This is part four of an ongoing, five-part series. Part one, the introduction, is here. Part two, about breaking up ad-tech companies, is here. Part three, about banning surveillance ads, is here.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in 2010, he didn’t just usher in a new kind of computing device – the first mainstream touchscreen tablet – he also promised a new model for internet-based publishing: paid subscriptions.
Jobs railed against the world of advertising-supported web publishing, correctly identifying it as the pretense for the creation of a vast, dangerous unaccountable surveillance system that the private sector would build, but which cops and spies enjoyed unfettered, warrantless access to.
Jobs promised a better internet: he promised publishers that if they expended the capital to build apps for his new tablets, that he would free them from the increasingly concentrated and aggressive surveillance advertising sector. Instead of paying for journalism with ads, Jobs promised that publishers would be able to sign up subscribers who’d pay cash money, breaking the uneasy coalition between surveillance and journalism.
Publishers piled in, spending billions in aggregate to fill Apple’s App Store with apps that let readers pay directly for the news. Readers followed – not in the numbers that Jobs had alluded to, and not for every publisher, but for many publishers, apps were a lifeline.
Apple’s App Store started off with a pretty straightforward proposition: when publishers sold an app to readers, Apple would process the transaction and take a 30 percent cut. After
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