Notes
Introduction
Jasmine Enberg, “Global Digital Ad Spending 2019,” eMarketer, March 28, 2019, https://www.emarketer.com.
Robert Bodle, “A Critical Theory of Advertising as Surveillance,” in Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising, ed. James F. Hamilton, Robert Bodle, and Ezequiel Korin (New York: Routledge, 2016), 138–51.
Thomas Streeter, Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6.
“Internet Firms Face a Global Techlash,” Economist, August 10, 2017, https://www.economist.com; Ben Zimmer, “Techlash: Whipping Up Criticism of the Top Tech Companies,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2019, https://wsj.com.
Aaron Smith, “Public Attitudes Toward Technology Companies,” Pew Research Center, June 28. 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org.
Ryan Mac, “Literally Just a Big List of Facebook’s 2018 Scandals,” BuzzFeed News, December 20, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com.
Issie Lapowsky, “Facebook Exposed 87 Million Users to Cambridge Analytica,” Wired, April 4, 2018, https://www.wired.com.
Alex Stamos, “An Update on Information Operations on Facebook,” Facebook Newsroom (blog), September 6, 2017, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/09/information-operations-update/.
United States of America v. Internet Research Agency LLC, No. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2, 371, 1349, 1028A (n.d.).
Scott Shane, “LinkedIn Co-founder Apologizes for Deception in Alabama Senate Race,” New York Times, December 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com.
Young Mie Kim et al., “The Stealth Media? Groups and Targets behind Divisive Issue Campaigns on Facebook,” Political Communication 35, no. 4 (2018): 515–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2018.1476425.
“Protesters and ‘Russian Troll’ Demonstrate as Mark Zuckerberg Testifies before Congress,” Hollywood Reporter, April 10, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com.
Jon Evans, “The Techlash,” TechCrunch, June 7, 2018, http://techcrunch.com.
Zeynep Tufekci, “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine,” New York Times, March 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com; Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia, “There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia,” Vice, March 9, 2018, https://www.vice.com.
Nathalie Maréchal, “Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World,” Vice, November 16, 2018, https://www.vice.com.
Rana Foroohar, “Big Tech’s Unhealthy Obsession with Hyper-targeted Ads,” Financial Times, October 28, 2018, https://www.ft.com.
Bruce Sterling, “Tech-Lash Galore,” Wired, April 30, 2018, https://www.wired.com.
McKenzie Funk, “Cambridge Analytica and the Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz,” New York Times, November 19, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com.
Jon Swartz, “Facebook’s Sandberg: ‘There Will Always Be Bad Actors,’” Barron’s, March 22, 2018, https://www.barrons.com.
Sam Biddle, “Cambridge Analytica Might Have to Return Ad Award—But Industry Still Embraces Company’s Goals,” Intercept, March 27, 2018, https://theintercept.com.
Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott, “Russia’s Election Interference Is Digital Marketing 101,” Atlantic, February 19, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com.
George Slefo, “Desktop and Mobile Ad Revenue Surpasses TV for the First Time,” Advertising Age, April 26, 2017.
Peter Kafka, “2017 Was the Year Digital Ad Spending Finally Beat TV,” Recode (Vox), December 4, 2017, https://www.vox.com.
Julia Angwin, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (New York: Times Books, 2014), 3.
Timothy Libert, “Exposing the Invisible Web: An Analysis of Third-Party HTTP Requests on 1 Million Websites,” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 18.
Elena Maris, Timothy Libert, and Jennifer Henrichsen, “Tracking Sex: The Implications of Widespread Sexual Data Leakage and Tracking on Porn Websites,” ArXiv, July 15, 2019, http://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06520.
Wolfie Christl, “Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life: How Companies Collect, Combine, Analyze, Trade, and Use Personal Data on Billions” (Vienna: Cracked Labs, 2017).
Bruce Schneier, “The Internet Is a Surveillance State,” CNN, March 16, 2013, https://www.cnn.com.
Edward Baig, “How Facebook Can Have Your Data Even If You’re Not on Facebook,” USA Today, April 13, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com.
Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110, no. 15 (2013): 5802–5, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1218772110.
Youyou Wu, Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell, “Computer-Based Personality Judgments Are More Accurate than Those Made by Humans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112, no. 4 (2015): 1036–40, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1418680112.
Abigail Wise, “Research Says Facebook Knows You Better than Your Mom,” Real Simple, January 15, 2013, https://www.realsimple.com.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2018), 352.
Christopher Graves and Sandra Matz, “What Marketers Should Know About Personality-Based Marketing,” Harvard Business Review, May 2, 2018, https://hbr.org; Maurits Kaptein et al., “Personalizing Persuasive Technologies,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 77, no. C (2015): 38–51, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2015.01.004.
S. C. Matz et al., “Psychological Targeting as an Effective Approach to Digital Mass Persuasion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 48 (2017): 12714–19, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1710966114.
Michael Reilly, “Is Facebook Targeting Advertising at Depressed Teens?,” MIT Technology Review, May 1, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com.
Cory Doctorow, “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” OneZero, August 26, 2020, https://onezero.medium.com.
For a well-rounded critique of digital advertising’s effectiveness, see Tim Hwang, Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (New York: FSG Originals, 2020).
Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy (New York: New Press, 2013), 59.
Steven Morris, “British Army Ads Targeting ‘Stressed and Vulnerable’ Teenagers,” Guardian, June 8, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com.
Zeninjor Enwemeka, “Under Agreement, Firm Won’t Target Digital Ads Around Mass. Health Clinics,” WBUR, April 4, 2017, https://www.wbur.org.
Ava Kofman and Ariana Tobin, “Facebook Ads Can Still Discriminate Against Women and Older Workers, Despite a Civil Rights Settlement,” ProPublica, December 13, 2019, https://www.propublica.org; Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Mary Madden et al., “Privacy, Poverty, and Big Data: A Matrix of Vulnerabilities for Poor Americans,” Washington University Law Review 95, no. 1 (2017): 53–125.
Timothy Carr and Craig Aaron, “Beyond Fixing Facebook” (New York: Free Press, 2019), 10.
Olivia Solon and Sabrina Siddiqui, “Forget Wall Street—Silicon Valley Is the New Political Power in Washington,” Guardian, September 3, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com.
Ben Brody, “Google, Facebook Set 2018 Lobbying Records as Tech Scrutiny Intensifies,” Bloomberg, January 22, 2019, https://bloomberg.com.
Solon and Siddiqui, “Forget Wall Street.”
Carr and Aaron, “Beyond Fixing Facebook,” 10.
“Newspapers Fact Sheet,” State of the News Media, Pew Research Center, July 9, 2019, https://www.journalism.org.
Penelope Muse Abernathy, The Expanding News Desert (Chapel Hill: Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018), 8.
Victor Pickard, “The Big Picture: Misinformation Society,” Public Books, November 28, 2017, https://www.publicbooks.org.
“Newspapers Fact Sheet.”
Hillary Hoffower and Shayanne Gal, “We Did the Math to Calculate Exactly How Much Money Billionaires and Celebrities like Jeff Bezos and Kylie Jenner Make an Hour,” Business Insider, October 14, 2018, htts://www.businessinsider.com.
Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 84.
Ben Zimmer, “Techlash: Whipping Up Criticism of the Top Tech Companies,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2019, https://www.wsj.com.
Amy B. Wang, “Former Facebook V.P. Says Social Media Is Destroying Society with ‘Dopamine-Driven Feedback Loops,’” Washington Post, December 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com.
Roger McNamee, “A Brief History of How Your Privacy Was Stolen,” New York Times, June 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com.
McNamee, “A Brief History of How Your Privacy Was Stolen.”
Andrew Granato and Scy Yoon, “A Look at the PayPal Mafia’s Continued Impact on Silicon Valley,” VentureBeat, January 13, 2019, https://venturebeat.com.
Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Vintage, 2010), 83.
Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–35 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy. The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce (Washington, D.C.: White House, 1997), Background section.
Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 17.
For a critique of Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism along these lines, see Evgeny Morozov, “Capitalism’s New Clothes,” Baffler, February 4, 2019, https://thebaffler.com. See also Jathan Sadowski, Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020), 50.
David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016), 133.
Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: Ideas from the Past that Can Improve Our Future (New York: Knopf, 1999), 42.
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 2008), 12.
John Sinclair, “Advertising and Media in the Age of the Algorithm,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 3523.
James Rorty, Our Master’s Voice: Advertising (New York: John Day, 1934).
Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication (London: Sage, 1996); Robert W. McChesney, Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media (New York: New Press, 2007); Dwayne Winseck and Dal Yong Jin, The Political Economies of Media (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
Jonathan Hardy, Critical Political Economy of the Media: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2013), 112.
Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989).
Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983) Pope also argues that mass advertising was a strategy developed by manufacturers to gain mercantile advantage over wholesalers and retailers.
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (New York: Huebsch, 1923), 309.
Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 23.
A rich literature of critical media history chronicles the contested processes whereby marketing imperatives came to govern the structure and content of successive media systems. See Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate (New York: Transaction, 1978); Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed.
Hannah Holleman et al., “The Sales Effort and Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review, April 1, 2009, https://monthlyreview.org.
Herbert I. Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 13.
Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble (London: Verso, 2001), 4. See also Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2017); David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013).
Dan Schiller, How to Think about Information (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Lee McGuigan, “Automating the Audience Commodity: The Unacknowledged Ancestry of Programmatic Advertising,” New Media and Society 21, no. 11–12 (2019): 2366–85, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819846449.
Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011).
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1993); Oscar H. Gandy, The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993).
Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
Turow, Breaking Up America.
Raju Narisetti, “New and Improved: Ad Experts Talk about How Their Business Will Be Transformed by Technology,” Wall Street Journal, November 16, 1998, https://www.wsj.com/.
Matthew P. McAllister, The Commercialization of American Culture: New Advertising, Control, and Democracy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995).
Joseph Turow, Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).
Howard Kurtz, The Fortune Tellers Inside Wall Street’s Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation (New York: The Free Press, 2000), 179.
Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (New York: Picador, 2010), xvii.
Bob Garfield, The Chaos Scenario (Nashville, Tenn.: Stielstra, 2009), 243.
1. The Revolution Will Be Commercialized
Technology for America’s Economic Growth: A New Direction to Build Economic Strength (Washington, D.C.: White House, 1993).
The National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action (Washington, D.C.: Information Infrastructure Task Force, Department of Commerce, 1993), 7.
Judith Beth Prowda, “Privacy and Security of Data,” Fordham Law Review 64, no. 3 (1995): 747.
Privacy and the National Information Infrastructure: Principles for Providing and Using Personal Information (Washington, D.C.: Privacy Working Group, Information Policy Committee, Information Infrastructure Task Force, 1995), 1–2.
Privacy and the National Information Infrastructure, 1–2.
Privacy and the NII: Safeguarding Telecommunications-Related Personal Information (Washington, D.C.: National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Department of Commerce, 1995).
Privacy and the NII, 7–8.
Edward Lee Lamoureux, Privacy, Surveillance, and the New Media You (New York: Peter Lang, 2016).
Privacy and the NII, 14.
Privacy and the NII, 14.
For a critique of the notice and choice approach to consumer privacy, see Matthew Crain, “The Limits of Transparency: Data Brokers and Commodification,” New Media and Society 20, no. 1 (2018): 88–104, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816657096.
David Medine, “Public Workshop on Consumer Information Privacy, Session Two: Consumer Online Privacy” (Washington, D.C.: Federal Trade Commission, 1997); Christine Varney, “Online Privacy Protection Act of 1999,” Pub. L. No. 106-1044, § Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (1999).
Technology for America’s Economic Growth, 7.
John Markoff, “Building the Electronic Superhighway,” New York Times, January 24, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com.
Markoff, “Building the Electronic Superhighway.”
Brandon Keim, “June 29, 1956: Ike Signs Interstate Highway Act,” Wired, June 29, 2010, https://www.wired.com.
Framework for Global Electronic Commerce (Washington, D.C.: White House, 1997), https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/WH/New/Commerce/index.html.
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 85–86.
Robert Horowitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980–1996 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 10.
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015); Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism.
The nickname references the consumer technology company Atari, a pioneer of video game consoles and personal computers that grew rapidly in the 1970s only to fail spectacularly in the early 1980s.
Thomas B. Edsall, “‘Atari Democrats’ Join Party Conflicts Revived by Gains,” Washington Post, November 7, 1982, https://www.washingtonpost.com.
Christopher Wright, “The National Cooperative Research Act of 1984: A New Antitrust Regime for Joint Research and Development Ventures,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 1, no. 1 (1986): 133, https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38KQ18.
Earl Foell, “A Modern Marshall Plan to Help U.S. in R&D Battle,” Christian Science Monitor, October 3, 1983, https://www.csmonitor.com.
Jerrold E. Schneider, Campaign Finance Reform and the Future of the Democratic Party (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2–3.
Leslie David Simon, NetPolicy.com: Public Agenda for a Digital World (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000), 369.
Paul M. Hallacher, Why Policy Issue Networks Matter: The Advanced Technology Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
Lily Geismer, “Atari Democrats,” Jacobin, February 8, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com. See also Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Jeff Faux, “Industrial Policy: Will Clinton Find the High Wage Path?,” in Toward a Global Civil Society, ed. Michael Walzer (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn, 1994), 159–73.
Leslie Wayne, “Designing a New Economics for the ‘Atari Democrats,’” New York Times, September 26, 1982, https://www.nytimes.com.
Al From, New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 181.
Matthew Stoller, “Why the Democratic Party Acts The Way It Does,” Naked Capitalism (blog), November 9, 2014, https://www.nakedcapitalism.com.
Stoller, “Why the Democratic Party Acts The Way It Does.”
Jon F. Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats,” Political Science Quarterly 110, no. 2 (1995): 218–24, https://doi.org/10.2307/2152360. See also Ryan Grim, We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement (Washington, D.C.: Strong Arm Press, 2019).
Joseph Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties: Seeds of Destruction (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 26.
From, New Democrats and the Return to Power.
William Clinton, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in New York,” July 16, 1992, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nomination-the-democratic-national-convention-new-york.
Technology for America’s Economic Growth, 3.
Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); Shane Greenstein, How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Greenstein, How the Internet Became Commercial, 13. For more on the public roots of the internet, see Janet Abbate, “Government, Business, and the Making of the Internet,” Business History Review 75, no. 1 (2001): 147–76, https://doi.org/10.2307/3116559.
Daniel Burstein and David Kline, Road Warriors: Dreams and Nightmares along the Information Highway (New York: Dutton, 1995), 338.
Matt Bai, “The Clinton Referendum,” New York Times, December 23, 2007, sec. Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com.
Technology for America’s Economic Growth, 21.
Technology for America’s Economic Growth, 1.
National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action, 5.
National Information Infrastructure: Agenda for Action, 5–8.
Horowitz, Irony of Regulatory Reform, 4–7.
Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy (New York: The New Press, 2013), 107.
Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries, 127; Vincent Mosco, Pushbutton Fantasies: Critical Perspectives on Videotext and Information Technology (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1982), 45.
Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, n.p.
Stiglitz, Roaring Nineties, xviii.
Stiglitz, Roaring Nineties, 17.
Stiglitz, Roaring Nineties, 90.
Rick Perlstein, “From and Friends,” Nation, February 11, 2014, https://www.thenation.com.
Gwen Ifill, “The 1992 Campaign; Clinton’s Standard Campaign Speech: A Call for Responsibility,” New York Times, April 26, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com.
Justin Fox, “The Mostly Forgotten Tax Increases of 1982–1993,” Bloomberg.com, December 15, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2012).
Peter Baker, “Bill Clinton Concedes His Crime Law Jailed Too Many for Too Long,” New York Times, July 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com.
Baker, “Bill Clinton Concedes.”
Jean-Christophe Plantin et al., “Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook,” New Media and Society 20, no. 1 (2018): 293–310, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553.
Stiglitz, Roaring Nineties, 91.
Quoted in Stiglitz, Roaring Nineties, 91.
Simon, NetPolicy.com, 370.
Stiglitz, Roaring Nineties, 90–91.
Jill Lepore, “The Hacking of America,” New York Times, September 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com.
“Communications/Electronics: Money to Congress,” Open Secrets, n.d., https://www.opensecrets.org.
“History of the Office of the Vice President and Clinton Administration History Project, ‘OVP—Gore Tech/Tech Outreach [1],’” August 20, 1996, Box 59, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/5066.
“History of the Office of the Vice President and Clinton Administration History Project, ‘OVP—Gore Tech/Tech Outreach [1],’” January 16, 1997, Box 59, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/5066.
Simon, NetPolicy.com, 371.
Simon, NetPolicy.com, 373.
Simon, NetPolicy.com, 371.
Michael Kinsley, “Let Them Eat Laptops,” New Yorker, January 16, 1995, https://www.newyorker.com.
Lepore, “Hacking of America.”
Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries, 125.
Markoff, “Building the Electronic Superhighway.”
“Clinton Economic Conference” (Little Rock, Ark.: C-SPAN, December 14, 1992), https://www.c-span.org/video/?36064-1/clinton-economic-conference.
David Bank, “Shaping the Info Highway,” San Jose Mercury News, April 4, 1994.
Lee Gomes, “Superhighway Has Social Curves,” San Jose Mercury News, January 12, 1994; Simon, NetPolicy.com, 171.
For a discussion of the methodology of reading the trade press see Thomas F. Corrigan, “Making Implicit Methods Explicit: Trade Press Analysis in the Political Economy of Communication,” International Journal of Communication 12 (2018): 2751–72.
Gary Levin, “Interactive Makes a Splash,” Advertising Age, April 5, 1993.
Mosco, Pushbutton Fantasies.
Scott Donaton, “Prodigy Cuts In-House Ad Sales Team,” Advertising Age, May 9, 1994.
Marcy Magiera, “Map to Superhighway Beset by Uncertainty,” Advertising Age, January 17, 1994.
“The Revolution Is Now,” Advertising Age, May 31, 1993.
Debra Aho Williamson, “Building a New Industry. There Is a Business, but Defining It Is Like Lassoing Jell-O,” Advertising Age, March 13, 1995.
Christopher Anderson, “Net Profits,” Economist, July 1, 1995.
Turow, Niche Envy, 22.
Turow, Daily You, 38.
Scott Donaton, “Agencies Being Left Behind by Technology,” Advertising Age, April 26, 1993.
Donaton, “Agencies Being Left Behind.”
John Motavalli, Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet (New York: Viking, 2002), 9.
Magiera, “Map to Superhighway Beset by Uncertainty.”
Motavalli, Bamboozled at the Revolution, 19.
“Revolution Is Now.”
Schiller, Digital Capitalism.
Edwin L. Artzt, “P&G’s Artzt: TV Advertising in Danger,” Advertising Age, May 23, 1994.
Jay Matthews, “Are the Ads Infinitum? Madison Avenue Fears the Day May Come When Television Won’t Carry Commercials,” Washington Post, July 31, 1994, https://www.washingtonpost.com.
Artzt, “P&G’s Artzt.” On the subject of radio, it is worth noting that Lee de Forest, one of the principal inventors of broadcasting technology, called commercials “stains” rather than “spots,” and he rejected the idea that advertising was a necessary component of media. De Forest even worked toward developing a mechanism for consumer radios that could automatically mute the volume during advertising messages and raise it again once programming returned. See Vincent Mosco, The Pay-Per Society: Computers and Communication in the Information Age (Toronto: Garamond, 1989), 32; McChesney, Digital Disconnect, 146.
McAllister, Commercialization of American Culture.
McAllister, Commercialization of American Culture, 225–26.
Artzt, “P&G’s Artzt.”
Scott Donaton and Jennifer Lawrence, “New-Media Summit Called,” Advertising Age, September 26, 1994.
Steven W. Colford, “Mr. Herbold Goes to Washington,” Advertising Age, July 18, 1994.
Colford, “Mr. Herbold Goes to Washington.”
“Inquiry on Universal Service and Open Access Issues; Notice Department of Commerce,” Federal Register 59, no. 80 (1994), https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-1994-09-19/html/94-23033.htm.
Colford, “Mr. Herbold Goes to Washington.”
2. A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce
Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries, 40, 99.
William Clinton, “Remarks Announcing the Electronic Commerce Initiative,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 33, no. 27 (1997): 1003–7.
Schmidt later went on to become CEO of Google.
Eric Schmidt, “Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of Novell,” July 3, 1997, Box 1, Folder 6, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, Ark.
Ken Wasch, “Re: Software Industry Comments on Proposed Administration Strategy (Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of Software Publishers Association),” January 31, 1997, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Joseph Dionne, “Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of McGraw-Hill,” January 23, 1997, Box 11, Folder 1, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Marilyn Cade, “Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of AT&T,” January 31, 1997, Box 10, Folder 3, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library; Christopher Caine, “Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of IBM,” January 30, 1997, Box 10, Folder 3, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Stiglitz, Roaring Nineties, 106.
Framework for Global Electronic Commerce (Washington, D.C.: White House, 1997), https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/WH/New/Commerce/index.html.
Carla Michelotti, “Re: Information Infrastructure Task Force Framework for Global Electronic Commerce (Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of Leo Burnett),” January 24, 1997, 2, Box 11, Folder 1, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Dallas Smythe, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1981), 37.
Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, n.p.
Michelotti, “Re: Information Infrastructure Task Force Framework for Global Electronic Commerce (Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of Leo Burnett),” January 24, 1997, 7.
“Comments on the Principles and Positions Set Forth in ‘A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce’ (Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of The Direct Marketing Association),” January 31, 1997, 6, Box 10, Folder 2, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
“Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of the Cato Institute,” January 23, 1997, Box 27, Folder 5, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, n.p.
Charles Piller, “Net Regulation: How Much Is Enough?,” PC World, May 1997, https://www.pcworld.com.
Piller, “Net Regulation.”
“Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of Information Technology Industry Council,” January 31, 1997, Box 10, Folder 4, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
William Burrington and Jill Lesser, “Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of America Online,” January 31, 1997, Box 10, Folder 4, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Cade, “Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of AT&T,” January 31, 1997; K. McGee, “Re: Interagency Task Force Paper on Global Electronic Commerce (Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of Oracle),” January 31, 1997, Box 10, Folder 3, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Daniel J. Weitzner, “Letter to Jonathan Greenblatt on Behalf of Center for Democracy and Technology,” December 4, 1996, Box 10, Folder 6, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Jeff Chester, “Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of Center for Media Education,” January 9, 1997, Box 10, Folder 6, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Bill Poulos, “EDS Applauds E-Com White Paper (Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of Electronic Data Systems),” May 20, 1997, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Poulos, “EDS Applauds E-Com White Paper.”
Ellen Messmer, “White House Backs Global Internet Free Trade in Electronic Commerce Report Event,” Network World, July 7, 1997.
“Electronic Commerce Report Takes Information Superhighway from 55 mph to Autobahn,” PR Newswire, June 30, 1997.
Patricia Aufderheide, Communications Policy and the Public Interest (New York: Guilford, 1999); Holt, Empires of Entertainment; Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
McChesney, Digital Disconnect, 91.
Aufderheide, Communications Policy, 5.
Ann G. Cutter and Len A. Costa, “The Framework for Global Electronic Commerce: A Policy Perspective,” Journal of International Affairs 51, no. 2 (1998): 527.
Cutter and Costa, “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce,” 536.
Cutter and Costa, “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce,” 536.
Matthew Petrillo, “Administration Moving to Coordinate Electronic Commerce, Internet Policies,” Telecommunication Reports 63, no. 5 (1997): 9–10; “Whitehouse Seeks Input on Electronic Commerce Policy,” Phillips Business Information’s Internet Week, December 23, 1996.
NTIA held public hearings in 1995, but they were limited to telecommunications access issues.
Mara Liasson, “Conservative Advocate,” Morning Edition, NPR, May 25, 2001, http://www.npr.org.
Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, n.p.
Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries, 127.
Herbert I. Schiller, “Computer Systems: Power for Whom and for What?,” Journal of Communication 28, no. 4 (1978): 184–93.
Cutter and Costa, “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce,” 527.
Molly Niesen, “Crisis of Consumerism: Advertising, Activism, and the Battle over the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 1969–1980” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, 2013).
Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).
Burrington and Lesser, “Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of America Online,” January 31, 1997.
Mosco, Pushbutton Fantasies, 23.
Mosco, Pushbutton Fantasies, 23.
Mosco, Pushbutton Fantasies, 38.
Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble.
Dan Schiller, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).
Edsall, “‘Atari Democrats’ Join Party Conflicts Revived by Gains.”
Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism.
Gabriel Zucman, “Global Wealth Inequality,” Annual Review of Economics 11 (2019): 120–21.
Lawrence Mishel and Jori Kandra, “CEO Compensation Surged 14% in 2019 to $21.3 million,” Economic Policy Institute, August 18, 2020, https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-surged-14-in-2019-to-21-3-million-ceos-now-earn-320-times-as-much-as-a-typical-worker/.
Drew Desilver, “For Most Americans, Real Wages Have Barely Budged for Decades,” Pew Research Center (blog), August 7, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org.
Elise Gould, State of Working America Wages 2018: Wage Inequality Marches On—And Is Even Threatening Data Reliability (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2019).
McChesney, Digital Disconnect, 29–57.
Hesmondhalgh, Cultural Industries, 124–25.
David A. Carter, Betty J. Simkins, and W. Gary Simpson, “Corporate Governance, Board Diversity, and Firm Value,” Financial Review 38 (2003): 33–53, https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6288.00034.
Charles B. Shrader, Virginia B. Blackburn, and Paul Iles, “Women in Management and Firm Financial Performance: An Exploratory Study,” Journal of Managerial Issues 9, no. 3 (1997): 358.
Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 218.
Marc Rotenberg, “Privacy and the Second Term (Letter to Ira Magaziner on Behalf of Electronic Privacy Information Center),” November 1, 1996, 2, Box 1, Folder 5, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Sally Katzen and Tom Kalil, “Memorandum for NEC/DPC Deputies Re: Privacy in the Information Age,” April 7, 1998, 5, Box 22, Folder 3, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Katzen and Kalil, “Memorandum for NEC/DPC Deputies,” 6.
Bruce McConnell and Becky Burr, “Memorandum for Privacy Contacts, Privacy Functions for Your Consideration,” April 7, 1998, 3, Box 22, Folder 3, Domestic Policy Council, Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce Series, William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
McConnell and Burr, “Memorandum for Privacy Contacts,” 4.
Des Freedman, The Contradictions of Media Power (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 62.
Freedman, Contradictions of Media Power, 64.
Freedman, Contradictions of Media Power, 74.
3. The Web Gets a Memory
Debra Aho Williamson, “Turning On the PC Turns Off Pay TV,” Advertising Age, September 19, 1994; Motavalli, Bamboozled at the Revolution, 9–33.
For a history of the World Wide Web, see William Aspray and Paul E. Ceruzzi, eds., The Internet and American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008); and Niels Brügger and Ian Milligan, The Sage Handbook of Web History (Los Angeles: Sage, 2019).
John Cassidy, Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 77.
Michelle Rafter Reuter, “Internet Advertising Is Hippest ’90s Trend,” Financial Post, December 22, 1995.
Reuter, “Internet Advertising Is Hippest ’90s Trend.”
Marc Andreessen, “Netscape: Portal to the Web,” in Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business, ed. Robert Reid (New York: Wiley, 1997), 5.
Debra Aho Williamson, “Privacy Is a Very Public Issue,” Advertising Age, October 17, 1994.
Garett Sloane, “Love It or Hate It, the Banner Ad Turns 25,” Advertising Age, October 27, 2019.
Lawrence Aragon, “The Real Thing?,” PC Week, December 16, 1995.
Magiera, “Map to Superhighway Beset by Uncertainty.”
Reuter, “Internet Advertising Is Hippest ’90s Trend.”
Cathy Taylor, “The Repping of the Web,” MediaWeek, February 26, 1996.
Turow, Daily You, 36.
Richard Karpinski, “Ad Sales Go Real-Time,” InternetWeek, December 1, 1997.
David Shen, Takeover! The Inside Story of the Yahoo! Ad Revolution (Palo Alto, Calif.: VTDS, 2017), 39.
Taylor, “Repping of the Web.”
Sally Goll Beatty, “Poppe Tyson Leads the Charge of Agencies Signing on the Internet,” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1996.
Kim Cleland, “Poppe Creates Web Net,” Advertising Age, October 30, 1995.
Kim Cleland, “Rep Firms Stake out Web Territory,” Advertising Age, February 19, 1996.
Debra Aho Williamson, “CBS to Outsource Web Ad Sales,” Advertising Age, January 29, 1996.
Taylor, “Repping of the Web.”
Richard M. Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996).
“80% of the Advertising in the U.S. Is . . . through . . . J. Walter Thompson,” 1889, J0101, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850–1920, Duke University David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Durham, N.C., https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4tq5t42b.
Ohmann, Selling Culture, 94–95.
Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
Kevin O’Connor, The Map of Innovation: Creating Something out of Nothing (New York: Crown Business, 2003), 190.
Patricia Riedman, “Digital Media Masters,” Advertising Age, September 23, 1996.
Ethan Zuckerman, “The Internet’s Original Sin,” Atlantic, August 14, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com.
Zuckerman, “Internet’s Original Sin.”
Randall Rothenberg, “An Advertising Power, but Just What Does DoubleClick Do?,” New York Times, September 22, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com.
Karpinski, “Ad Sales Go Real-Time.”
Kim Cleland, “New Tools Make It Easier to Buy Web Ads,” Advertising Age, May 20, 1996.
Taylor, “Repping of the Web.”
Jeffrey M. O’Brien, “Feeling like a Number?,” MC: Marketing Computers, April 1996.
“DoubleClick Short Term Buy,” Standard & Poor’s Emerging and Special Situation, January 15, 1998.
Charles Waltner, “Going Beyond the Banner with Web Ads,” Advertising Age, March 4, 1996; Debra Aho Williamson, “Breaking Free from Boring Banners,” Advertising Age, April 1, 1996. See also Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas, “Formats and Formalization in Internet Advertising,” in Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures, ed. Marek Jancovic, Axel Volmar, and Alexandra Schneider (Lüneburg, Germany: Meson, 2020), 65–79.
Turow, Niche Envy.
David M. Kristol, “HTTP Cookies: Standards, Privacy, and Politics,” Communications of the ACM 1, no. 2 (2001): 155–56, https://doi.org/10.1145/502152.502153.
Thomas Weber, “The Man Who Baked the First Web Cookies Chews Over Their Fate,” Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2000.
Weber, “Man Who Baked the First Web Cookies.”
Rajiv C. Shah and Jay P. Kesan, “Recipes for Cookies: How Institutions Shape Communication Technologies,” New Media and Society 11, no. 3 (2009): 324, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444808101614.
Mark Gibbs, “Cookies: Feeding Session Information from Web Servers to Clients, and Back,” Network World, January 20, 1997.
Ariel Poler, “Advertising on the Web,” in Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business, ed. Robert Reid (New York: Wiley, 1997), 217.
Turow, Daily You, 47.
“Internet Advertising Bureau Backs Cookies,” press release, Internet Advertising Bureau, June 9, 1997, http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press_release_archive/press_release/4234.
Technically, this created a link between DoubleClick’s ad servers and users’ Web browsers. The advertising industry goes to great lengths to use this fact to claim that surveillance is anonymous. Numerous studies have shown that it is trivial to deanonymize many kinds of so-called anonymous advertising data sets. See Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, “Myths and Fallacies of ‘Personally Identifiable Information,’” Communications of the ACM 53, no. 6 (2010): 24–26, https://doi.org/10.1145/1743546.1743558.
FTC Staff Report: Self Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising (Washington, D.C.: Federal Trade Commission, February 2009).
Zina Moukheiber, “DoubleClick Is Watching You,” Forbes, November 4, 1996.
Kristi Coale, “DoubleClick Tries to Force Hand into Cookie Jar,” Wired, March 17, 1997, https://www.wired.com.
“America Online 1996 Annual Report,” 10-K (America Online, 1996).
“The Burger King of Internet Advertising,” Interactive PR, August 12, 1996.
Judith Messina, “New Media’s Hot Play: DoubleClick Infusion Largest Ever in City,” Crain’s New York Business, June 16, 1997.
“Ads Find Strength in Numbers,” CNET, November 4, 1996, http://news.cnet.com.
Kate Maddox, “Internet Ad Sales Approach $1 Billion,” Advertising Age, April 6, 1998.
Quoted in Peter Golding, “World Wide Wedge: Division and Contradiction in the Global Information Infrastructure,” Monthly Review 48, no. 3 (1996): 70, https://monthlyreview.org.
John Schwartz, “Giving Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy,” New York Times, September 4, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com.
David M. Kristol and Lou Montulli, “HTTP State Management Mechanism,” request for comments, 2109, Network Working Group, Internet Engineering Task Force, February 1997, http://tools.ietf.org.
Schwartz, “Giving Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy.”
David M. Kristol, e-mail message to the author, August 4, 2012.
Tim Jackson, “This Bug in Your PC Is a Smart Cookie,” Financial Times, February 12, 1996, https://www.ft.com; Shah and Kesan, “Recipes for Cookies.”
Rick E. Bruner, “Cookie Proposal Could Hinder Online Advertising,” Advertising Age, March 31, 1997.
Kristol, “HTTP Cookies,” 178–81.
The IETF’s mailing list (titled ietf-http-wg-old) is archived by the World Wide Web Consortium, “Mailing List Search Service,” https://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/. I reviewed correspondence from February to April 1997.
Mark Hedlund, “RE: Issues with the Cookie Draft,” March 22, 1997, https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1997JanApr/0588.html.
David Stein, “RE: Unverifiable Transactions/Cookie Draft,” March 14, 1997, https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1997JanApr/0507.html.
Kristol, “HTTP Cookies,” 160.
Yaron Goland, “RE: Issues with the Cookie Draft,” March 22, 1997, https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1997JanApr/0594.html.
Yaron Goland, “RE: Unverifiable Transactions/Cookie Draft,” March 18, 1997, https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1997JanApr/0507.html.
Helen Nissenbaum, “From Preemption to Circumvention: If Technology Regulates, Why Do We Need Regulation (and Vice Versa)?,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 26, no. 3 (2011): 1367–86.
Bruner, “Cookie Proposal Could Hinder Online Advertising.”
Kristol, “HTTP Cookies,” 161.
Bruner, “Cookie Proposal Could Hinder Online Advertising.”
“User Complaints Sour Cookie Technology,” Phillips Business Information’s Internet Week, February 19, 1996.
Kristol, “HTTP Cookies,” 169–70.
Shah and Kesan, “Recipes for Cookies,” 329.
Shah and Kesan, “Recipes for Cookies,” 329.
Joshua Piven, “Outsmarting the Cookie Monster,” Computer Technology Review 16, no. 11 (1996).
Dwight Merriman, “Unverifiable Transactions/Cookie Draft,” March 13, 1997, https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1997JanApr/0416.html.
Mark Hedlund, “RE: Unverifiable Transactions/Cookie Draft,” March 14, 1997, https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg-old/1997JanApr/0419.html.
Bruner, “Cookie Proposal Could Hinder Online Advertising.”
Rajiv C. Shah and Christian Sandvig, “Software Defaults as De Facto Regulation the Case of the Wireless Internet,” Information, Communication and Society 11, no. 1 (2008): 25–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180701858836.
Gillespie, Wired Shut, xiv.
Paul Judge, “Internet Evangelist,” BusinessWeek, October 25, 1999.
4. The Dot-com Bubble
David Kirsch and Brent Goldfarb, “Small Ideas, Big Ideas, Good Ideas: Get Big Fast and Dot-Com Venture Creation,” in The Internet and American Business, ed. William Aspray and Paul E. Ceruzzi (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 261.
Kirsch and Goldfarb, “Small Ideas, Big Ideas, Good Ideas,” 261.
Michael Peltz, “High Tech’s Premier Venture Capitalist,” Institutional Investor 30, no. 6 (1996): 89–98.
Joshua Quittner and Lawrence Mondi, “Browser Madness,” Time, August 21, 1995.
Marc Andreessen, “Netscape: Portal to the Web,” in Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business, ed. Robert Reid (New York: Wiley, 1997), 31.
Adam Lashinsky, “Remembering Netscape,” CNN Money, July 25, 2005, https://money.cnn.com.
“Dot Con,” Frontline, PBS, January 24, 2002, http://www.pbs.org.
Kirsch and Goldfarb, “Small Ideas, Big Ideas, Good Ideas,” 261.
Between 1990 and 2000, the number of VC firms in the U.S. more than doubled, while the number of start-ups funded grew sixfold, from 1,050 to 6,420. See National Venture Capital Association Yearbook 2011 (Arlington, Va.: National Venture Capital Association, 2011); and Venture Impact: The Economic Importance of Venture Capital–Backed Companies to the U.S. Economy (Arlington, Va.: National Venture Capital Association, 2011).
Matthew Zook, The Geography of the Internet Industry: Venture Capital, Dot-Coms, and Local Knowledge (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
Debra Aho Williamson and Alice Z. Cuneo, “Flexing VC Influence,” Advertising Age, November 1, 1999.
Brent Goldfarb, Michael Pfarrer, and David Kirsch, “Searching for Ghosts: Business Survival, Unmeasured Entrepreneurial Activity and Private Equity Investment in the Dot-Com Era,” Robert H. Smith School Research Paper No. RHS, October 12, 2005, 6–27.
Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 105.
Gretchen Morgenson, “How Did They Value Stocks? Count the Absurd Ways,” New York Times, March 18, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com.
For more on how informational practices create economic realities, see Micky Lee, “What Can Political Economists Learn from Economic Sociologists? A Case Study of NASDAQ,” Communication, Culture, and Critique 7, no. 2 (2014): 246–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12043.
Kurtz, Fortune Tellers.
Geert Lovink, “After the Dotcom Crash: Recent Literature on Internet, Business and Society,” Australian Humanities Review 27 (2002), http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2002/09/01/after-the-dotcom-crash-recent-literature-on-internet-business-and-society/.
Nigel Thrift, “‘It’s the Romance, Not the Finance, that Makes the Business Worth Pursuing’: Disclosing a New Market Culture,” Economy and Society 30, no. 4 (2001): 425, https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140120089045.
Brett Trueman, M. H. Franco Wong, and Xiao-Jun Zhang, “The Eyeballs Have It: Searching for the Value in Internet Stocks,” Journal of Accounting Research 38 (2000): 137–62, https://doi.org/10.2307/2672912.
Jim Clark and Owen Edwards, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-up that Took on Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 98.
Mary Meeker and Chris DuPuy, The Internet Report (New York: Morgan Stanley, 1996), 1–20.
Beth Snyder, “GSD&M Swaps Work for Equity in Net Start-ups,” Advertising Age, November 15, 1999.
Michael Wolff, Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 51.
Wolff, Burn Rate, 54.
Laurie Freeman, “Net Slashes Time from Hello to Adios,” Advertising Age, October 4, 1999; Suein Hwang, “Growing Pains on the Web: In Web Firms’ Ad Blitz, an Eye on Wall Street,” Wall Street Journal, August 19, 1999, https://www.wsj.com/.
Bradley Johnson, “Boom or Bust?,” Advertising Age, November 1, 1999.
“Breaking News,” Advertising Age, October 25, 1999.
David Goetzl, “Spokesman Reeve Stars in Effort for Disability Insurer,” Advertising Age, February 21, 2000.
Hwang, “Growing Pains on the Web.”
Bradley Johnson, “Out-of-Sight Spending Collides with Reality,” Advertising Age, August 7, 2000.
Catharine P. Taylor, “E-Business Falls Back to Earth,” Advertising Age, May 21, 2001.
Chuck Ross, “The Race to TV Creates Pain and Gain for Buyers,” Advertising Age, November 1, 1999; Wayne Friedman and Kate Fitzgerald, “Dot-Coms Give Commercials a Break,” Advertising Age, August 7, 2000.
WebVan, Value America, HomeGrocer, CNET, AltaVista, and E*Trade each launched $100 million–plus ad campaigns in 1999. See Dawn Kawamoto, “Dot-Commercials,” CNET, February 21, 2000, http://news.cnet.com; Alice C. Cuneo, “Milkman of Cyberspace,” Advertising Age, November 2, 1999; Jennifer Gilbert et al., “Dot-com Doubt,” Advertising Age, April 10, 2000.
“100 Leading National Advertisers: 1997 Edition,” top advertisers by media (Advertising Age, September 29, 1997), Advertising Age Data Center, http://adage.com.
Galen Svanas, “Out of the Box,” BrandWeek, June 9, 1997; “Yahoo 1996 Annual Report,” 10-K (Yahoo, 1996).
Peter Elsworth, “Internet Advertising Growing Slowly,” New York Times, February 24, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com; Bradley Johnson, “Advertising Jumps 80% to $359 Mil,” Advertising Age, October 18, 1999.
Kevin Featherly, “Traditional Firms Flock to Online Advertising,” NewsBytes, November 20, 2000.
“100 Leading National Advertisers: 2001 Edition,” domestic ad spending by medium (September 24, 2001), Advertising Age Data Center, http://adage.com; “2000 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (New York: Interactive Advertising Bureau, April 2001); “2010 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (New York: Interactive Advertising Bureau, April 2011).
“2000 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report.”
“Net Results,” Advertising Age, November 1, 1999.
Stefanie Olsen, “If You Post It, Will They Pay?,” CNET, March 29, 2001, http://news.cnet.com.
Zuckerman, “Internet’s Original Sin.”
Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 1–2.
Lovink, “After the Dotcom Crash.”
Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 3–4.
Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Ways the Network Economy Is Changing Everything (New York: Viking, 1998), 1.
Judith Messina, “Double-Time DoubleClick Acquisition Strategy,” Crain’s New York Business, July 19, 1999.
Justin Fox, “Net Stock Rules: Masters of a Parallel Universe,” Fortune, June 7, 1999.
Cassidy, Dot.con, 241.
Colin Barrow, “Internet Firms: What Strategic Changes Have to Be Managed?,” Strategic Change 10, no. 2 (2001): 79, https://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.530.
National Venture Capital Association Yearbook 2011, 11.
Suein Hwang, “Who’s in Charge? The Dot-Com Blur,” Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2000, https://www.wsj.com/.
Williamson and Cuneo, “Flexing VC Influence.”
Michael Indergaard, Silicon Alley: The Rise and Fall of a New Media District (New York: Routledge, 2004), 51.
O’Connor, Map of Innovation.
Messina, “New Media’s Hot Play.”
John Mulqueen, “DoubleClick Wants to Hit Big Button,” InternetWeek, December 22, 1997.
Messina, “New Media’s Hot Play.”
Judith Messina, “Kevin O’Connor and the Mouse That Roared,” Crain’s New York Business, May 15, 2000.
Messina, “Kevin O’Connor and the Mouse That Roared.”
Mark Walsh, “DoubleClick Clique Expands as Internet’s Appeal Boosts IPO,” Crain’s New York Business, February 23, 1998.
Michael Schrange, “Kevin O’Connor,” Adweek, January 18, 1999.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 2000 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 2000), 48; cash flow data from CapitalIQ financial database.
CapitalIQ financial database.
Messina, “Double-Time DoubleClick Acquisition Strategy.”
“DoubleClick, Inc. 1997 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 1997), 4. This language also appears verbatim in the 1998, 1999, and 2000 reports.
Judith Dobrzynski, “CEO Round Table; Online Pioneers: The Buzz Never Stops,” New York Times, November 21, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com.
Steven Vonder Haar, “Data Chase,” Adweek, September 6, 1999.
“Distinguished Achievement Citation: David S. Wetherell,” Ohio Wesleyan University, May 19, 2001; Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
Dennis Callaghan, “CGMI’s Excellence @ Venture,” MC: Technology Marketing Intelligence, August 1999.
Judge, “Internet Evangelist”; Fox, “Net Stock Rules”; Kimberly Weisul, “Net Investor CMGI Readies Raft of New Offerings,” Inter@ctive Week, March 8, 1999.
Stewart Deck, “Alta Vista Stake Sold to CMGI for $2.3B,” Computerworld, July 5, 1999.
John R. Wilke and George Anders, “Microsoft Sets a New Strategy for Investments,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 1998, https://www.wsj.com/; “Intel to Buy 4.9% Stake in CMG,” Wall Street Journal, December 9, 1997.
Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
Beth Snyder, “Pre-IPO Branding Essential for Web Companies,” Advertising Age, August 24, 1998.
Kurtz, Fortune Tellers, 118–19.
The deal with the Patriots was later canceled in the wake of the crash. Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
Callaghan, “CGMI’s Excellence @ Venture.”
McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy.
Peltz, “High Tech’s Premier Venture Capitalist.”
Mark Walter, “DoubleClick Merges with NetGravity,” Seybold Report on Internet Publishing 4, no. 1 (1999).
Messina, “Double-Time DoubleClick Acquisition Strategy.”
Messina, “Double-Time DoubleClick Acquisition Strategy.”
Courtney Macavinta, “DoubleClick, Abacus Merge in $1.7 Billion Deal,” CNET, November 24, 1999, http://news.cnet.com.
Randall Rothenberg, “An Advertising Power, but Just What Does DoubleClick Do?,” New York Times, September 22, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com.
Fox, “Net Stock Rules.”
“DoubleClick Takes 30% Stake in ValueClick,” Advertising Age’s Business Marketing, February 2000.
Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
The deals included the FlyCast media buying platform; the AdForce ad network; Yesmail, an email marketer; and AdKnowledge, a provider of ad targeting systems. Jennifer Gilbert, “CMGI’s Web Dealmaking Hits Big-Time,” Advertising Age, October 4, 1999; Stephen Lacey, “In the Net Ad Wars, CMGI Squares Off,” Mergers and Acquisitions Report, December 20, 1999.
Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
Norm Alster, “Can CMGI Stop the Bleeding?,” BusinessWeek, September 25, 2000.
Mitch Wagner, “Ad Agency DoubleClick Heads Off Downtime with Redundant Systems,” InternetWeek, June 13, 1999.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 1997 Annual Report.”
Messina, “New Media’s Hot Play.”
David P. Baron, “DoubleClick and Internet Privacy,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, August 2000, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu; Judith Messina, “On-line Networks Confront Survival of the Clickest,” Crain’s New York Business, January 12, 1998.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 2000 Annual Report,” 12.
“CMGI 1996 Annual Report,” 10-K (CMGI, 1996), 13; “CMGI 1998 Annual Report,” 10-K (CMGI, 1998), 12; “CMGI 2000 Annual Report,” 10-K (CMGI, 2000), 4.
DoubleClick Inc., “Dynamically Targeted Advertising,” advertisement, Adweek, March 6, 1997.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 1998 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 1998), 1–2.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 2000 Annual Report,” 4.
“CMGI 1998 Annual Report,” 3.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Online Profiling: A Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.: Federal Trade Commission, June 3, 2000), 2.
Gina Neff, Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 53; Indergaard, Silicon Alley, 78.
DoubleClick took a 30 percent stake in ValueClick, while FlyCast and AdForce were purchased outright by CMGI.
Matthew Goldstein, “Web Agency Uses Its New Bulk to Make On-line Strategy Click,” Crain’s New York Business, April 13, 1998; “Company News: Excite Agrees to Buy Matchlogic for $120 Million,” New York Times, January 16, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com; Kate Maddox, “Dave Morgan,” Advertising Age, June 1, 1998.
Debra Aho Williamson, “Targeting Distinguishes AdForce from the Pack,” Advertising Age, March 1, 1999; “24/7 Media, Inc. Reports Year-End and Fourth Quarter Revenues That Exceed Expectations,” Business Wire, March 2, 1999, 7; “ValueClick Serves More than One Billion Impressions per Month,” PR Newswire, November 1, 1999; “High Availability and Scalable Capacity for Internet Servers Cited as Top Issues Driving the Integration of New Web Switching Technology,” PR Newswire, July 12, 1999; FTC, Online Profiling, 2; “Christopher D. Neimeth Leaving New York Times Company to Become President, CEO of Real Media,” PR Newswire, December 8, 1999.
Rothenberg, “Advertising Power.”
FTC, Online Profiling, 3.
“Ads Find Strength in Numbers,” CNET, November 4, 1996, http://news.cnet.com.
Messina, “New Media’s Hot Play.”
Vonder Haar, “Data Chase.”
“DoubleClick Takes 30% Stake in ValueClick.”
Messina, “On-line Networks Confront Survival of the Clickest.”
Jennifer Gilbert, “Weathering the I-Storm,” Advertising Age, November 1, 1999.
Gilbert, “Weathering the I-Storm.”
Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
Norm Alster, “CMGI: Cashing in on Internet Jackpot,” Upside, June 1999.
Alster, “Can CMGI Stop the Bleeding?”
“CMGI 2000 Annual Report,” 2.
“DoubleClick,” in Gale Encyclopedia of E-commerce (Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 2002); “DoubleClick, Inc. 2000 Annual Report,” 8.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 2001 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 2001), 26.
Alster, “Can CMGI Stop the Bleeding?”
Wolff, Burn Rate, 15.
Fox, “Net Stock Rules.”
“DoubleClick, Inc. 1999 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 1999), 31.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 1997 Annual Report,” 4.
Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
Alster, “Can CMGI Stop the Bleeding?”
“DoubleClick, Inc. 1999 Annual Report,” 31.
Cassidy, Dot.con, 135.
5. Surveillance Advertising Takes Shape
“Toward a More Responsible Future for Advertising,” P&G Signal 360 (blog), February 6, 2020, https://pgsignal.com.
Artzt, “P&G’s Artzt.”
Dylan Tweney, “Online Advertising: A $3 Billion Industry Limping on Its Last Legs,” InfoWorld, October 4, 1999.
Rothenberg, “Advertising Power.”
This quote is possibly the most hackneyed in all of advertising scholarship. I consider it a rite of passage to include it in this book. See Turow, Niche Envy, 21.
Peppers and Rogers, One to One Future.
Turow, Daily You, 90.
Judith Mottl, “The Trouble with Online Ads,” Information Week, October 11, 1999.
Debra Aho Williamson, “Sony Seeks Big-Bucks Sponsors for Web Site,” Advertising Age, March 18, 1996.
Sally Beatty, “P&G, Rivals and Agencies Begin Attempt to Set On-line Standards,” Wall Street Journal, August 24, 1998, https://www.wsj.com/.
Martin Nisenholtz, “Public Workshop on Consumer Information Privacy, Session Two: Consumer Online Privacy,” Federal Trade Commission (1997), 224, 227.
Jim Clark and Owen Edwards, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-up that Took on Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 3.
Beatty, “P&G, Rivals and Agencies”; “2000 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (New York: Interactive Advertising Bureau, April 2001), 6.
Beatty, “P&G, Rivals and Agencies”
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2017), 103.
Sean Silverthorne, “New Research Explores Multi-sided Markets,” HBS Working Knowledge, March 12, 2006, http://hbswk.hbs.edu. For a useful discussion of platformization, see Anne Helmond, David B. Nieborg, and Fernando N. van der Vlist, “Facebook’s Evolution: Development of a Platform-as-Infrastructure,” Internet Histories 3, no. 2 (2019): 123–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667.
O’Connor, Map of Innovation, 61.
Schrange, “Kevin O’Connor.”
Tina Grant, ed., “DoubleClick, Inc.,” in International Directory of Company Histories (Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 2002).
Kurtz, Fortune Tellers, 179.
Seth Fineberg, “Dot-com Sea Change Forces Ad Networks to Rethink Strategies,” Advertising Age, October 30, 2000.
Kevin O’Connor, “I Am Kevin O’Connor, the Co-founder and Former CEO of DoubleClick, and Now CEO of FindTheBest-AMA,” Reddit, October 9, 2012, http://www.reddit.com.
“DoubleClick,” in Gale Encyclopedia of E-commerce.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 1998 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 1998), 1–2; Beth Snyder, “DoubleClick Forms Consumer-Tracking Unit,” Advertising Age, October 5, 1998.
Judge, “Internet Evangelist.”
Rick E. Bruner, “Engage and AdSmart Team up to Offer Improved Ad Targeting,” Advertising Age, January 19, 1998.
“Engage.Knowledge (TM),” Engage Technologies, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, February 13, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19980213153314/http://www.engagetech.com/text/knowledge.htm.
“Microsoft Acquires LinkExchange to Greatly Expand Small-Business Services from MSN,” PR Newswire, November 5, 1998.
Jennifer Owens, “DoubleClick Debuts Web-Ad Exchange Program,” Adweek, August 14, 2000.
O’Connor, Map of Innovation, 206.
Jennifer Gilbert, “Flycast MediaNet Tracks Online Ads,” Advertising Age, June 14, 1999.
“Bulletin Board,” Advertising Age, January 19, 1998.
David Wamsley, “Online Ad Auctions Offer Sites More than Bargains,” Advertising Age, March 29, 1999.
“Ad Info/Products,” DoubleClick, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, February 5, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19980205040958/http://www.doubleclick.net/nf/adinfo/spotlset.htm.
“Boomerang,” DoubleClick, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, August 15, 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/20000815064513/http://www.doubleclick.net:8080/advertisers/network/boomerang/.
Kim M. Bayne, “AdKnowledge Rolls out Web Ad Evaluation Tool,” Advertising Age, June 8, 1998.
Debra Aho Williamson, “Targeting Distinguishes AdForce from the Pack,” Advertising Age, March 1, 1999.
Nigel Watson, “A Brief History of Experian: Our Story” (Dublin: Experian, 2013), https://www.experianplc.com/media/1323/8151-exp-experian-history-book_abridged_final.pdf.
Rothenberg, “Advertising Power.”
Rothenberg, “Advertising Power.”
Gandy, Panoptic Sort, 1.
Gandy, Panoptic Sort, 2.
Gandy, Panoptic Sort, 18.
David Lyon, Surveillance and Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Turow, Daily You, 88.
Turow, Niche Envy, 186.
Philip M. Napoli, Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Kipp Cheng, “Engage Technology Plays Follow the User,” Adweek, October 11, 1999.
“Engage.Knowledge (TM).”
Lori Andrews, “Facebook Is Using You,” New York Times, February 4, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com.
Turow, Breaking Up America; Turow, Daily You, 194.
Marcia Stepankek, “Weblining,” BusinessWeek, April 3, 2000.
Stepankek, “Weblining.”
Noble, Algorithms of Oppression; Jathan Sadowski, Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020).
Tamara Shepherd, “Desperation and Datalogix: Facebook Six Months after Its IPO,” Culture Digitally (blog), November 12, 2012, http://culturedigitally.org.
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017).
Mark Andrejevic, ISpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 2–4.
Andrejevic, ISpy, 7.
Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication (London: Sage, 1996); Dan Schiller, How to Think about Information (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Matthew Crain, “The Limits of Transparency: Data Brokers and Commodification,” New Media and Society 20, no. 1 (2018): 88–104, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816657096.
“100 Leading National Advertisers: 1999 Edition,” domestic ad spending by medium, September 27, 1999, and “100 Leading National Advertisers: 2000 Edition,” domestic ad spending by medium, September 25, 2000, Advertising Age Data Center, http://adage.com.
Stefanie Olsen, “Advertisers Flock to the Web,” CNET, December 3, 2000, http://news.cnet.com.
Stuart Elliott, “A Study Says Many Traditional Marketers Are Quickly Becoming Devotees of Cyberspace,” New York Times, May 9, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com.
“Net Results,” Advertising Age, November 1, 1999; “Net Results,” Advertising Age, February 26, 2001; “2000 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report,” 6. The 1999 totals are annualized.
Jennifer Gilbert, “Agencies Centralize Web Serving,” Advertising Age, March 1, 1999.
Gilbert, “Agencies Centralize Web Serving.”
“DoubleClick Short Term Buy,” Standard & Poor’s Emerging and Special Situation, January 15, 1998.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 2000 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 2000), 6.
Schrange, “Kevin O’Connor.”
“The Burger King of Internet Advertising,” Interactive PR, August 12, 1996.
George Anders, “Wide Open Space: Internet Advertising, Just Like Its Medium, Is Pushing Boundaries,” Wall Street Journal, November 30, 1998, https://www.wsj.com/.
“Tech Firms Promise New Era of Interactive Selling,” Interactive Marketing News, December 20, 1996.
Thomas Weber, “The Man Who Baked the First Web Cookies Chews Over Their Fate,” Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2000.
FTC, Online Profiling, 6.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Privacy Online: Fair Information Practices in the Electronic Marketplace (Washington, D.C.: Federal Trade Commission, 2000), 9.
Fineberg, “Dot-Com Sea Change.”
Vonder Haar, “Data Chase.”
Schiller, Digital Capitalism, 99–101.
“100 Leading National Advertisers: 1999 Edition.”
Kate Maddox, “Net Gains Credibility as Ad Medium,” Advertising Age, April 26, 1999.
Kate Maddox, “P&G: Interactive Marketer of the Year,” Advertising Age, May 3, 1999.
Maddox, “P&G: Interactive Marketer of the Year.”
Kate Maddox, “Marketers Debate FAST’s Outcome,” Advertising Age, September 7, 1998.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 2003 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 2003), iii.
Dana Blankenhorn, “NetGravity Puts Emphasis on Solutions,” Advertising Age, March 1, 1999.
Blankenhorn, “NetGravity Puts Emphasis on Solutions.”
Vonder Haar, “Data Chase.”
Vonder Haar, “Data Chase.”
“DoubleClick, Inc. 2000 Annual Report.”
“DoubleClick, Inc. 2000 Annual Report,” 8; Alster, “Can CMGI Stop the Bleeding?”; FTC, Online Profiling, 6.
Rick Whiting, “Web Data Piles Up,” Information Week, May 8, 2000.
Patricia Riedman, “AOL Taps Offline Databases in Ad Targeting Quest,” Advertising Age, October 20, 1997.
6. The Privacy Challenge
Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Privacy Online: A Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.: Federal Trade Commission, 1998).
Marc Rotenberg, “Public Workshop on Consumer Information Privacy, Session Four: Database Study,” Federal Trade Commission (1997), 237–39.
Freedman, Contradictions of Media Power.
Lauer, Creditworthy; Jason Pridmore and Detlev Zwick, “Marketing and the Rise of Commercial Consumer Surveillance,” Surveillance and Society 8, no. 3 (2011): 269–77, https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v8i3.4163.
Colin J. Bennett, The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).
Center for Media Education, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, February 23, 1999, http://web.archive.org/web/19990223194220/http://tap.epn.org/cme/.
Other participating organizations included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Junk Busters, Privacy International, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Consumer Federation of America, and the National Parent Teacher Association.
McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, 126; Streeter, Selling the Air.
Kathryn C. Montgomery, Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 68.
Jeff Chester, telephone interview with the author, December 14, 2012.
Lee Gomes, “Leading Web Browsers May Violate Privacy of Users’ Computers, Activities,” San Jose Mercury News, February 13, 1996.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Staff Report: Public Workshop on Consumer Privacy on the Global Information Infrastructure (Washington, D.C.: Federal Trade Commission, 1996), 8.
Janlori Goldman, “Public Workshop on Consumer Information Privacy, Session Two: Consumer Online Privacy,” Federal Trade Commission (1997), 335.
Ira Teinowitz, “Privacy Groups Ready to Seek FTC Regs for Online Biz,” Advertising Age, June 9, 1997.
David P. Baron, “DoubleClick and Internet Privacy,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, August 2000, 5, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu.
Evan Hendricks, “Public Workshop on Consumer Information Privacy, Session Two: Consumer Online Privacy,” Federal Trade Commission (1997), 325.
Web of Deception: Threats to Children from Online Marketing (Washington, D.C.: Center for Media Education, 1996).
These concerns led to the controversial Communications Decency Act of 1996 (Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996), the anti-indecency provisions of which were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997.
Montgomery, Generation Digital, 76.
Colin J. Bennett, “Convergence Revisited: Toward a Global Policy for the Protection of Personal Data,” in Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape, ed. Philip E. Agre and Marc Rotenberg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 113.
Industry representatives included Netscape, Prodigy, and trade associations including CASIE, ANA, AAAA, and DMA. The privacy advocates included representatives from CME, EPIC, and CDT.
Montgomery, Generation Digital, 79.
Montgomery, Generation Digital, 80.
FTC, Privacy Online, 36–37.
Edward Lee Lamoureux, Privacy, Surveillance, and the New Media You (New York: Peter Lang, 2016); Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
FTC, Staff Report, 27–28.
Chris Jay Hoofnagle, “Denialists’ Deck of Cards: An Illustrated Taxonomy of Rhetoric Used to Frustrate Consumer Protection Efforts,” Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Scholarly Paper, February 9, 2007.
Ira Teinowitz, “Internet Privacy Concerns Addressed,” Advertising Age, June 16, 1997.
Medine, “Public Workshop on Consumer Information Privacy,” 88.
Gregory Dalton, “OPS: Answer to Cookies?,” Information Week, October 13, 1997, 3.
Baron, “DoubleClick and Internet Privacy,” 8.
Teinowitz, “Privacy Groups Ready to Seek FTC Regs for Online Biz.”
FTC, Privacy Online, ii–iii.
FTC, Privacy Online, 41.
“Internet Site Agrees to Settle FTC Charges of Deceptively Collecting Personal Information in Agency’s First Internet Privacy Case,” Federal Trade Commission, August 13, 1998, https://www.ftc.gov.
FTC, Privacy Online, 42.
“Editorial: Help Hold Off Online Rules,” Advertising Age, April 8, 1996.
Simon, NetPolicy.com, 143.
Robert Schriver, “You Cheated, You Lied: The Safe Harbor Agreement and Its Enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission,” Fordham Law Review 70, no. 6 (2002): 2279.
Montgomery, Generation Digital, 95.
Montgomery, Generation Digital, 93–94.
Montgomery, Generation Digital, 102.
Judith Messina, “Companies Idling as Beltway Maps Plans for I-Way,” Crain’s New York Business, March 9, 1998.
“Microsoft Wants Net Privacy,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 24, 1999.
“Online Privacy Alliance Says Web Sweeps Confirm Significant Progress in Privacy Self-Regulation,” Online Privacy Alliance, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, February 29, 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083227/http://www.privacyalliance.org/news/05121999.shtml.
Ira Teinowitz, “FTC Chief Asks Congress to Ensure Privacy on Web,” Advertising Age, June 8, 1998.
Sheila F. Anthony, “The Case for Standardization of Privacy Policy Formats,” July 1, 2001, https://www.ftc.gov/public-statements/2001/07/case-standardization-privacy-policy-formats. Draper and Turow argue persuasively that opaque privacy policies are part of a tool kit for the deliberate corporate cultivation of resignation among Internet users. See Nora A. Draper and Joseph Turow, “The Corporate Cultivation of Digital Resignation,” New Media and Society 21, no. 8 (2019): 1824–39, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819833331.
Beth Cox, “Profiling Firms Defend Themselves,” ClickZ, November 10, 1999.
Simon, NetPolicy.com.
Courtney Macavinta, “Consumer Group to Fight DoubleClick Deal,” CNET, June 8, 1998, http://news.cnet.com/.
“The Internet’s Chastened Child,” Economist, November 9, 2000, http://www.economist.com.
Andrea Petersen and Jon G. Auerbach, “Online Ad Titans Bet Big in Race to Trace Consumers’ Web Tracks,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1999, https://www.wsj.com/.
David J. A. Todd, “Politicizing Privacy: ‘Focussing Events’ and the Dynamics of Conflict” (master’s thesis, University of Victoria, 2001).
Evan Hansen, “DoubleClick under Email Attack for Consumer Profiling Plans,” CNET, February 2, 2000, http://news.cnet.com; Jennifer Gilbert, “D’Click Says Merging Abacus Data Impossible,” Advertising Age, November 15, 1999.
Schrange, “Kevin O’Connor.”
Hansen, “DoubleClick under Email Attack.”
“Internet’s Chastened Child.”
Todd, “Politicizing Privacy,” 121.
Kurtz, Fortune Tellers, 273–74.
Greg Sandoval, “Probes Are Latest Headache in E-Commerce,” CNET, February 16, 2000, https://www.cnet.com.
Evan Hansen, “DoubleClick Postpones Data-Merging Plan,” CNET, March 2, 2000, https://www.cnet.com.
“Internet’s Chastened Child.”
Hansen, “DoubleClick Postpones Data-Merging Plan.”
Todd, “Politicizing Privacy,” 119–20.
Hansen, “DoubleClick under Email Attack.”
Hansen, “DoubleClick under Email Attack.”
Jennifer Gilbert and Ira Teinowitz, “Privacy Debate Continues to Rage,” Advertising Age, February 7, 2000.
Jennifer Gilbert and Ira Teinowitz, “Online Privacy Disputes Reach FTC Panel,” Advertising Age, January 31, 2000.
Ross McGhie, “Internet Advertising: The Internet as a Commercial Mass Medium” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2003), 199.
Baron, “DoubleClick and Internet Privacy,” 6.
Baron, “DoubleClick and Internet Privacy,” 6.
“DoubleClick, Inc. 2000 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 2000), 8.
Bennett, Privacy Advocates, 155.
Messina, “Kevin O’Connor and the Mouse That Roared.”
FTC, Privacy Online, iii.
Baron, “DoubleClick and Internet Privacy,” 8.
Heather Green, “Privacy: Outrage on the Web,” BusinessWeek, February 14, 2000.
Federal Trade Commission, Self-Regulation and Privacy Online: A Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.: Federal Trade Commission, 1999), 2.
Simon, NetPolicy.com, 145.
Green, “Privacy.”
Simon, NetPolicy.com, 143.
Greg Sandoval, “McCain-Led Group Introduces Net Privacy Bill,” CNET, July 26, 2000, https://www.cnet.com.
Weber, Thomas, “To Opt In or Opt Out: That Is the Question When Mulling Privacy,” Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2000, https://www.wsj.com/.
Other proposed bills of note were the Electronic Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 1999 and the Secure Online Communication Enforcement Act of 2000.
L. Scott Tillett, “Pressure Builds for Privacy Laws,” InternetWeek, June 5, 2000.
Ernest Hollings, “Internet Privacy Concerns,” Pub. L. No. 106-1147, § Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (2000), 6.
Rothenberg, “Advertising Power.”
Wendy Melillo, “Getting Personal,” Adweek, March 27, 2000.
Thornton May, “Privacy’s Pariahs; If Interactive Marketers Aren’t Careful, We Will Be Branded the Bad Boys on the Digital Block,” Advertising Age, April 17, 2000.
W. John Moore, “Invasion of the Internet Industry,” National Journal, March 18, 2000.
Moore, “Invasion.”
Wendy Melillo, “Private Matters,” Adweek, June 19, 2000.
Messina, “Kevin O’Connor and the Mouse That Roared.”
McGhie, “Internet Advertising: The Internet as a Commercial Mass Medium,” 204.
Melillo, “Getting Personal.”
Inger Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Molly Niesen, “The Little Old Lady Has Teeth: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Advertising Industry, 1970–1973,” Advertising and Society Review 12, no. 4 (2012), https://doi.org/10.1353/asr.2012.0000.
Steve Lohr, “Seizing the Initiative on Privacy,” New York Times, October 11, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com.
Varney, “Online Privacy Protection Act of 1999.”
Christine Varney, “To Review the Federal Trade Commission’s Survey of Privacy Policies Posted by Commercial Web Sites,” Pub. L. No. 106-1116, § Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (2000).
Patricia Jacobus, “Cookies Targeted as Congress, Advocates Address Net Privacy,” CNET, February 11, 2000, http://news.cnet.com.
Hoofnagle, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy, 158.
Ira Magaziner, telephone interview with the author, February 22, 2013.
David Joachim, “Internet Privacy Debate Is Dead,” InternetWeek, April 16, 2001.
Joachim, “Internet Privacy Debate Is Dead.”
Freedman, Contradictions of Media Power.
Turow, Niche Envy, 83.
7. The Legacy of the Dot-com Era
Gretchen Morgenson, “How Did They Value Stocks? Count the Absurd Ways,” New York Times, March 18, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com.
“2003 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (New York: Interactive Advertising Bureau, April 2004), 7.
Normandy Madden, “Economy Hampering Yahoo’s Global Goals,” Advertising Age, March 12, 2001.
Dawn Kawamoto, “CMGI Severs Engage Ties,” CNET, September 9, 2002, http://news.cnet.com.
“Gilt’s Kevin Ryan: It Is All in the Presentation,” Tech Crunch: Founder Stories, 2011, http://techcrunch.com.
“Brighter Days for Net Plays,” Advertising Age, August 7, 2000.
Kevin Featherly, “Traditional Firms Flock to Online Advertising,” NewsBytes, November 20, 2000.
Patricia Riedman, “Net Loss; Flat Online Ad Spending Forces i-Shops to Pare Down,” Advertising Age, September 18, 2000.
Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 61.
Google actually “borrowed” the idea for auction-based pay-per-click ads from a rival search engine called GoTo.com. See Will Oremus, “Google’s Big Break,” Slate, October 13, 2013, https://slate.com.
“2002 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (New York: Interactive Advertising Bureau, June 2003); “2003 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report.”
“2004 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (New York: Interactive Advertising Bureau, April 2005), 3.
Brian Morrissey, “Private Equity Firm to Buy DoubleClick,” Adweek, April 25, 2005.
Paul La Monica, “Google Surges above $400,” CNN Money, November 17, 2005, https://money.cnn.com.
Alex Wilhelm, “A Look Back in IPO: Google, the Profit Machine,” TechCrunch, July 31, 2017, https://techcrunch.com.
Paul La Monica, “Google Files for Its Long Awaited IPO,” CNN Money, April 30, 2004, https://money.cnn.com.
“2006 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (New York: Interactive Advertising Bureau, May 2007).
By 2004, the keyword format accounted for around 40 percent of internet advertising, where it has hovered ever since. See “2018 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (New York: Interactive Advertising Bureau, May 2019).
Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016), 68.
Chris Gaither, “Google Aspires beyond Text Ads,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2005.
Auletta, Googled, 91.
Saul Hansell, “Google to Sell Type of Ad It Once Shunned,” New York Times, May 13, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com.
Stefanie Olsen, “Dot-Coms Paring Down Ad Spending Ahead of Holidays,” CNET, January 2, 2002, http://news.cnet.com.
David C. Churbuck, “Google and the Rebirth of Banner Ads,” Bloomberg.com, April 27, 2007, https://www.bloomberg.com; “DoubleClick, Inc. 2000 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 2000), 4; “DoubleClick, Inc. 2001 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 2001), ii; “DoubleClick, Inc. 2002 Annual Report,” 10-K (DoubleClick Inc., 2002), iv.
Auletta, Googled, 174.
Eric Auchard, “Google to Pay $3.1 bln for DoubleClick Ad Business,” Reuters, April 13, 2007, https://www.reuters.com.
Auletta, Googled, 174.
Churbuck, “Google and the Rebirth of Banner Ads.”
“2006 Founders’ Letter,” Alphabet Investor Relations, https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2006/.
Chris Isidore, “Microsoft Buys AQuantive for $6 Billion,” CNN Money, May 18, 2007, https://money.cnn.com.
Eric Schmidt, “We’ve Officially Acquired DoubleClick,” Official Google Blog, March 11, 2008, https://googleblog.blogspot.com.
Susan Wojcicki, “Making Ads More Interesting,” Official Google Blog, March 11, 2009, https://googleblog.blogspot.com. Google’s rollout of behavioral advertising was an abrupt turnaround. As late as July 2007, Wojcicki told a reporter that Google was averse to collecting data for behavioral ads. See Eric Auchard, “Google Wary of Behavioral Targeting in Online Ads,” Reuters, July 31, 2007, https://www.reuters.com.
“Google, Inc. 2009 Annual Report,” 10-K (Google Inc., 2009), 6.
“Google, Inc. 2009 Annual Report,” 6.
Charlie Warzel and Ash Ngu, “Google’s 4,000-Word Privacy Policy Is a Secret History of the Internet,” New York Times, July 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com.
Mat Honan, “Google’s Broken Promise: The End of ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” Gizmodo, January 24, 2012, https://gizmodo.com.
Schwartz, “Giving Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy.”
J. R. Raphael, “Google’s Behavioral Ad Targeting: How to Reclaim Control,” PC World, March 11, 2009, https://www.pcworld.com.
Wojcicki, “Making Ads More Interesting.”
Stacey Lynn Schulman, “Hyperlinks and Marketing Insight,” in The Hyperlinked Society, ed. Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 145.
Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex (New York: Public Affairs, 2018).
“Six Months of Revelations on the NSA,” Washington Post, December 24, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com.
Timothy Libert, “Exposing the Invisible Web: An Analysis of Third-Party HTTP Requests on 1 Million Websites,” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 18; Julia Angwin, “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets,” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2010, https://www.wsj.com/; “Cross Device Tracking: An FTC Staff Report,” United States Federal Trade Commission, January 2017, https://www.ftc.gov.
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries et al., “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret,” New York Times, December 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com.
“Stat Oil,” Economist, February 9, 2013, http://www.economist.com.
John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (New York: New York University Press, 2017), xiii.
Gabriel Weinberg, “What If We All Just Sold Non-creepy Advertising?,” New York Times, June 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com.
Weinberg, “What If We All Just Sold Non-creepy Advertising?”
“Federal Trade Commission Closes Google/DoubleClick Investigation,” Federal Trade Commission, December 20, 2007, https://www.ftc.gov.
Mark Zuckerberg, “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data,” § Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (2018), 132, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/facebook-social-media-privacy-and-the-use-and-abuse-of-data.
Weinberg, “What If We All Just Sold Non-creepy Advertising?”
Woodrow Hartzog, “Policy Principles for a Federal Data Privacy Framework in the United States,” § U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation (2019).
Hacker and Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics.
Much of the current debate hinges upon the GDPR’s implementation and whether rules will be enforced by privacy regulators. See Adam Satariano, “Europe’s Privacy Law Hasn’t Shown Its Teeth, Frustrating Advocates,” New York Times, April 27, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com.