Starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads.

If you have a disease and suddenly start getting ads for cures for that disease and it's an embarrassing disease - all that kind of stuff it just gets into that zone of autonomy or privacy where you feel a sense of freedom to be who you want to be.

I'm kind of concerned the combined effect, not only Google, all these companies is kind of to make us more boring and that seems the opposite of what the Internet was supposed to be.

Google - and some of the other sites, YouTube and, you know - Google has an amazing search engine. The map product is incredible. So there's a sort of exchange when you put up with a bunch of ads. Facebook basically gives you access to your friends who, in theory, you had access to already. So sometimes I don't really understand the deal, but I guess it makes it slightly easier. So that's their contribution.

There is this inherent human instinct that the usual way you control trolling is you force people to use their real identities. So there's less trolling on Facebook, for example.

Facebook, when it began, like Google, was very resistant to advertising. They knew, like all - Mark Zuckerberg, like all good engineers, knew that advertising makes the product worse. But, you know, over time, they've been forced to increase the advertising load more and more and more. And the way they advertise is they - it's subtle but they know everything, you know, about everybody on the site.

All business models have something challenging about them, but the problem with the attention merchant business model they have is they need to keep increasing the amount of ads they deliver to people and therefore make their product worse.