A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy

MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA

Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has been a core focus for Mozilla from our founding. How do we ensure creators get paid for their work? How do we prevent huge segments of the world from being priced out of access through paywalls? How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.

We started engaging in this space because the way the industry works today is fundamentally broken. It doesn't put people first, it's not privacy-respecting, and it's increasingly anti-competitive. There have to be better options. Mozilla can play a key role in creating these better options not just by advocating for them, but also by actually building them. We can't just ignore online advertising - it's a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years.

We have the beginnings of a theory on what fixing it might look like - a mix of different business practices, technology, products, and public policy engagements. And we have started to do work on all of these fronts. It's been clear to us in recent weeks that what we haven't done is step back to explain our thinking in the broader 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 share our thinking, engage people along the way, and incorporate that feedback into our efforts to help reform the ecosystem.

We're going to correct that, starting with this blog post. I want to lay out our thinking about how we plan to shift the world of online advertising in a better direction.

Our theory

As we say in our Manifesto: ...a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical ... to creating an open, healthy internet. Through that balance, we can have an internet that protects privacy and access, while encouraging a vibrant market that rewards creativity and innovation. But that's not what we have in online advertising today.

Our theory for improving online advertising requires work across three areas that relate to and build upon one another:

• Regulation: Over the years, improving privacy and consumer protection in advertising while enabling competition has been at the core of our policy efforts. From pushing to improve Google's Privacy Sandbox proposals via engaging with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK to advocating for strong protections for universal opt-out mechanisms via state privacy laws in the United States, we have a long history of supporting legislation that puts users in more meaningful control of their data. We recognise that technology can only get us so far and needs to work hand-in-hand with legislation to fix the most egregious practices in the ecosystem. With the upcoming new mandate in the European Commission expected to focus on advertising and the push for a federal privacy legislation in the United States reaching a fever pitch, we intend to build upon this work to continue pushing for better privacy protections.
• Standards: As a pioneer in shaping internet standards, Mozilla has always played a central role in crafting technical specifications that support an open, competitive, and privacy-respecting web. We are bringing this same expertise and commitment to the advertising space. At the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Mozilla is actively involved 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 work is to identify legitimate, lawful, and non-harmful use cases and promote a healthy web by developing privacy-respecting technical mechanisms for those use cases. This would make it practical to more strictly limit the most invasive practices like ubiquitous third-party cookies.
• Products: Building things is the only way for Mozilla to prove these hypotheses. For years, Mozilla products have supported an advertising business without the privacy-invasive techniques common today by deploying features such as Total Cookie Protection and Enhanced Tracking Protection to protect our users. And we'll continue to explore ways to add advertiser value while respecting user privacy - including by exploring how we can support other businesses in achieving these goals via Anonym. Our goal is to build a model to demonstrate how ads can sustain a business online while respecting people's privacy. Laura expands upon our approach in her blog.

We have work underway right now across all three of these areas, with much more to come in the weeks and months ahead.

The way forward -together

This theory, and the work to test it, will become an increasingly integral part of the discussions we already have underway with regulators and civil society, consumers and developers, and advertisers, publishers and platforms. We will continue to set up gatherings, share research, and explore new ways to collectively share ideas and move this ahead for all of us - both shaping and being shaped by the ecosystem.

Fixing the problems with online advertising feels like an intractable challenge. Having been fortunate enough to be part of Mozilla for well over a decade, I am excited to tackle this challenge head on. It's an opportunity for us to bring a whole community - including often divergent voices from advertising, technology, government and civil society - to the table to look for a better way. Personally, I don't see a world where online advertising disappears -ads have been a key part of funding creators and publishers in every era from newspapers to radio to television. However, I can imagine a world where advertising online happens in a way that respects all of us, and where commercial and public interests are in balance. That's a world I want to help build.

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