Without regulation, you have no protections against these corporate actions. If you’re expecting or relying on corporations to act in good faith, you are going to be disappointed.

Uber, famously a company that respects existing laws and regulations.

Is there any recent example of one of these huge tech companies actually reducing advertising due to people "voting with their wallets"? Or even making any customer-favoring change whatsoever (ad-related or otherwise) as a result of voting with wallet? "Vote with your wallet" gets trotted out here all the time but it doesn't work.

Doesn't work for who? If you stop using their service then you're not subject to getting your data sold by them because that data simply won't exist. There is no inherent need to get tech companies to "stop advertising" on a societal level.

It gets trotted on a lot here because the overarching narrative on HN is that regulation is an answer to everything when it's easier to just... not use the thing if you don't like it. Rather than creating a mountain of regulations that only big business can comply with, I think it's better to choose what you do with your money as a consumer.

Doesn't work for YOU, because Uber burned many billions across 15 years making sure they killed all their competitors.

In most places, your options for a taxi service are Uber or go fuck yourself. That's how they're able to get away with their price gouging, privacy recklessness, and share-cropped labor.

Free market dynamics only work if you are in a free market. We're not, there's one player, and they won the market by literally just cheating and breaking the law. Sorry, sorry, "disrupting".

what alternatives in ride sharing / streaming / whatever are you suggesting I vote for with my money that doesn't do this? They all follow the same playbook.

Not giving them money is a start, and for alternatives I'd recommend finding another taxi service. Either the traditional yellow cabs or another private company/single owner-operator ones (like the ones that drive black SUVs/cars)

For streaming, I'm not sure since I don't watch much, and YT+adblocker is sufficient for me. Again, not giving them money is enough of a signal if you don't find the product good.

What if the service costs more to deliver than the market is willing to pay (e.g., search engines and social media)? I think it's reasonable to have advertising-supported services, it just needs to be clear up front. I don't mind dropping Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services for Blu-Ray ripping and Plex if it gets too expensive, even with ads.

>What if the service costs more to deliver than the market is willing to pay

What if I don't have enough money to buy something and I want it anyway!

While totally unaware of the underlying economics, I do find it interesting how the major LLM providers found a way to get a non-trivial portion of consumers to actually pay for the consumer service. Of course, ads are still coming, but it was objectively impressive to go from 20+ years of "search is free" to "search is free, but capped, unless you pay us."

LLM use is not a simple search. I pay for it to either aid me or autonomously do work with document authoring, software development, and market research. It's not apples-to-apples when comparing.

if you looked at the underlying = economics - even a quick review - you'd see that paying customers is a relatively trivial portion. This is much closer to the dotcom race to maximum eyeballs; figure out the money part later.

FTA:

> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.

It's apparently not that they directly sell your PII at least.

I don't think G-Suite customers are excluded from Google's ad tracking network. Microsoft enterprise? Neither. All you can ask if that they don't show you ads. And even that is temporary