Nighttime Must-Read: Ethan Zuckerman: The Internet’s Original Sin

Ethan Zuckerman: The Internet’s Original Sin: “It’s not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web….

…What we wanted to do was to build a tool that made it easy for everyone, everywhere to share knowledge, opinions, ideas and photos of cute cats. As everyone knows, we had some problems, primarily business model problems…. At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising… [the] revenue source is investor storytime: Investor storytime is when someone pays you to tell them how rich they’ll get when you finally put ads on your site…. The key part of investor storytime is persuading investors that your ads will be worth more than everyone else’s ads…. Demonstrating that you’re going to target more and better than Facebook requires moving deeper into the world of surveillance…”