Divesting AdSense might help Google stave off worse regulatory action
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I could see how this idea would come from someone inside Google. Product doesn’t make them much money and they can claim they made a major change to their business. Because of YouTube, Google has more display inventory to sell now than they can handle. Ironically, the YouTube display inventory is incredibly poor quality, relative to the better Adsense properties out there.
An actual divestment would have to be Google splitting their search engine off from all of their other businesses. Keeping ad sales bundled with Google Search would be reasonable because there wouldn’t be any internal products to promote.
There are several companies competing for ad dollars and using various platforms (search, Instagram, etc) to feed ad systems for revenue. Their systems are extremely targeted and I like the optimized ads for new brands that are finding me.
Additionally, Chinese companies are doing the same and will combine even greater amounts of data — size is extremely valuable in an economic war of east vs west. I choose us.
Forgive me, but this sounds entirely like PR-speak used by ad companies to justify the mass stalking they perform. What sort of examples are there that you enjoy, what information did they use to target you, and what made that initial information gathering be justified?
Then it would be fine for them to switch to opt-in tracking, right?
The US could operate similarly but we usually expect a warrant for such access but I think there is a big push in the US govt to expand access as well.
With PRISM starting data collection from Google more than 10 years ago I think expecting a warrant for this very valuable data is generous.
They monopolies actually do things. (c.f. general electric -> shitty finance.) They are no 1 state capitalists. They can monopoly better than we can.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
1. Pre-2008 GOOG never charged for search 2. Can you think of any general-purpose examples where charging for search has worked? I can think of a few in the specialist space (academic papers, law documents, medical professionals) but nothing in the general-purpose space. That sounds like a recipe for the company's revenue imploding.
It's an option but not one I expect them to go with.
So what you're basically saying is that government should decree to destroy Android as a product and let Apple take over the whole marked with its completely proprietary and DRM locked OS (which is also not earning any money by itself without the rest of Apple corporation to feed it).
Android is profitable.
Just like pretty much every other major opensource project - even Linux itself is majorly developed by a few corporations.
Why else would they keep moving things out of AOSP and into their proprietary frameworks?
Same for Linux itself - however in that case, there isn't incentive to make it proprietary, because the companies are either making money from hardware sales or from support contracts.
If Android weren't free, perhaps we would have more paid alternatives to Apple. The problem with free and open-source software seems to be that you can't have a vibrant market of alternatives, development tends to acrete around 1 or 2 successful projects, with perhaps some satellites sitting at much, much lower market share.
This wouldn't necessarily be problematic, but it becomes so when those core few popular solutions are controlled and monetized by a single huge corporation.
As it is now, I'd rather have to be vigilant to what I put on my Android phone than having no Android phone and trust the other big companies they will not take the chance of exploiting ex-Android user base.
Killing Android is not going to stop Google from collecting data much like Facebook still collects data from people who install Instagram/FB on their oh-so-pricy iPhones.
If what you really want is to ask for regulation to stop data collection from the companies, be my guest. But advocating the destruction of one of the largest software ecosystems which is (mostly still) based on F/OSS is cutting off the noise to spite the face.
* https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Apple on the other hand makes its money from sales of its hardware and from their 30% cut of the much more profitable App Store. They are likely also collecting data and probably extracting value from that as well, and they are certainly allowing other companies (such as Google and Facebook) to release their data-collecting apps on their platform; but if data collection was entirely prohibited starting tomorrow, Apple would still be selling and developing iOS.
F/OSS is not a good in itself. Technology is technology. A F/OSS data collection program is exactly as bad as a proprietary data collection program - the purpose is much, much more relevant than the development model, in the grand scheme.
So sure, I have nothing against Android itself (I prefer it to iOS personally). But if attacking the data collection model had to cause the end of Android, I would accept that in a heartbeat, and I think most privacy advocates would as well.
The problem of oversimplifying some concepts is that we end up with absurd statements like this accepted as fact.
> Android makes money for Google by achieving that.
You are confusing tactics with strategy. Android is not a tactic, it is strategy. (Please do read the link I posted before)
> F/OSS is not a good in itself
Yeah, well, that is just, like, your opinion, man. For plenty of people there is a lot of inherit value associated with Software being Libre. The mere fact that I can take a fork of Android, remove the G-Services part that I don't like and install it on a rootable device, while not being able to do the same with iOS, is an concrete example of that.
> A F/OSS data collection program is exactly as bad as a proprietary data collection program.
Your issue here is not with Android, rather with the myriad of other Google Services that come in the OS. I am failing to understand why you keep conflating the two. Are you also going to start asking for Google to stop contributing to the Linux kernel because they use it on Android and their servers?
The biggest risk for Google is that someone else controls the mobile platform, and chooses not to give them space on this platform, or chooses not to allow them to collect the data that they need to improve their advertising.
Both are the same reasons why Google chose to build Chrome. Browsers were already a commodity, Microsoft and Netscape had seen to that long before Chrome started. So Google's strategy with Chrome can't have been commoditizing their complements. Rather, their strategy is about control of their platform, and it proved very successful. And now they are applying the same strategy with Android and the Google Play services.
And yes, my issue is not with the core open source Android code, my issue is with the final OS on my phone, which includes the Linux kernel, the Android OS, and a lot of Google tracking that I can't scrutinize or disable.
However, if Google were to start losing control of Androideither through laws or through competition (say the Amazon Android phone had taken off and squeezed Google Play out of the market) I can guarantee you that Google investment in Android would slow to a crawl. Google doesn't need a commodity OS on mobile. Google needs to control as much as possible of the mobile phone platform.
In the end, all I can say is "if you are so worried about Google's Android, go ahead fight the good fight, get a Fairphone with a custom ROM without g-services, or with any other OS. Asking for Android as a whole to be killed is short-sighted and will not achieve anything"
What if I am fully aware that they sell my eyeballs for revenue and I am OK with that because I find the amount of ads to be acceptable compared to the value I get from the product ?
Obviously, selling your data is not as harmful to you as selling a kidney. But it is still harmful, and it is also extremely harmful to society when many people do so.
If you order Google to abandon the project, you're effectively ordering to stop them from investing into the operating system while allowing their main competitor to keep subsidizing development of their iOS operating system.
"allowing their main competitor to keep subsidizing development of their iOS operating system."
I do not think this is true. Apple simple spend money to develop iOS so it can sell iPhone. You could not sell cars without engines and you cannot sell mobile devices without operating system. The entire ad money subsidising X phenomenon exists because Google does it, very successfully. I absolutely dislike the concept of surveillance capitalism and I do not want to participate in this. Mobile phone vendors should develop their own OS and price their products accordingly instead of forcing me to consider only iPhone/iOS if I do not want to install some hackware or adware as the OS of my device. I want to pay for the goods I use and it is not ok to give something for "free" when free means that my entire digital life is sold for the higher bidder.
All licensed Android phones are also forced to bundle Google apps like Youtube, Chrome, Play Store, Google search, Drive etc. And all these products make Google a LOT of money. Not to mention the amount of personal data it helps Google collect. Google didn't buy and develop Android out of kindness for its customers.
[1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...
Microsoft still is around 88% desktop market share. Now that’s a 25 year old monopoly.
As a rule, Big corporations do not innovate - they form cartels and sit on their products extracting rent. We have already seen the severe drop in innovation in the mobile space, now that the market is settled.
I guess we will soon just use Chinese-made software too then.
- Not chocolate, but I was amazed when I saw a bag of dried apples came from China.
> drinking Chinese beer,
- I'd be more worried about it skunking...
> driving Chinese assembled cars,
This actually reminds me, I forgot to see how that spat where GM didn't want to have to pay taxes on Chinese assembled cars they sell in the US wound up finishing.
> and watching Chinese movies?
Someone made a rather convincing argument that the influence of Chinese financiers in the film industry has contributed to shifts in the movies we get.
Now, there are those who may say 'But were any of those Megacorps?' The Apples were Dole, the cars were GM, and the movies (in question in the argument made) were Disney.
My counterpoint to that is that one has to consider that China in this case is the megacorp, due to the level of involvement/oversight they have over the companies that operate in their country.
This model can already be used right now - and it hasn't been successful at all. Especially when there are other players left in the market that subsidise their development.
Basically Google is developing Chrome and funding its major competitor.
- users being increasingly aware of the problem,
- legislation like GDPR everywhere on the horizon,
- Other companies (e.g. Apple) competing on providing better privacy.
So Google is trying to transition to services with defined income (Cloud, game streaming, Youtube) while it's still easy.
Maybe instead of dragging out a seemingly endless series of customer trust sapping product shutdowns it should just decide what it’s keeping them split the company into what it’s keeping and what it’s killing.
Here’s my prediction of what will finally be left standing:
Search
Search advertising
Maps
Gmail
50% chance they’ll keep their cloud 50% chance it’s already living dead like rackspace.
Everything else will go.
It’s starting to feel like google is in trouble.
I think they’ll give up on the cloud. Google has already given a succeed or close deadline on this.
What are the “many many others” you refer to? I suspect those are the ones google will kill.
I wouldn't predict they'll shutdown cloud until and unless they're convinced it won't blow up like they hope for them.
I don't think you've done any research for this opinion.