In the absence of public activism, the state has reliably made media policy in service of private sector interests, but no political outcome is ever guaranteed. Commercial radio was highly contested, as evidenced not only by organized citizen opposition but also by the decisions of peer nations like Great Britain to reject advertising and establish alternative public models. Ideally, democratic political institutions should provide countervailing levers of control over media development, though U.S. history shows a mixed track record in that regard. Nevertheless, even in the face of strong structural inertia, there are always real political choices to be made, especially during a platform’s formative years. The Internet was no exception.
For surveillance advertising, two moments of policy making stand out as particularly important. The first was the overarching decision that the Internet would be privatized and commercialized. Beginning in the late 1980s, federal policy makers worked closely with a range of commercial interests to establish what was framed as a “non-regulatory, market oriented” approach to Internet policy. The guiding principle was that the private sector would lead Internet system development, and the government’s primary role was to facilitate private profits. This left a regulatory vacuum around consumer data collection and gave the nascent online advertising industry free rein to build business models around hidden surveillance.
The latter moment occurred at the end of the 1990s, when the progenitors of today’s surveillance advertising behemoths faced the very first public activism for Internet privacy. Responding to increasingly invasive data collection practices, a coalition of advocacy groups mounted a campaign to convince legislators to reverse the government’s laissez-faire approach to Internet privacy. Despite the public concern, Congress and the White House prioritized the growth of the commercial Internet over serious consideration of the ramifications of a surveillance-based digital economy. Though largely overshadowed by the web’s mythos of “friction-free” markets and entrepreneurialism, the regulatory foundations of modern commercial Internet surveillance were forged in this period through negotiations over privacy policies, user consent, data merging, and industry self-regulation, which became the baseline policy framework for online data collection in the twenty-first century. The neoliberal consensus was that commercial surveillance on the Internet was a business like any other: best to let the market sort out the details. Both of these moments reflect the increasingly anti-democratic nature of communications policy-making in the United States. As Patricia Aufderheide notes, “the public is endlessly invoked in communications policy, but rarely is it consulted.”