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It's pretty wild that the case against an adtech giant is based on its monopolistic practices and the harms it is having on publishers, rather than its privacy violations and harms to the general public and to society at large.

They do mention one negative societal effect in passing:

> “The result is less news where it is needed most,” Gannett’s lawsuit said. “Communities throughout the United States now do not have a suitable local paper to advise on local events."

Their issue is that there are not enough newspapers(!), which as we all know are the primary source of modern information... Not that the advertising business has corrupted every form of media it touches, to the point where news outlets don't even report events that don't get them views. Advertising has been instrumental in killing journalism as we knew it, and we're all letting it continue to wreak havoc to our other institutions, because, hey... profit.

> Google has accused the DOJ of having a "narrow view of the ad tech market" that's outdated and "doesn’t reflect reality."

Hilarious take, considering adtech has consistently kept the ways it conducts its business hidden from public view. When users of their services are kept in the dark when their data is being collected and how value is extracted from it, is it really surprising that governments have a wildly inaccurate sense of what's going on? "Senator, we run ads."

The harms to publishers are more quantifiable than privacy violations, so it should be an easier case. Anti-trust lawsuits are about damage to the economy, not just negative outcomes.

[flagged]

Justice that is not bound by the letter of the law is not just at all.

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

What would you propose instead? That someone who steals the bread from your table can't be convicted of anything? We tried something like that recently and the results were pretty toxic.

You're missing the essence. That those who are desperate and poor can be punished easily, swiftly, harshly, but those who are wealthy tend to avoid punishment and when it even occurs it is with herculean effort, sluggish, and limp.

An easy comparison of sorts is that often the penalty for stealing millions or even billions as a white collar criminal will be lower (or functionally lower) than that for stealing hundreds, or the punishments for nonviolent drug crimes (to remove the aspects of possible violence).

Or, to focus on the quote's notion about sleeping under a bridge -- it's often that penalties exist exclusively harming the poor and uninfluential, but which are trivial to get around if you have resources. A desperate rich person laments they had to pay for an overpriced room and were so robbed -- A desperate poor person may sleep in wretched conditions only to be penalized by a law that was virtually never going to affect the rich person to begin with.

(I don't mean to open up any debate about e.g. homelessness either, as there's nothing noble about most modern mentally-ill homeless severe-addicts; i implore you to look at the deeper structure of the quotation / expression)

> You're missing the essence. That those who are desperate and poor can be punished easily, swiftly, harshly, but those who are wealthy tend to avoid punishment and when it even occurs it is with herculean effort, sluggish, and limp.

This is the fully orthogonal problem. In one case you're complaining that there is a law against theft that applies uniformly to everyone but only the poorest are desperate enough to steal. You can't fix this by making the law imply non-uniformly, because things fall apart if there exist people who are allowed to steal with impunity. You have to solve it some other way.

In the other case there is a law against theft which is intended to apply uniformly but the rich manage to steal anyway and then weasel their way out of the consequences. In this case causing the law to imply uniformly to everyone is the solution.

If someone needs to steal food and sleep under a bridge I think we can do better than convicting them.

Yeah, but people who shoplift expensive non-edible items don't neatly fall into the "poor paupers" category. I would even call them predators preying on small shops and their owners.

At the end of the day, most theft in the developed world is not motivated by mere poverty, but harder-to-address things like having a drug habit. I don't really see the case for decriminalization of theft in general.

I do see a case for financing research into drug dependence and treatment thereof - the current (unexpected) results around GLP-1 agonists seem to indicate that there is a pharmacologic way to treat addiction. But that is somewhat orthogonal to the original criminal law problem.

That's a proposal not to change the policy that theft is uniformly illegal.

> In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

A great quote!

Wow

What a person considers just or unjust is a matter of personal preference. Half of this thread doesn't make any sense...

Justice without law is lynching

Law without justice is tyranny

Finally someone gets my point..

Who said it wasn't?

Why not?

Prosecutorial action not bound by the law is despotism, which is inherently unjust.

Is prosecution the same as justice?

It calls itself the Department of Justice.

You'd think the bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms would be a hoot, but alas there's more to a thing than its name.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is intended to be concerned with alcohol, tobacco and firearms. What is the Department of Justice intended to be concerned with? Presumably not foreign policy.

Does unequal enforcement count as unjust? Seems you're purposely missing the point.

Enforcing the laws unequally is unjust, and is the reason why having overbroad, overcomplicated and widely violated but rarely enforced laws is a mechanism of injustice.

But large corporations typically have lawyers and then comply with the law, even while doing something you might not think they ought to be doing. Conniving of a way to get them anyway, instead of changing the law so it does what you intend, is either that same injustice (selective prosecution for a different offense than the thing that made you dislike them) or the overt despotism of making up the rules as you go along. There is really very little daylight between the two of them except that people seem a lot more inclined to go along with the first one when it gets them the outcome they want.

What’s wild about it? This case is about its competitive practices in the marketplace, not privacy

As someone who's very pro-privacy, I'm about to bring the most cynical take I could think of: you could argue that the effective monopoly (well oligopoly, if you also consider FB a part of the problem) on acquiring / processing tracking data at scale creates an uneven playing field for all businesses, who have to resort to using Google's ads&analytics services - or entirely give up any edge that their presence on the open Internet could bring them.

I could imagine a much better world where the playing field is levelled for everyone by outlawing tracking entirely, but I'll just keep on dreaming.

>Advertising has been instrumental in killing journalism as we knew it,

Advertising for many years was what supported journalism. Now there's a problem that advertising doesn't care to support journalism because their industry believes there are superior methods.

By that logic businesses that buy advertising have supported nascent technologies as they develop. When newspapers were new and the main way of disseminating information that's what they used and happened to "support" as a byproduct. If you read an old scientific american from 1845 the last page was all ads. That's where eyeballs were.

As the internet developed now they support millions of websites as byproducts, many that would never exist otherwise. The ad industry has many bad things but it has for example allowed me to pay for my expenses during university because as a highschool student making small free tool-like websites to learn, and with traffic it ended up allowing me to go to a good university in the country's capital instead of a shitty one in my hometown. And there's probably millions of such stories. This to me is way more democratic than "just" supporting newspapers which by now are just part of huge conglomerates. Even your "local" newspapers and news stations are all just part of a couple of conglomerates. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2022/07/1...

Maybe there should be a distinction between online advertising and print advertising?

They seem to have very different business models.

Yeah, I see this more as a journalism problem than an advertising problem. If people really thought journalism was valuable, they'd happily pay for subscriptions. When people vote with their wallets, quality journalism just isn't a priority, and I don't see why that's Google's fault or problem.

Advertising doesn't care to support journalism? Why do you say that?

because Advertising has money to spend on its goals, and finds its money is better spent elsewhere, thus Journalism has lost its old revenue model and the business of Journalism is much worse off than it was about 20 years ago.

Advertising never cared to support Journalism, Advertising cared to achieve its goals and Journalism was the best way to do it at the time.

> monopolistic practices and the harms it is having on publishers, rather than its privacy violations and harms to the general public

1. We have a few modest protections in law against monopolistic practices that address its harm to businesses, such as those used to slap MS on the wrist for bundling MSIE as a tactic to kill its competitors, and such as the laws used to force a breakup of AT&T (during times of far more ambitious government regulators). We have a very few absolute jokes of federal and state privacy laws, mostly focused on the complete wrong things.

- CAN-SPAM? Let's demand that you have a physical address on your emails, and that you provide an opt-out link, but all political email is exempt, iirc? and feel free to sell your list to the next guy.

- CCPA? Let's focus on cookies and maybe on how people get annoyed by retargeting ads, and do other stupidity to emulate GDPR but not do anything that changes the actual landscape like maybe mandating an ad-free experience of social networks be offered for money, allowing you to be a customer and not a product.

- Do-not-call list: Let's not force telcos to know where calls originate and allow filtering of spoofed VOIP calls coming from offshore. Or at least, let's let them take 2 decades to fumble around attempting that. Instead let's allow a tiny fine -- and let's exempt the biggest offenders: Political robocalls.

> "and to society at large"

2. Our legal (and political) system really has virtually zero ways of addressing even severe harms to society, whether it's school shootings, thinly-veiled bribery of public officials via 'campaign finance,' or a pervasive corporate culture of extortion, exploitation and cheating that companies like Google and Apple love to engage in.

It seems to me like the DOJ is playing the hand it's dealt -- there's little they can do, but this is something.

privacy isn't really a market power problem though, because you can have a market in such data. We need comprehensive laws protecting privacy before an agency can enforce them.

> privacy isn't really a market power problem though, because you can have a market in such data.

If social networks are centralized then the operators can do anything the law allows, including invade your privacy, and you can't get out of it because of the network effect. If they're federated/decentralized then you can choose a node (or operate one yourself) that contractually or technologically guarantees that it respects your privacy, and then people would pick those because they don't want their privacy invaded and they would have the choice.

I don't find it at all wild. Trials determining monopolies are about fair and healthy competition which is good for consumers. If adtech is simply bad for all consumers, that would be a different effort to outlaw it.

Monopoly is defined differently in the US and Europe. In Europe a monopoly is permitted so long as the ability to exert dominance in one area does not allow gaining dominance in another. In the US a monopoly is disallowed if it leads to an inefficient market that makes customers pay more.

Imho both are unworkable and useless definitions for different reasons. But, since this is a US trial, it must be shown that Google make customers pay more for goods and services than they could under fair market conditions.

The problem is that Google (and most of its competitors) offer services "for free". As we know, it's not "free", but customers pay with data taken as payment in lieu.

This means the justice system must redefine "free" to incorporate the market price of that data. This is the real cost the customer is paying.

Nobody wants to do that, because nobody (including government) wants an overt acknowledgement of the economics of surveillance capitalism and the entire modern surveillance industry. It is an entire economy set up in parallel to the visible monetary one.

So the proceedings are being cast in all kinds of unusual distortions to avoid this happening.

> It's pretty wild that the case against an adtech giant is based on its monopolistic practices and the harms it is having on publishers, rather than its privacy violations and harms to the general public and to society at large.

But then again, "The business of America is business."

That's because the privacy violations are driven by government and deep state interests.

Advertisers don't need or want the personal data. They're just taking the blame for it because knowing the truth is not comfortable for the public.

Advertisers absolutely do want people’s personal data. It helps them build better dossiers on individuals. This helps them target ads. Improving ad targeting improves publishers and advertisers profits because consumer responses to advertisements increase as advertisement relevance increases.

Advertisers want broad demographic groups ("English-speaking zoomer from a middle income family"), or anonymized cohorts with known statistical distributions. ("Cohort DFHY12 has 13 clicks versus cohort KHFD35's 145 clicks.")

Personal data ("A John Connor from Stockton, CA has bought 359 FPV drone parts last month") is the purview of law enforcement and state-level actors.

Having worked with advertisers this is absolutely true.

But if they have the latter data they'll sell it in a heartbeat.

> deep state

Lol. Did you misspell profits? You make it sound like some magical grand conspiracy. It's profits. Always has been, and we buy into it because we are consumer whores. The corporations are in charge, so there's your "deep state," I guess, a bald-faced hornet people like you love to keep pretending is something else.

Personal data is very hard to turn into profits. Adtech wants statistical distributions, not granular personal data.

You can turn personal data into statistical distributions with enough effort, but that's expensive and fraught with legal perils when you can get the same statistical distributions easier and cheaper with conventional statistical methods.

> On Sunday, Google posted a blog warning that any attempt to break up its ad business could rattle customers who choose to use Google's ad tech because it "is simple, affordable, and effective."

Has that ever been true? Every instance I know of monopolies being broken up has been good for customers.

It’s a spectrum not a binary.

1970’s Airline breakups were very beneficial to customers with lower prices and more routes popping up virtually overnight (though read “Hard Landing” if you want a more nuanced take), 1980’s AT&T breakup was somewhat beneficial in that long distance and cell rates went down but local rates went up (see “The Deal of the Century”), 1990’s California Energy breakups were basically a net negative for customers allowing energy market speculation and manipulation (“Smartest Guys in the Room”), and in a handful of examples like the Soviet Union or South Africa, deregulation lead to outright collapse of essential sectors in banking, agriculture, and energy and set society/customers back decades (“Sale of the Century”/“After the Party”).

The airlines weren't broken up in the 70s. They were deregulated and allowed to add or remove routes and set fares as they saw fit. Less government oversight in this case turned out to be a good thing for consumers.

That’s a literal interpretation, but it misses the point of “Hard Landing”. The book argues that while the airlines weren’t monopolies in name, they acted like a government-sanctioned monopoly under the Civil Aviation Board. The Airline Deregulation Act was essentially meant to break up this cartel, and was pushed through despite heavy resistance from those same airlines.

They didn’t want the Civil Aeronautics Board dismantled because it protected their monopolies over routes and guaranteed income, and they feared new entrants would disrupt their control.

So, while the airlines weren’t formally ‘broken up,’ the airline business, the route monopolies, and CAB were which directly led to the dissolution of companies like Eastern and Pan Am, and the creation or expansion of new entrants like Frontier, JetBlue, and Southwest which were previously prohibited from competing in these markets.

In the short term? The flying experience is less than miserable now and the costs are going up. I see a lot of articles out there talking about how prices have fallen, but I haven't actually seen the data. The one article that actually cited prices as examples was obviously wrong about those prices, had cherry-picked them or used the laughable quoted prices you see to sucker you into clicking (which then triple as you go through the actual process of getting the ticket). Looking at BTS stats [1] the price appears to be going down somewhat since 1995, but it then goes on to say that the price only covers the base fare, not extras like baggage and the like. We all know by the time you actually fly the cost has gone up considerably. I was forced to pay 150$ for a bag on a recent flight (not even over-weight), that price isn't listed in the base fare anymore but it used to be part of the ticket. Looking at the BTS numbers I see an industry that has had 30 years of technology improvements and customers that aren't seeing that benefit.

[1] https://www.bts.gov/air-fares

(edit) I said 'DOT' when I meant 'BTS' Bureau of transportation Statistics

The phrase "jet set" referred to the elite able to afford airfare. Now everyone can

Looking at 1995 prices is not relevant to the question: those are post deregulation prices

I believed you missed my point about 'in the short term'. My argument, backed by the linked data, was that for the last 30 years the prices actually look flat when you factor in the lost services like luggage. (is that actually a service?) Combine that with the completely horrific experience and there is a clear argument that the overall value proposition for consumers is tanking, badly. Deregulation happened in 1978. The trends I pointed out are lined back to 1995. the consumer benefit looks like it is lasting less time than the detractors to me so 'in the short term' is, I think, a good discussion point.

i'd argue most of the annoyance is tsa type things... no water of x amount... stuck in security line arrive an hour early... disrobe and pull everything out now put it back on...

this is all gov regulation

This is the natural result of businesses only fighting the regulations that actually hurt them and quietly letting the bad ones that help them stay. They have no incentive to lobby to get rid of that silliness. In fact, the worse the airport experience is because of someone other than them the easier it is to give us the worst experiences of our life and charge us for it. It shows who actually has representation, and who doesn't. We don't need less govt regulation, we need better representation.

If enough people care about a thing, it will filter up to representation. If not, it won't. It's not bad representation if no one knows about it.

>Soviet Union … deregulation lead to outright collapse of essential sectors in banking, agriculture, and energy

You literally named one of the most successful sectors of economy in ex-USSR. Banking sector in most former republics did effectively a greenfield start becoming the most technologically advanced in Europe - if they were able to expand to Europe, they would crush it.

Agriculture? Changed hands from state to private, productivity and yield increased, pre-war exports are all-time high.

Energy? 1990s weren’t great in some republics like Kazakhstan, but having some private companies in the business definitely helped. Not enough is being done on green energy, but that is a different story.

> most successful sectors of economy in ex-USSR. Banking sector in most former republics did effectively a greenfield start becoming the most technologically

Wasn’t it mostly controlled by foreign banks, though?

Of course not. You can find the list of top banks yourself. Russia, Ukraine - there are just few of them in the top.

> and in a handful of examples like the Soviet Union or South Africa, deregulation lead to outright collapse of essential sectors in banking

That sounds more like due to corruption. Also we are talking about breakups not deregulation.

> Also we are talking about breakups not deregulation.

In a way they were breakups, in the USSR at least, since all almost all sectors of the economy were fully controlled by government monopolies.

Not exactly. There was central planning, of course, but it was not one big corporation - it was extremely heavy regulation, basically telling different state-owned businesses what to produce, how much, where to sell it and where to get supplies. This is the reason why after privatization there were many companies in most sectors, not just one big monopoly. They were privatized independently.

Well, yes, they were effectively subsidiaries of that one big corporation.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some divisions of a a company like Stellantis have significantly more autonomy than any of the car companies in the USSR.

No, you are wrong, they were not. Centralized strategic planning did exist in USSR between 1930s (end of NEP) and 1950s (death of Stalin). The economic reforms of Kosygin shifted planning to enterprise level and the central planning authority - Gosplan - only coordinated the plans of each enterprise. In the last 30 years of its existence USSR was neither planned nor market economy, but rather something in between. They got incentives wrong, focusing on volume and revenue rather than on quality, innovation and profits.

Weren’t Kosygin’s reforms mostly reversed after a few years?

Could consumers goods companies adapt to consumer demand by freely increasing/decreasing production? Production targets were still a thing, weren’t they?

e.g. if the production target for the Lada factory was 1000 cars and they were allocated enough supplies for that (but there was enough demand so that 10000 could be sold profitably in the same period) would they be able to freely scale demand or would they be stuck with plan enforced on them by the central “corporate” office?

Again, plenty of modern companies have more control of their production targets, pricing, expansion etc. while being subsidiaries of major corporations than most Soviet “companies” generally did.

> 1990’s California Energy breakups were basically a net negative for customers allowing energy market speculation and manipulation

This was basically a regulatory failure. They broke up the energy market on paper but without making it feasible for new entrants to actually enter the market, which is the sine qua non of making this work. So then the incumbents purposely constrained generating capacity to spike the prices.

You didn't mention the biggest US breakups, Standard oil, Bell Systems (ATT) and the railways

That sounds exactly like a binary, as hinted at by a sibling comment: Breakup of a company monopoly (always good for the consumer) vs. Breakup of a government monopoly (potentially bad for the consumer)

No, because of the part on how local phone rates went up when AT&T was broken up.

There's no "always" here, the world is not that simple.

Breaking up a large company is often going to be good for some sets of customers, bad for others.

> because of the part on how local phone rates went up when AT&T was broken up.

Isn't that caused by the "last mile" problem? Even with the split there was always only one company in control of local infrastructure and from what I understand they could even block newcomers from installing their own, citing concerns over possible service interuptions and various kinds of interference. I think Google Fibre even went through several experimental ways to get its infrastructure in place just so it could avoid dealing with any of that.

In that case, it mostly just created local monopolies. You still didn’t have a choice for local service unless you moved several hundred miles away. From the consumer’s perspective, we just replaced one monopoly with another.

deregulation and breaking monopolies are not the same things though

> Soviet Union [..] essential sectors in banking, agriculture, and energy and set society/customers back decades

That was pretty much unavoidable though. The old Soviet system and institutions were unsustainable and couldn’t coexist with “capitalist” institutions. There was no banking sector (at least how we understand it) to begin with, any company producing consumer goods, electronics, cars etc. collapsed overnight because they were producing garbage products that nobody needed after foreign substitutes became available.

Basically there were only two choices, sell off everything remotely useful to foreign companies and hope that they modernize/fix it or allow the local oligarchs to privatize/steal everything. Arguably the countries that picked the first option came out ahead (but are now stuck with entirely foreign owned banking, telecommunications. Retail sectors with much of their industry either directly foreign owned or incapable of doing anything but subcontracting)

e.g. Belarus tried to hold on much longer, instead it got stuck where it was for several decades with little progress. The Baltic countries crashed and were close to societal collapse for a few years but have been on an almost continuous upwards trend since they recovered.

> Every instance I know of monopolies being broken up has been good for customers.

Sometimes breaking government monopolies may lead to worse outcomes. In Europe breaking transportation monopolies (especially rail transport) lead to decades-long worsening of services in some countries. Because instead of one company managing everything you now have one company owning moving stock, one company owning rails, one company offering repair services, one company... And all of them delegating and re-assigning blame.

But these situations are more of an exception

Also everything related to privatisation. Often, short-term gains (cash for the current government) results in later higher prices for customers. Basically, a lot of stuff in UK.

Rail is fundamentally expensive, though. Compared to hiring a driver to drive a coach on a road, where you can get your coach and your driver so easily, keeping rail running is a nightmare of expense, and the skills are not common and the unions are strong, so labour problems are massive as well. If you think the state-run railways were good, you must have only ridden them in the 1950s, when there was still an empire to fund government stuff, and far fewer people in the country to consume it.

> Sometimes breaking government monopolies may lead to worse outcomes.

if the gov't monopoly was receiving tax payer subsidy, then breaking it up means the taxpayer gets back the cost of the subsidy, and the service being provided returned to private funding model.

If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad - after all, cost was raised. But you have to also consider the savings in the subsidy that is no longer paid.

It's not black and white. Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most.

> the service being provided returned to private funding model.

They never do. They keep receiving substantial government subsidies.

> If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad

No. I view it as "prices went up, service levels have gone down: delays, breakdowns, staff shortages have increased"

> Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most.

Then there would be no public transport, as its costs are prohibitive

> If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad - after all, cost was raised. But you have to also consider the savings in the subsidy that is no longer paid.

You've got to consider other costs as well - higher road use means direct costs, direct deaths, and pollution. Some things simply aren't easy to isolate the effects of and bill an individual for; some things are natural monopolies, some things are economic lighthouses, and we shouldn't be afraid of administrating things via governments in the many cases where a true free market simply isn't a viable option.

> Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most.

We don't demand that highways generate direct profits/revenue outside of limited application of toll roads, would you also want every road to be pay-per-mile?

> Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most.

If you are willing to pay 100€ for a 1h train ride, that is.

Subsidies allow public transport for everyone.

One time Google accidentally forgot to refund $70 million they thought they had refunded for ad fraud, and they only found out when they were sued for a $500k piece of it someone definitely knew they had not received. This was back when they were in the tres commas club so I'm sure consumers will benefit immensely from smaller companies with smaller responsibilities.

In a way it's like having a single one-million-line file vs a clean separation between API, UI, etc etc.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/13/google_click_fraud_la... (I think it was this one but search results are saturated with other litigation and antitrust since)

The best-faith argument I can make of it is that Google/Meta really are the lifeline for a lot of businesses who have zero chance of being able to leverage large-scale advertising blasts that big companies use. The customers using mega-scale digital ad exchanges get the benefit of being able to buy 0.001% of a billboard the moment someone actually interested in their product walks past.

If you want to increase competition and stop the market from consolidating into a few players it's not immediately obvious that breaking up these ad exchanges goes that direction because it deprives reach from everyone except already large companies.

> being able to buy 0.001% of a billboard

^^ this is possible because the ads are delivered digitally, not because of any magic power google has.

Even if every website was its own independent advertising space (an extreme opposite), they could all still be open to advertising companies big and small by using “open standards”.

The innovations are all technological.

Okay so you have group A who has ads they want to put in front of potential customers and group B who has digital billboards and wants to sell them. Group A doesn't know where to advertise and can't identify customers, and Group B knows about their users but doesn't know what kinds of buyers might be interested in them.

I genuinely don't know how this doesn't precipitate a market-maker who can match up the two groups and who naturally becomes huge because the best matchmakers will be the ones with the largest populations of both groups. The bigger they are the more and better matches that can exist and everyone (theoretically at least) gets better prices because buyers and sellers are in competition in a larger pool.

> don't know how this doesn't precipitate a market-maker who can match up the two groups

In finance lingo, Google is the exchange, the market makers, the brokers on both sides and a good fraction of the listed companies to boot.

This is incredibly fair. Where would you make the incisions? Google's own billboards, their own ads, and the brokers seem easy to cut but the rest is real messy.

If a device company can be forced to deploy browsers or search engines from competitors,

Can a search company be forced to allow users to choose their as network? Show me whatever results but I want facebook's ads, or bing's ads and so on.

Pretty sure google's going to ask for 30% of what Facebook makes I guess but that's fine, let's start building a business model on that.

Assumption is that search is a monopoly and that's why they will be saddled with regulations. Frame any other constraints and market solutions can be figured.

> Can a search company be forced to allow users to choose their as network? Show me whatever results but I want facebook's ads, or bing's ads and so on.

> Pretty sure google's going to ask for 30% of what Facebook makes I guess but that's fine, let's start building a business model on that.

Why wouldn't Google ask for the equivalent of what they make with their own ads? Which is likely to be more than what a 3rd party ad provider would make.

Search doesn't make money by itself, it makes money by displaying ads. Why should another company get to capture the profit from that?

> (theoretically at least)

The “at least” is unwarranted, and even the “theoretically” is being far too kind.

Of course if you allow a monopoly to develop they will protect their own interests to the exclusion of others, and use their power to entrench their position. Even the oldest theories about markets point out the dangers of monopolies.

Doubleclick existed before Google bought them. Apple has an ad network. Meta has an ad network. Breaking google’s ad network off doesn’t change anything for the small businesses who want to spend $50 to reach 100 millennial women interested in home goods.

The ad exchange buys user profile data from those who collect it (which also happens today in addition to first party collection)

Or, am I missing your point?

> because it "is simple, affordable, and effective."

Hahaha. Maybe if you compare it to getting a master's in marketing...

I'm a user of parts of their ad tech, and I've tried to be a user of more of their ad tech.

It may be affordable. I don't know, because there's not much left to compare it with.

It's probably somewhat effective for loads of people, since it's everywhere.

But it's decidedly NOT "simple". It's a monstrosity. If you come from no ad skills you will have to spend days digging through overly verbose documentation just to figure out which boxes to check. And probably a few hundred to a few thousand to "experiment" and find what's working.

This is absolutely NOT a "spend hundred bucks, get a few interested visitors" solution.

Even at the other end it's getting more complicated. It used to be: here's some HTML, slap it where you want the ad. Now you have to be constantly vigilant that they aren't destroying your site by sneakily enabling Auto Ads or showing interstitials.

When I started this back in '08, there were many of those providers. We could rotate through them to get some variety and get good payouts. ALL of them are now out of business, except Google, who started to magically payout less after competition declined.

As someone who uses them a lot, appreciates their technical ecosystem, who has his bills paid in part by their ad ecosystem, who is generally pro-business and thinks it's fundamentally unfair to punish successful companies for their success, I'll say this: Fuck Google. Break 'm up.

Very true, few people know how to keep ads profitable when you have a high volume of traffic. The rotation scheme used to help. In a way publishers have to have their own private ad tech to integrate with commercial ad tech to game it in some way in order to not be completely milked in a never ended reduction of value of one’s traffic as a user base grows unresponsive.

Representing the broker, the publisher and the house is efficient and is how google can spend your ad budget and deliver absolutely nothing in return. It takes expertise (more money) and a long runway to even break even with todays google “ad tech”.

The blog post in question https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/googl...

Depends on how you slice it. Without Googles ad money, Firefox will probably die.

Without Googles ad money, so will Chrome - and then consumers are left with what exactly? Safari for those on Apple devices, sure, but thats about it.

If Android is made to stand up on its own, can it? And even if it does, is it competitive with iOS? And for how long? If each major manufactor ends up forking it, even that is a net loss for consumers.

You can split up ma bell, large airlines, and Standard Oil. But a modern high tech business? That is a lot harder.

> Without Googles ad money, Firefox will probably die.

Correction: Mozilla will probably die. Firefox, or a fork of it, will undoubtedly live on.

I wish I could speed up that death with a letter to the court.

In what form?

Something with a name like Iceweasel

How much development does Iceweasel do? Changing a logo doesn't actually help sustain a browser long term; they were effectively "leaching" off of Firefox development and by extension Google ad money.

“Open source and maintained by volunteers”

The Ma Bell breakup was anything but. Splitting the county into regions and the regions don't compete with each other? That's just creating separate regional monopolies. They didn't break up Microsoft after their trial.

> Safari for those on Apple devices, sure, but thats about it

Webkit is open-source though. Wrapping a browser around it is not too hard (that’s how Chrome started after all).

So it might not be a horrible situation. Just like Google now they’b be subsidizing the cost of development to a significant extent which would result in much lower entry barriers without having a meaningful direct presence in the market themselves (outside of iOS/Mac).

I think same applies for Chromium. It wouldn’t just disappear and MS and other companies would probably pick up the slack to some extent.

> Without Googles ad money, so will Chrome - and then consumers are left with what exactly?

With any hope: probably some browsers that care about users rather than consumers

Would breaking Google into smaller parts really cause these things to suddenly have no income ? Seems unlikely. The smaller "Googles" would still be huge companies no ?

> The smaller "Googles" would still be huge companies no ?

Or they would be worthless if they are not self sufficient and are only there to funnel users to Google’s profitable products (Ads).

Even something like GCP would struggle, and they aren’t necessarily doing that great compared to competition already.

Android or Chrome on the other hand? They have no direct revenue and wouldn’t have existed in the first place if Google wasn’t allowed to do stuff like this from the beginning.

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/02/17/more-than-money-anti... addresses the consumer welfare standard that guided the FTC for 40 years and the recent (~2 years) shift away from that standard.

You can only install apps on 50+% of phones in America that are approved by Apple, and they also have to grant 30% of all revenue to Apple for the privilege. Including subscriptions or even digital stores (ebooks).

Imo going after for Google for antitrust is like cracking down on jwalking and ignoring the murders taking place downtown.

Google have already been found guilty of using their position to undermine competition against their play store. It was a pretty smoking gun at that so it’s pretty fair to use that to follow other abuses of power.

And besides, apple are already under investigation by the DOJ anyway.

It's embarrassing that this was the case when Google actually allows alternate app stores, and the major competitor (with higher marketshare in the country in question) does not. And doesn't even allow individual app installations.

And therefore Apple doesn’t undermine any competing stores because they don’t exist.

It’s really that simple. Any feelings to the contrary have no legal precedence to go off of. The EU had to pass an entire new regulation to allow alternate stores and even they don’t say it’s anticompetitive to have no competition , unless you’re above a certain user count.

> Imo going after for Google for antitrust is like cracking down on jwalking and ignoring the murders taking place downtown

That’s an awful analogy. Google is clearly a monopoly on many fronts. Sure, apple aren’t great either but you have to start somewhere, and this is clearly not like going after petty crimes compared to murder.

"Starting somewhere" and then waiting years to follow up with the rest of the market is essentially picking winners and losers in this domain.

At the pace these things move by the time the DOJ looked at Apple the damage to competition on mobile would be irreversible.

Apollo’s complaint in their comment was that what apple is doing compared to what google is doing is like murder vs jaywalking. That’s obviously not true.

Sure let's be pedantic about the analogy without actually addressing your main claim.

I didn’t say this in my comment but my angle is that the critics here seem to be making this an apple v google thing, which is tired thing that I have no interest in, and neither should anyone else.

This is really about big tech vs the people, so who cares which big tech company lines up first.

How is it good for the people if they’re all herded into Apple's walled garden because that’s all that’s left?

Google activates in more than one market. While they are second fiddle in the US mobile space, they are by far the biggest company in the world in ads, web search, web browsing, dwarfing Apple by 100:1 or more in those spaces.

The U.S government should obviously be looking out for U.S consumers.

Apple being worse doesn’t make Google better.

No but Android is the only competition Apple has and is already losing ground.

If you knock Google out of that market you're just going to cement Apple's dominance, in the US where DOJ has jurisdiction, of the most important computing platform for a generation. And mobile is too hard for any newcomers to enter now.

Maybe, but I don't think the DOJ makes decisions this way. They'll evaluate and deal with Apple separately which I think makes sense. They can't really make the decision that yes Google is a monopoly but they'll allow it to stave off another monopoly, this is private-sector thinking.

Android spun-out as an independent company might actually be a good thing for the platform allowing it operate and compete on its merits.

Even with all of Google's backing Android is already falling behind in the US. How exactly is Android without Google behind it supposed to do better?

It's still dominant worldwide and gaining marketshare, maybe it could do better by embracing what makes it the more open, flexible, mobile platform and decoupling itself from Google Services.

Who are these consumers that are today not buying Android phones because it’s too closed and inflexible? What are they buying instead?

Google controls information and the wider marketplace, Apple controls hardware and a smaller marketplace, imo they're going after the right one first.

One leads to many.

Yeah, but Apple didn't start with a "Do no evil" slogan - Google both identified what it means to be evil in its industry and then became it.

I think punishment is in order for something like that.

You watch too many Marvel movies it seems

Almost nobody outside adtech understands that 3rd party cookies are only alive today because Google was afraid that removing them would give the DoJ additional antitrust ammunition.

Google would gladly have removed them and acted as a broker for anonymized targeting data, but it would have killed other players in the ad ecosystem and given them exclusive power as the distributer of chrome.

Google has done alot of things to delay the inevitable

That doesnt mean there isnt a case or anticompetitive practices aren’t occurring

Corporations are conduits, getting shareholders to multi trillion dollar valuations is worth it when the only consequences will just affect the shell of the corporation remaining

I'm not making a judgement on the broader case (although, personally, I would have gone after Apple first).

Eh, I mean its not like they do it linearly. They are indeed going after Apple... And Meta, and Amazon, all in parallel.

okay, I'll bite. Assuming everything you said is true, for the purposes of discussion, I'm curious....

Are third party cookies a good thing?

(Context for anyone interested, also note citations 1 and 2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_cookies

> Are third party cookies a good thing?

Theoretically yes, they are intended to hold some piece of state that is relevant to or derived from your usage and that's not bad by itself. Third-parties aren't always ads either, you might embed maps or AI or countless other things that can use this.

In practice, they have been abused for tracking very widely and they support all these other uses so much that we expanded this idea to include local storage, session storage, indexed storage etc.

It depends on your POV. Privacy advocates would argue no, but basically all the major players (google, websites, and the rest of the ad ecosystem) except for truly independent web browser developers (of which... I don't know if there are any) want them because they're what makes ad targeting work.

Safari disables third party cookies, but I didn't call them independent because they have their own ad ecosystem (so of course they want to nerf web ads).

The interesting part to me is that you did not list consumers/individuals among your list of “all the major players” involved.

I would categorize them as either apathetic (almost all of them) or the privacy advocates.

My opinion: No, definitely not, regardless of whether or not what they said is true. What they suggest, however, is a strong argument for not allowing the same company to be both an ad-tech leader and the dominant browser vendor, because it gives them severe conflicts of interest in either direction. I don't know what we can or should actually do about this, but it's pretty obvious that it can't really work.

IMO the fact that any discerning user can easily browse the web without them by using Safari or otherwise disabling 3PC’s makes them pretty benign. I think the intense focus on them is a distraction from the much, much, worse instances of privacy violations being carried out by e.g. ISP’s selling PII-level location data to bounty hunters.

Also browser fingerprinting, as a way to prevent people from resetting things by clearing cookies and/or maintaining separate profiles.

Third-party cookies, as a naive identifier on their own, are comparatively straightforward and controllable. It's all the other tricks around them that make it worrisome.

Third-party cookies are not intrinsically good or bad, much like a hammer, or a knife, or a can of spray paint. is not good or bad. It's a tool. All depends on how people use it. And third-party cookies very certainly have a high potential for abuse, and are being abused heavily.

Lets say you have a corporate app that serves thousands of internal users that has its backend hosted on a separate webserver. This app can implement super simple auth by having the backend query the company's AD server to prove identity, then fetch what is allowed to be viewed and store the session in a third party cookie.

An app like this is probably not ideal for outward facing sites but I have seen apps like this serve its purpose very well as an internal app and the simplicity allows it to have less tech overhead.

This can be accomplished without third party cookies.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/v2...

> This can be accomplished without third party cookies [by using OAuth2].

You seem to have missed these important parts of the statement:

> This app can implement super simple auth...

> ...the simplicity allows it to have less tech overhead.

OAuth is not simple, and for something entirely internal, simple is fine.

It depends on your POV. Privacy advocates would argue no, but basically all the major players (google, websites, and the rest of the ad ecosystem) except for truly independent web browser developers (of which... I don't know if there are any) want them because they're what makes ad targeting work.

> the DOJ hopes to prove that Google's alleged monopoly has shuttered newspapers across the US and threatens to do more harm if left unchecked

What does this mean lol. Isn't the real reason that newpapers a shuttering because no one reads newspapers.

Craigslist killed the newspapers. They were abusive local monopolies who charged $50 to run a used car advertisement and Craig Newmark nuked them.

From the article:

>> On Monday, Wood told Brinkema that Google intentionally put itself in this position to "manipulate the rules of ad auctions to its own benefit," The Washington Post reported.

A better way to understand this is that Google allegedly forced publishers to use Google's ad server and ad exchange if they wanted traffic from Google ads. From [1]:

>> After buying DoubleClick, Google tied its control over advertising demand to publisher use of its software. As the DOJ put it in the complaint, "If publishers wanted access to exclusive Google Ads’ advertising demand, they had to use Google’s publisher ad server (DFP) and ad exchange (AdX), rather than equivalent tools offered by Google’s rivals." The result is that it acquired a monopoly across the entire industry, in the software publishers use and the matching engine for advertisers.

[1] - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-post-google-world

Im not sure i get it. It seems like a stretch to say that that caused newsapers to all go out of business.

Isn't the party here that's getting hurt the "equivalent tools offered by Google’s rivals". I'm still not seeing how this hurts publishers. Or is this like, if you want to show google ads, you can't show ads from other ad providers.

The way this case is being handled all I see is the courts are trying to make other business people richer. They remain hostile to the consumer. Its a case of legal protection for the rich. I feel the harms that traditional publishers cause are immense as well. They dont pay their employees properly, are controlled by sketchy media moguls. Quite frankly traditional publishing houses just failed to adapt with the times.

Yes, Lina Khan has been very clear that she wants to abandon the previous guidelines that made consumer harm the focal point of anti-trust cases.

I think that's pretty shady and in several of these cases she really just wants to spear any old Big Fucking Whale so it looks like she's been successful. That said, "consumer" really does mean other companies when it comes to Google ads, since they directly pay them a TON of money, so if they can prove that Google's monopoly is distorting the market I think this is fair game, 100%. And the ad market has been incredibly shitty for a very long time because if you don't have an audience in the billions you can't even try to compete, so anything that can open that up to some innovation would be positive, and price competition would allow a lot of products to exist and thrive that otherwise would have failed because cost of user acquisition was too high. That is very good for consumers.

Or it could be really negative, depending how they implement it. The funny thing is, despite the company fighting against it strongly, it's uncertain how good or bad it would be for Google shareholders, oftentimes breakups are very good for their stock because as each piece of the company is unshackled from the others, things that would be profitable for the division but get blocked by other interests at the company all of a sudden become possible: IIRC the combined value of the Baby Bells ended up far greater a few years after the breakup, for one example. The only people it's guaranteed to be bad for are the people at the top at Google, who would have their kingdoms shredded up and taken away from them.

What do you find shady about moving away from the consumer welfare standard, Khan herself aside?

In my view, returning from a Borkian era back towards something more Brandeisian makes a lot of sense. "Consumer welfare" to me feels like it assumes a functioning free market system, but antitrust should deal with powerful entities that are already able to distort "free" market functioning by their size and power.

But, I'm politically an anarchist so of course I would have a "big is bad" bias.

Internet killed local newspapers. They lost the geographic monopolies

Newspapers get monetized via ads. Google search being the prime entry point was "preventing" clicks by summarizing articles. Also, Adsense being the biggest kid in the block could set prices due their position as a king maker.

Hmm close but not quite, IMO. That all happens, but this article is about Google's tendency to actively defend their monopoly over the "Ad Exchange" market, which is how publishers (newspapers) are connected to buyers of advertising space (advertisers, both brand advertisers like Coca-Cola and performance advertisers like mobile games). It's nothing complex, just the same ol' man-in-the-middle racket that impoverishes both sides as they skim off the top, confident that neither party can go to a competitor.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

They very much are trying to muddy the waters here, so no hate for the misunderstanding. This is the third active anti-trust suit they're currently involved in, after all! Also, as always: AFAIK ;)

Lot of newspapers in the US used to rely on money through classified ads but that was taken over by Craigslist.

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...

Craigslist is largely a ghost town these days: a lot of that stuff has moved to Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, etc. for selling stuff, and dating apps for the "personals" stuff.

Basically, decades ago before the internet, newspapers served a role in facilitating communication between strangers, in a rather poor fashion. Individuals didn't have the money to have their own printing press and distribution system, so they had no way of contacting people unless they already knew their telephone number, or knowing what others had to offer. So newspapers had the "classified ads" section so people could spend a small amount of money and run a very tiny ad in the weekly newspaper for others in their town to see, and it was easy for the newspapers to just add a few extra pages with this stuff at the end. The internet simply made this all obsolete.

If the newspapers had been really forward-thinking, they would have created first the social network services and become dominant there before MySpace, Digg, and Facebook came along. But it took them ages to even start thinking about anything besides a business model dependent on printing newspapers.

It doesn't look like Google summarizes news articles, though:

Google News has headlines and photos. It used to have snippets, but that was many years ago.

In search results, there is a very brief snippet from the article.

So the DOJ complaint alleges that Google's "monopoly" reduces publisher earnings and increases how much advertisers pay and that's where the alleged 30%+ margin Google gets comes from.

If this is true, 2 of the 3 parties here are motivated to bypass Google to increase the money publishers earn and how much advertisers play, are they not? If's not that hard to set up an ad server from scratch. The issue of course is inventory.

But publishers and use multiple ad servers. In fact there are tools for them to pick whichever impression will pay them the most from those available. Advertisers are free to buy on multiple platforms. At least I see no allegation that Google is actually or effectively restricting the use of other tools.

So can't Google use this to say that publishers use them because they pay the most? And advertisers use them because the ads are the most effective? Advertisers in particularly are heavily metrics-focused. In the background, they're analyzing ad performance (in terms of impressions -> clicks -> action) based on audience segmentation.

Now the DoubleClick cookie does have value because it's so widely deployed, Google has a lot of information to derive behavioural characteristics about the user. Just based on what sites you go to, Google builds a profile of your interests, your likely (implied) demographics and so on. You can argue that this cookie is anticompetitive.

But I don't see "cookie" mentioned once in this article.

So I'm really not sure where this goes. It could be the reporting just isn't great on the case because it requires some legal knowledge. I guess we'll see.

Ahh an expert! All right on, but I think you're missing the big picture: advertisers can buy from multiple (networks of) publishers, and publishers can sell to multiple (networks of) advertisers, very true. But there's a sneaky little box in the middle of that system diagram that actually coordinates all that: AdX. I think. IMO they intentionally conflate product names and acronyms in this space to confuse us lol. But either way, that box is singular -- they control some insane percentage of the market, ~~like 95% or something.~~ This is profitable for a few direct reasons (charging fees) and a lot of indirect ones (privileged insights into market trends, ability to tip the scales of auctions to favor whoever you want, a threat to hold over buyside or sellside customers that get out of line, etc).

Lots of links in my other comments in here - in particular you might find "project Bernanke" of interest, if you've spent serious money on Google before.

EDIT: Their exact market share is really hard to pin down... again, definitely a situation that Google encourages. But the trend is clear: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

Yup. Just wanted to say that as someone who worked in the space for 5 years and attempted to integrate with google ad tech products:

1. I could never fully understand how all the google products integrated with each other.

2. The guys we talked to at google were often unable to recommend which product was correct for our use case (it seemed like there were multiple entry points but they all funneled back to one or two common sources)

3. Many of the integrations we wanted to do had no clear criteria for whether google would accept you or not. This led to us wasting lots of time.

4. Our whole company focused on an integration with google for 6-9months. When we were validating our implementation google pulled out, citing antitrust concerns. A few months later they announced a product that competed with us. As google is a big org I'm not really sure if this was coordinated on their side.

> advertisers can buy from multiple (networks of) publishers > But there's a sneaky little box in the middle of that system diagram that actually coordinates all that: AdX.

AdX handles networks of publishers on Google publisher platform. When advertiser buys ads from say Facebook, it doesn't use AdX, right?

Well, lets get into it! Great question, because that's definitely how the word "AdX" is used by many players in the industry. Hilariously/embarrassingly, I worked there and still never really got to the bottom of these questions -- they have a strong "don't ask questions about what isn't broken" ethos there when it comes to terminology.

I posted this link above, which is a google-published doc that's much, much clearer than the usual "Help" pages: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

  The DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace to **buy** and sell display advertising space.

  ### Who Participates in the Ad Exchange?
  1. The large online publishers (sellers)—websites like portals, entertainment sites and news sites
  2. **Ad networks and agency holding companies** that operate networks (buyers)—companies that connect web sites with advertisers

But, again; I struggled to understand these distinctions even with access to internal explainers, and the doc I linked is at least somewhat OOD (it mentions AdWords, which was retired in 2018[2]). So I could easily just be somewhat slow and mistaken on this complex issue :)

[1] https://www.justice.gov/d9/styles/d09/public/press-releases/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads

> But to take part in the wider algorithmic Display Ad sales market, my understanding of the DoJ's complaint is that you're (de facto) mandated to use Google's exchange.

even on DoJ pic they say AdX is 50% of market share, meaning other publishers even when using Doubleclick for publishers go somewhere else, so it seams like google allows it.

Also, my understanding is that even on google platform, there is Doubleclick for publishers, but there are other tools: AdSense and AdMob, which are very simple and without much lock in, publisher can move out whenever he wants. Per some internet discussion AdSense don't use AdX, and per some "reddit experts" it is violation of policy to use both simultaniously: https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/18e3mqs/can_i_use_ad...

No, it is not easy to compete with Google on ad sales.

It's much harder because of how much behavioral data Google hordes.

If Google were to sell its behavioral user data to anyone, at a fair price, that would increase competition.

If Google were to allow anyone to bid on the search page, that would increase competition.

If Google stopped acquiring competitors with any sign of life, that would increase competition.

If Google sold their pricing and bid matching algorithmic advances that would increase competition.

Google broke its reputation as the ideal employer and now it’s in an antitrust trial. I have to wonder whether the two are related.

Google has certainly been less able to avoid antitrust scrutiny than the other tech giants.

I think underappreciated aspect of Facebook's brand reinvention to Meta was the role it played in transforming their brand perception away from evil and toward merely bizarre. I do think a significant part of that transition was to avoid the fever pitch of antitrust scrutiny that they had been under, that now seems to have gone away.

The heat was on Facebook, but they got out from under it. And now it's on Google.

It seems a private dinner does help:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-hosted-zuckerbe...

Facebook is huge but what monopoly power does it hold?

Me and many of my friends never interact with Meta and it hasn't been an issue. This isn't the case with Google.

Meta allows 3rd party advertiser to upload their data to their platform... and they do, sometimes illegally.

If your home address is on some advertiser's mail list, chance they are on meta's database as well.

Even if you never use Facebook or Instagram, there's an ad profile for you that ads are ostensibly being shown to, that ad buyers pay for, same with Google.

The DOJ has a case open against Apple as well: https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-a...

The DOJ case for Google is going after Ad Tech—the company’s core revenue generator.

Exactly. I have had dinner with "The Zuck" personally and he's quite charismatic and pleasant. This whole Howard Hughes tier eccentricities and spreading of rumors that he's some sort of lizard or robot (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aHQ1yQPwRo) and weird haircut are all part of his enormous ruse to hold and maintain maximum wealth.

"I believe whatever doesn't kill you, simply makes you stranger." - Mark Salamander Zuckerberg, inventor of the psyop superweapon facebooks that successfully destroyed social cohesion in over 200 nations and 4 billion people, under the flag of social cohesion no less.

I actually think the Facebook thing has a lot more to do with the fact that they really aren’t a monopoly in the social media space anymore. They’re still evil but they’re not winning lol. In my country it seems like they have a monopoly on gen x with facebook, and significant market penetration with younger generations on instagram and WhatsApp, but there’s a lot of competition

What market does Meta control?

Social media is what they're under antitrust for.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_v._....

Google has been heading this way for twenty years. Maybe just consider its behaviour in a very general way.

[flagged]

  "by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising."

There are people who sell Display Ad space ("Publishers") and people who buy ad space ("Advertisers"). Google AdSense is a well-known name, but that's actually their division for small blogs and such -- the big bucks come in from news sites, homepages, and other high-traffic publishers that use a different product altogether. Google isn't a monopoly on the publisher side (say, ads on your "Google Home" screen in the Google app), and obviously isn't a monopoly on the advertiser side; the issue comes about in the middle of the two, the "Ad Exchange" side. Google runs the show, and has spent roughly infinity dollars to keep it that way, even though this whole segment (Display Ads) is a pretty small slice of their overall revenue. The graphic published by the DoJ does the best job of explaining the overall issue, and the pieces involved: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

For example, they staved off Facebook's short-lived attempt to break into the exchange market (a meta-market, if you will!) by drowning the issue in money, then eventually doing the corporation equivalent of "I'll pay you $5 to fuck off": cartel formation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

  According to the draft lawsuit, Facebook agreed to reduce its participation in header bidding in return for "information, speed, and other advantages" that would come from staying with Google. Facebook allegedly would receive a guarantee of 90% of auctions regardless of the bids; 300 ms to bid (vs 160 offered to others), along with the ability to identify 80% of smartphone users and 60% of web users.

Article: https://adtechexplained.com/google-project-bernanke-explaine... Major points to anyone who can find the actual slides, they're made for middle managers so very digestible, and they have the hilariously illegal "ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE" warnings up top that Google is now known for. But somehow they're nowhere to be found as of today, even on Kagi.

If nothing else, once the dust settles and the redactions clear this will be a fascinating snapshot of how normal, kind people are made to do wildly asocial things with a smile on their face. I never once met a single person at Google who wasn't kind, intelligent, and well-spoken. And yet...

To add onto what you’re saying, this is surely part of Google’s strategy: obfuscation through complexity.

The anticompetitive schemes they engage in are so complicated and require so much background context that it’s basically impossible to explain to even subject matter experts, much less the casual reader.

Well said, totally agree. While looking for the Project Bernanke slides I stumbled across this absolute classic internal guidance document, courtesy of the Texas DoJ: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417885.pdf

  Don't define markets and estimate shares... For example, a field like advertising sweeps worldwide, and includes lots of different products and services. Defining a "market" more narrowly, or even defining one at all, can create issues if economists aren't involved. There's no problem with referring to a "market segment,'' "sector," "business/' etc., but just try and avoid defining the "market" for what we offer. Similarly, estimating "market share" is complicated, and it implies a defined market, so guessing or approximating isn't very reliable.

  If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

No, project Bernanke wasn't about that.

At that time, the exchange was a second-price auction, and all parties could submit up to two bids (presumably, the top two bids from their own collection of advertisers). Let's call the Google bids G1 > G2.

Since Google already implemented automated bidding strategies, they would submit to this auction (1+a)G1 and (1+b)G2 for certain fixed small value parameters a,b. Project Bernanke computed on historical data the optimal values of these a,b parameters.

Cue government discovery misunderstanding documentation

Hmm, you clearly know what you’re talking about and this contradicts the available info, so thanks for sharing! I’m a little confused though. To bring it back to simple terms: you’re saying that the project was simply to start bidding more on ad space…? How exactly does that help (/“bailout”) their customers, and why would that be its own project? “Determining how much to bid for ad space” is already the job of half of Bayview campus, so I’m confused by this benign explanation.

At the very least it sounds like they were using their position as auctioneer to fine-tune their bidding strategies, which seems like a textbook example of monopolistic behavior. But even that would be a step up from what I/the article above accuse them of.

The values of G1 and G2 are computed by a complex algorithm, however, that algorithm is agnostic of the position of the ad in the auction. Unlike the constant factors (1+a) and (1+b) applied on top of that.

Other companies in that auction could apply this kind of optimization, too. Perhaps the improvement is not as large for smaller participants, and so, not worth looking into.

Great comment. Will be interesting to see what Google looks like in 5 years from now.

I'm going to make a prediction. There may be some good outcomes from this, and some bad ones.

I'd say there would be more good outcomes if Google was made to segment in several planes at once, across product and location, and if transfer pricing models were forbidden.

Basically, if the EU and a competent Asian market regulator got involved as well.

I don't see why alphabet can't share s.w. over the federated Google.eu and like, but with datacenter locality maintained jurisdictionally.

BTW, if anyone wants to run "inevitable balkanisaion of the internet" it's an interesting topic. Because it may be true, and it may still be true more benefit than harm stems.

Google controlling web standards and owning Chrome is a big part of the problem. They get to only allow changes that protect their monopolies, allow invasion of privacy, avoid commoditization of their native Android APIs etc.

To be fair, Google as done a lot for the web. Google is also the one who has been pushing for the web as an alternative to native apps, while Apple has been the one to actively sabotage. If only everyone used Firefox and Mozilla was the one with the most influence...

Right. Without pressure from Chrome we'd be locked into proprietary, incompatible native app stores with no recourse over arbitrary, anti-competitive review processes. The flourishing of web apps like Figma and Notion would never have happened.

The web has many shortcomings as an app platform but at least you can still build what you want without getting permission from a trillion dollar tech giant.

complain all you want but without Google web would've been an obsolete platform. You had to write things in iOS, or Facebook OS or potentialy Azure Intelligent Cloud API.

I don’t see google walking away from this unscathed.

No doubt there will be much squabbling about definitions but seems pretty obvious that it is. Eg See browser market. There is basically no competition. And the competition is Firefox that Google is funding heavily to keep it alive - arguable to avoid being called a monopoly. That’s basically an admission in itself.

This is not a case about browsers.

What’s the 4x word for trifecta then?

Instagram ads are as big as Google ads if not bigger (ask any teenager) but this DOJ is on a mission it seems.

They’re chasing ad tech monopolies but missing the point. Ads ruin user experience, violate privacy, and have become a global tax on the web - paid by the most vulnerable, non-tech-savvy users. It’s not just about competition. It’s about building something better for the people. Focus on that, and the rest will follow.

> It’s about building something better for the people. Focus on that, and the rest will follow.

Strongly disagree with this part. The courts have adopted a very narrow view of anti-monopoly law focused on monopolies that increase prices. Politicians have yet to correct the courts on this. This would be a losing strategy for the executive branch.

> It’s about building something better for the people.

which google has already done (their search engine). But the payment comes due.

Break them up!

Fantastic. Hopefully Google is broken up completely. And then do Amazon and Facebook next. This mental oligarchy has gone on for too long. We need to go back to capitalism and a healthy playing field.

I'd be curious if Amazon is exploiting their market position somehow but frankly they're just better than the competition. Every time I got to a brick and mortar retailer beyond Aldi I regret it.

I also have many friends who work there who say it's hard work but the pay is great and there's a clear path to climb. I can't say the same about old brick and mortars.

I think usually when people talk about Amazon they are also talking about AWS - not just the consumer storefront.

You can both abuse your market position and offer a better service, possibly because of the former enabling it.

I don't really feel the "power" of google in any way. Search is so crappy i rarely even use it.

This is focused on the customer: advertisers, not the end users like you.

I'm sorry, I have a very cynical view of this. The economics of it - don't matter. If the US couldn't break up Microsoft in 2000, all this trial indicates is that Google got on someone's bad side.

Or maybe the Biden administration wants to be seen doing something just before the election. “Vote for us again so we continue doing these good things that we didn’t do during the last 4 years.”

Basically in the US, with the Presidential election, you have 2 choices: one candidate who's not going to do anything useful at all, and instead will do a bunch of highly counterproductive stuff (possibly disastrous, even), and another candidate who won't do anything disastrous, probably won't do much that's counterproductive, and maybe if you're really lucky will get something that's somewhat useful passed. Great choices, huh? But obviously one is better than the other.

I'm not convinced this will go anywhere.

For one, the entry to compete is very low with something like Google Search, same with web browsers. I will admit that Operating Systems are winner take all monopolies and as any other such monopoly should be regulated.

But everyone has the freedom to download another browser, it's open protocols which anyone can implement. And search? You literally Ctrl+L and type bing.com from a user perspective. From a competitor's perspective you just write a web crawler and run it, it's a CompSci year 1 project.

> I will admit that Operating Systems are winner take all monopolies and as any other such monopoly should be regulated.

Not sure I follow, could you explain how this is the case when the OS market has been much more competitive than the browser market for many years?

It's easier to build a browser than to build a OS.

OS: Mac, Windows, Linux

Browsers: Netscape, internet explorer, safari, opera, firefox, chrome, brave, samsung explorer, whatever smart tvs use, whatever the wii or the playstation used, etc...

High cost of entry is a core property of monopolies.

Most of those browsers are Chrome based or no longer being actively developed. Your only browser options are Chromium, Firefox and WebKit (Safari).

This isn't about browsers. It's about Display Ads, aka the images and videos you see on the side of blogs and at the start of shitty mobile games.

Article mentions google has monopoly trifecta but doesn't clarify what that it is exactly.

From the body I assumed it refers to the monopolies of: Operating System, Browser, and Search Engine.

I don't see ads as being a monopoly, that's just the monetization system, of the core products. It's like saying they have a monopoly on money?

That's a great guess, partially because they're indeed involved in antitrust suits for all three of those at the moment! Plus the "attorney-client privelege" action as the metacherry on top. That said, I think they're talking about three monopolies within Display Ads: publisher network, ad exchange, and advertiser network. AKA "sellside", "the auction", and "buyside".

I see what you're saying with monetization, but this is slightly different than what you're thinking of: this is "Display Ads", which is indeed a product (or, again, 3+ products) that they sell to others. A name you might know is "AdSense". The whole search part of their business is completely separate, and you're absolutely correct that they're a natural+benign monopoly over Google Search ads, just like Microsoft has a monopoly on Bing Search ads. But, again, this lawsuit is more about the little images and videos you see on blogs, news sites, forums, etc.

I think complain actually about monopoly for segment of large high traffic sites which use "Publisher Ad Server", specifically newspapers and such.