronting the menace in the White House simply is not an option. Disagreement must be carefully disguised to avoid provoking his wrath. For the British political establishment, the convenient excuse is the need to preserve the UK’s “special relationship” with the US. Following their White House
US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has brought renewed scrutiny to the Taiwan-US semiconductor relationship with his claim that Taiwan “stole” the US chip business and threats of 100 percent tariffs on foreign-made processors. For Taiwanese and industry leaders, understanding those developments in their full context is crucial while maintaining a clear vision of Taiwan’s role in the global technology ecosystem. The assertion that Taiwan “stole” the US’ semiconductor industry fundamentally misunderstands the evolution of global technology manufacturing. Over the past four decades, Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, led by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), has grown through legitimate means
RSS