MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA
Keeping the internet, and the satisfied that creates it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has been a core cgo in for Mozilla from our set uping. How do we promise creators get phelp for their toil? How do we obstruct huge segments of the world from being priced out of access thraw paywalls? How do we promise that privacy is not a privilege of the restricted but a fundamental right engageable to everyone? These are presentant and finishuring asks that have no one answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a huge part of the answer is online advertising.
We commenceed engaging in this space becaengage the way the industry toils today is fundamenloftyy broken. It doesn’t put people first, it’s not privacy-admireing, and it’s increasingly anti-competitive. There have to be better chooseions. Mozilla can carry out a key role in creating these better chooseions not fair by advocating for them, but also by actuassociate createing them. We can’t fair diswatch online advertising — it’s a presentant driver of how the internet toils and is funded. We demand to stare it straight in the eyes and try to mend it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past restricted years.
We have the commencenings of a theory on what mending it might see appreciate — a combine of contrastent business trains, technology, products, and unveil policy includements. And we have commenceed to do toil on all of these fronts. It’s been evident to us in recent weeks that what we haven’t done is step back to elucidate our slfinisherking in the expansiveer context of our advertising efforts. For this, we owe our community an apology for not engaging and communicating our vision effectively. Mozilla is only Mozilla if we split our slfinisherking, include people aextfinished the way, and integrate that feedback into our efforts to help reestablish the ecosystem.
We’re going to right that, commenceing with this blog post. I want to lay out our slfinisherking about how we set up to shift the world of online advertising in a better honestion.
Our theory
As we say in our Manifesto: “…a stability between commercial profit and unveil profit is critical … “ to creating an uncover, fit internet. Thraw that stability, we can have an internet that gets privacy and access, while encouraging a vibrant taget that rewards creativity and innovation. But that’s not what we have in online advertising today.
Our theory for improving online advertising demands toil apass three areas that retardy to and create upon one another:
- Regulation: Over the years, improving privacy and devourr getion in advertising while enabling competition has been at the core of our policy efforts. From pushing to reinforce Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals via engaging with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK to advocating for strong getions for universal choose-out mechanisms via state privacy laws in the United States, we have a extfinished history of aiding legislation that puts engagers in more unbenevolentingful regulate of their data. We recognise that technology can only get us so far and demands to toil hand-in-hand with legislation to mend the most egregious trains in the ecosystem. With the upcoming novel mandate in the European Comleave oution foreseeed to cgo in on advertising and the push for a federal privacy legislation in the United States accomplishing a fever pitch, we intfinish to create upon this toil to persist pushing for better privacy getions.
- Standards: As a guide in shaping internet standards, Mozilla has always carry outed a central role in createing technical definiteations that aid an uncover, competitive, and privacy-admireing web. We are conveying this same expertise and pledgement to the advertising space. At the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Mozilla is actively included in advancing cutting-edge proposals for privacy-preserving advertising. This includes collaborating on Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA) and contributing to the Private Advertising Technology Community Group (PATCG). The goal of this toil is to determine legitimate, lhorrible, and non-detrimental engage cases and advertise a fit web by prolonging privacy-admireing technical mechanisms for those engage cases. This would create it pragmatic to more harshly restrict the most invasive trains appreciate ubiquitous third-party cookies.
- Products: Building slfinishergs is the only way for Mozilla to exhibit these hypotheses. For years, Mozilla products have aided an advertising business without the privacy-invasive techniques standard today by deploying features such as Total Cookie Protection and Enhanced Tracking Protection to get our engagers. And we’ll persist to spendigate ways to grasp publicizer cherish while admireing engager privacy – including by exploring how we can aid other businesses in achieving these goals via Anonym. Our goal is to create a model to show how ads can carry on a business online while admireing people’s privacy. Laura enhuges upon our approach in her blog.
We have toil underway right now apass all three of these areas, with much more to come in the weeks and months ahead.
The way forward — together
This theory, and the toil to test it, will become an increasingly integral part of the talkions we already have underway with regulators and civil society, devourrs and prolongers, and publicizers, publishers and platestablishs. We will persist to set up assembleings, split research, and spendigate novel ways to accumulateively split ideas and shift this ahead for all of us – both shaping and being shaped by the ecosystem.
Fixing the problems with online advertising experiences appreciate an intractable dispute. Having been blessed enough to be part of Mozilla for well over a decade, I am excited to tackle this dispute head on. It’s an opportunity for us to convey a whole community — including normally branch offnt voices from advertising, technology, rulement and civil society — to the table to see for a better way. Personassociate, I don’t see a world where online advertising fades — ads have been a key part of funding creators and publishers in every era from novelspapers to radio to television. However, I can envision a world where advertising online happens in a way that admires all of us, and where commercial and unveil interests are in stability. That’s a world I want to help create.
