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Sic 'em Dan: Dan Gillmor's column in yesterday's San Jose Mercury News lays out hypocrisies of AOL and Doubleclick: two companies hellbent on controlling markets — one by hoarding the fattest distribution pipes and the other by tagging and tracking consumers like cattle on a range. Before buying Time Warner, AOL lobbied hard for "open access" of cable pipes to competing ISPs. Now it nobly wants "the market to decide." Of course, they'll soon own 1/5 of the cable distribution business, which has markets that consist of monopolistic utilities in every neighborhood they serve. And Doubleclick is what Dan calls a "Web-advertising company with a business model that depends on invading consumers' privacy." How it works: "Web sites pay DoubleClick to keep track of consumers' surfing and then serve up ads based on observations of what consumers do online. DoubleClick calls it targeted marketing. I call it surveillance. We're both right." He says the thrust of Doubleclick's recent PR initiative "is to spin consumers toward DoubleClick's side of the debate — to persuade consumers that surveillance is good for them. If you buy that, you'll be happy to let me tail you around your favorite shopping mall with a video camera, recording every window you look into and every purchase you make and then, if I choose, sell what I learn to other people." Well put. Applied Subversion: The New JOHO is out. Or up. Choose your preposition. Whatever, it rocks. One sample line: "At LotusSphere (pronounced "LotusFear"), the company unveiled Raven, although since they were showing a "prebeta" version, perhaps it'd be better to say that they undiapered it." The insults continue from there. Dig it. — Doc Searls
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