Mike Speiser reminded me of a point which I feel very strongly about: the right of content/service providers to advertise on their pages.  Congress recently stipulated that major advertising networks such as Yahoo and Google provide the means for users to opt-out of behavioral advertising schemes.  While having good intentions to protect consumer privacy, this is essentially a form of price intervention, a perspective perhaps overlooked by policy makers.

For content/service providers who give away a free, ad-monetized product, advertising is akin to a pricing agreement.

So this is really about the right to set your own prices.  It’s not the same as forcing anybody to view ads or have behavior data collected about them: it simply means that business should have to right to refuse service to anyone who doesn’t agree with the advertising or “pricing” scheme.

After all, if you don’t agree on the price, the transaction shouldn’t happen.

But now there are two problems that circumvent the right to advertise: ad-block software, which is essentially stealing, and the recent out-put legislation, which behaves exactly like price control.  If behavioral targetting technology can boost you ad revenues from a $1 CPM to $10 CPM, then letting users opt-out while retaining the same service is essentially a government-mandated price decrease from $10 to $1.  This seems quite misguided, considering the number of startups offering great free products but have yet to achieve attractive CPMs.

Ad-blocking is tricker because the provider doesn’t know it’s happening.  So to be fair, ad-block should be updated so that it report its presence in the user-agent string.  It’s a fair compromise between letting users block ads, while informing providers and letting them decide on whether to block service, or at least show a nag message.