States bring action against Google under federal and state antitrust laws [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

States bring action against Google under federal and state antitrust laws [pdf]

texasattorneygeneral.gov

860 pointspondsider501 comments

>211. Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, but Google employees knew that AMP only improves the [redacted] and AMP pages can actually [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for cached AMP version of webpages were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed. Some publishers did not adopt AMP because they knew their pages actually loaded faster than AMP pages.

Vindication for everybody pointing out that amp pages don't actually load faster, they were just incompatible with things that commonly made sites load slower.

>212. Google also [redacted] of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one second delays in order to give Google AMP a [redacted] [redacted] slows down header bidding, which Google uses to turn around and denigrate header bidding for being too slow.

Seems damning. (emphasis mine)

Wonder what all the redacted is.

Also glad to see that google's preferring of amp sites in searches is going to get them in trouble, as that was basically the primary complaint I had with it. AMP pages would show up in searches for dynamic content, despite its restriction of static pages

This is the first I've heard of that one-second delay. That's downright evil. Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed.

[deleted]

What good do these witch hunts accomplish? Punish the senior leadership that demanded this feature

> What good do these witch hunts accomplish? Punish the senior leadership

I believe this line of thought and justification was addressed for good in the Nuremberg Trials.

That is beyond hyperbole. These are people implementing a caching feature not individuals leading human being into death camps. A false equivalency seldom matched.

>I was only following orders.

It is not an excuse. What they did sets the nature of the penalty which may or may not even come out to being a substantial punishment. That they were told to do it, and knew it was wrong, but did it anyway merely fails to absolve them of guilt.

The crimes are not equivalent, but the "I was just following orders" excuse is just as bogus in both cases.

If you believe that people are responsible for their actions, and they have a choice of what to do, then just because someone gives them an order doesn't mean they have to follow it. They could refuse. If they accept they are then responsible for their own decision and its consequences.

What if you didn't know the ultimate goal of the delay feature you implemented? The ticket could have been fairly generic/abstract.

Not at all. It was a prevalent defense there, and their view of those crimes was the the Superior Orders defense was a mitigating factor, but that the crimes were too severe to allow them to escape all culpability like that.

It was used prior, and has been used since, with outcomes ranging from being ignored to being absolved of all responsibility.

It comes down to the scope of the crime. If you helped murder 6 million people (apologies if that's not the correct number), "I was told to" is not an appropriate defense. If it's Karen's birthday and she's lactose intolerant, but your boss says to get an ice cream cake anyways, "I was told to" is a perfectly valid excuse.

Slowing down ads falls somewhere in between, but far closer to pissing off Karen's lactose intolerance than attempting genocide.

I wonder how the team adding in that extra delay justified it to themselves?

I always wonder this with things like the Volkswagen emissions cheating - how do those engineers rationalise it?

Well, working in ad-tech is pretty much bad from the get-go, this just seems like more of the same to me. To be fair, unlike VW diesels, it's also not directly damaging anyone's health, but it's still a nasty business.

> it's also not directly damaging anyone's health

I completely disagree. Have you noticed how much targeted advertising has sold out our world and affected peoples ability to rationally think?

Advertising has done more damage to people’s mental health and self-image then just about any other industry.

> working in ad-tech is pretty much bad from the get-go

No, it's the same as any other industry. A single company or negative behavior doesn't define everyone.

No, ad tech is well-known as the particularly abusive part of these monopolistic businesses.

It's a race to the bottom, and someone has to code them there. It's bad.

It's common practice in the advertising industry to exploit people's feelings of inadequacy. This is an industry that doesn't think twice about making an emotionally vulnerable teenager feel like a loser if they think it will help them sell some shitty product as the 'solution.' This is directly harming people's health.

Yes, I considered that, and I agree that it's an industry that does cause psychological harm to make a buck. But that still seems a little different than causing respiratory illness - maybe not that different, really...

With regard to particulate emissions, consider the role advertisers play in the deaths attributable to the tobacco industry. I'd wager more have been killed by tobacco industry advertisers than by VW engineers.

They justified it by earning very high salaries. Turned around, it is very difficult for a person to see a problem, if their salary depends on not seeing the problem.

I have worked in ad tech. Can confirm

Not even that: a culture where you are expected to meet your goals, deadlines and performance criteria can lead to shortcuts and ethical breaches when the company is relying on you "making it happen".

For an engineer the end justifies the means when it involves putting food on the table and ensuring there's a roof over your families head - whistle-blowing is not an option, and quitting mid-project is never a good look either.

> For an engineer the end justifies the means when it involves putting food on the table and ensuring there's a roof over your families head - whistle-blowing is not an option, and quitting mid-project is never a good look either.

Every time I hear this ... no. Google engineers could get a job elsewhere easily. It is not like software engineers would be like miners in dying industry struggling to survive. We are well paid and can get jobs easily.

I am not saying that everyone should leave Google. I am saying that if your company demands something unethical from you, rationalizing it through "ensuring there's a roof over your families head" is just lie for most of us.

"I wonder how the team adding in that extra delay justified it to themselves?"

A nice fat paycheck will often be enough to quiet a lot of people's doubts. And if it still bothers them, they can make themselves feel better by donating some of the money to charity.

Also, people who do things they know are wrong can mollify their consciences by comparing themselves to people who do even worse, and then patting themselves on the back for not being as bad.

They think things like, "at least I'm not literally robbing anyone", and the robbers think, "at least I'm not physically hurting anyone", and those that hurt people think "at least I'm not killing anyone", and then killers think, "at least I'm not torturing anyone to death," and the torturers tend to have some excuse too, like doing it for the greater good.

Unless you are literally the worst of the worst there'll always be someone worse you could compare yourself to and think that at least you're better than them.

There are already some examples of this kind of justification in this very thread.

"These are evil, vile people I am torturing to death. In fact, it's debatable if they're even people!" tends to be the justification, and it tends to be based on mental gymnastics surrounding some old book :-/

I see your point, and I agree. "In the end, it's better for the consumer this way, we're just giving the process the tiniest of nudges." has fueled a lot of anti-consumer hogwash over the years, I'm sure.

The design of it was discussed in https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133. It wasn't done nefariously. AMP prioritizes the page content and verified elements first over non-AMP content (including non-AMP ads).

I read this and it was interesting and clarifying. As an aside, I still hate amp though

This is interesting and sounds eerily similar to the justifications made by the anti-net-neutrality lobby: "Here at Comcast, we're not penalizing your content, we're just prioritizing traffic from our Valued Partner sites..."

I've worked at a startup in the past where the design team requested we put artificial delays / fake progress bars in. I told the design team that 1) Its just bad design / hostile to our users, and 2) that I'd quit before I'd build it for them.

It's a hill I'd be happy to die on. I feel like 6/10 engineers wouldn't care to have that fight, let alone risk their job over it. I'm lucky to be in a position that I am even able to. So many are not. Yet another example for the banality of evil.

Tip of the hat to you

I agree, I've heard of artificial delays being introduced because some loading of things was deemed 'too quick'- something about the user expects some delay and anything quicker than that gives the feel that nothing has really happened. I can see the logic in it a wee bit, I'll try find a link to their thinking on it.

If they have to add something, add an animation.

Artificial delays and user satisfaction (with focus group testing) were discussed in this podcast episode:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wait-wait-tell-me/

Almost all JS ads have a render delay of ~1 s to avoid page layout issues.

In this case they are using the same approach for HTML/JS ads on AMP pages, but if they know it's AMP they don't need to.

So I dunno - from an engineering point of view it seems pretty well justified to me.

It looks to me like the design for this was https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, and I'm friends with some of the people at the link. Speaking only for myself.)

So tl;dr: Traditional HTML+JS ads have always needed an extra second delay to load because of cross-domain UX degredation, but because AMP is pre-caching pages, they're able to pre-cache the ads too?

Is that what I'm reading?

I believe that the idea is that if the ad is amp, you can be sure it will load fast and not impede the ux of the page, whereas if it's html/js, you can't. It isn't about whether it is cached or not.

So taking websites hostage and demanding a ransom in the form of an amp link. Thanks.

If the top-line goal is to make the page as responsive as possible, I'm a little stumped as to what the alternative would be beyond delaying the loading of arbitrary html and JS. Can you think of a way to load arbitrary HTML immediately and not cause any page responsiveness issues on, say, a three year old Android device?

But this sounds like a technical limitation that makes sense? This entire comment chain is mostly people interpreting the lawsuit as claiming this was a deliberate artificial delay for business reasons and getting outraged about that, not a technical issue.

It's a little murky. If the status quo comes with a cost, because of practical uncertainty, and you provide an alternative that eliminates the uncertainty (and the cost), and then you use the elimination of the cost to prefer your own method... at minimum, that feels "not fair."

Why would it be unfair? A lot of UI delays come from uncertainty, it’s often a significant technical issue.

Because you eliminate uncertainty by imposing your own standard, the adoption of which financially benefits you.

An unbiased viewpoint acknowledges that bad people doing bad things for selfish reasons, can have both positive and negative results.

There's further details about it here: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133

And yeah, it's a technical issue.

So the suit in one paragraph claims that AMP isn't faster, then in the very next paragraph says that it is faster, but that's anti-competitive?

This is answered above. It is faster for arbitrary means, nothing substantive.

Where "arbitrary" can be swapped out for "malicious" and "anti-competitive."

It’s not faster when the browser actually loads them. It is faster when google induces a delay to making it available to start loading.

The first article I found about this was https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2018-03-19-how-fast-is-amp-r..., which claims that AMP is actually faster in practice, probably mostly because it encourages good habits. Where are you seeing that it's not faster? This article is from '18 so perhaps there has been a change in how well AMP performs versus the baseline.

Also worth noting that we should probably judge AMP as a whole product. What if it didn't make things faster at all, but did make them predictable and amenable to prerendering? The product is AMP+Cache+Prerendering. Prerendering unquestionably gives huge speed advantages in many scenarios. If you don't have AMP, you don't have prerendering, which means AMP-as-a-product gives significant speed advantages, since it's on the critical path to prerendering. (All of this is of course predicated on the idea that you can't practically prerender normal HTML pages, which perhaps you can, I don't know. I'm just saying if that justification for AMP is correct, it shouldn't necessarily matter that HTML+AMP markup is not faster than HTML markup.)

Did you use Google to search for the benefits of using AMP?

Are you serious? What else would I use? But I just checked, and DuckDuckGo and Bing return the same page as the first result.

> mostly because it encourages good habits. Where are you seeing that it's not faster?

You just answered it yourself. If someone follows good habits already, then AMP isn’t faster for them (aside from Google not allowing non-AMP loads to start sooner).

Thanks for the link. Though as a Google employee you should probably refrain from any further public comments.

There's nothing wrong with a Google employee participating in a Google-related discussion (edit: I mean in an HN thread of course), same as with any company. It's nice if they say so, which jefftk did.

Edit: I misread. Corrected below. Sorry!

I'm pretty sure they mean it's a bad idea from Google's perspective, not Hacker News'

Oh, I think you're right. I'm too used to certain types of internet reflexes. Sorry GP!

I would edit your initial comment because to many it will read as if you understood it as Google’s perspective, and still Okayed

Ok, I did that. Thanks!

Nothing wrong with that, sure, but making comments related to ongoing antitrust litigation against company employing you, while not being any official spokesperson and not having your comments vetted by legal and PR, can be really, really detrimental to one's career if Google decides that it doesn't like your comments. Google is very explicit in its internal trainings to never make any public comments like that unless you're officially empowered to do so. You can say or write anything you want on HN... on the last day at your job.

Would whistleblower protections apply in this case?

No, why would they? He's not whistleblowing. The commenter even admits that he has no context on the link in question and just suspects it's what's being implicated.

I worked at Microsoft in Europe and we never had such training. Is this only in the US?

There's probably better protection against random terminations on average in Europe than in America.

Yes, in the EU employees are more protected and it is much more limited what an employer are legally allowed to do. In fact they have to prove that your intention was malicious.

Nothing wrong for HN, but definitely risky as an employee.

It seems possible that in the history of internet forums, some of them might occasionally receive subpoenas because forum members posted something essential to one side's case in some litigation. It also seems possible that some of those forums receiving subpoenas would rather not deal with the burden of responding.

I've been given formal warning for that, others have been fired. It made it front page of HN. I don't think that's wise advice in all cases dang.

Dan, that's like asking a Google employee to basically get themselves fired. It's not something we should encourage, for their own benefit.

Exactly, wouldn't want to lose those golden handcuffs :)

Is Google legal going to extend their protection to you during this?

For the parents interest can we please delete his post...don’t want to see him get into any issues

He can probably manage to do that himself if he wants.

Do I understand correctly that the 1-second delay existed in both AMP and non-AMP case? And later, someone found a way to remove the 1-second delay for AMP since it could be done without a negative UI impact (unlike for the non-AMP case)?

That seems more likely than complete malice.

People are way too quick to defend Google around here - and I'm saying that as a former Google evangelist.

Google does a LOT of crap like that these days. Most people just aren't aware just how "evil" they've become, or prefer to defend them with nonsensical arguments like "see, Google still throws the Don't Be Evil motto somewhere at the very end of their multi-page work of conduct document, so technically they still believe in it!"

Yeah... They aren't the same Google of 20 or even 10 years ago...

>Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed.

Isn't it the CEO?

more than likely a single "Rogue" engineer

This was sarcastic, right?

Someone’s gotta be the scapegoat...

Obviously yes, probably on the back of stuff like Jerome Kerviel, and Tom Hayes, where one "rogue X" is capable of taking down Y.

"air quotes"

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

You mean scapegoat?

The engineer is responsible for it. The CEO is accountable for it.

No. It’s the board of directors. The board of directors is by proxy of the shareholders, is the actual owner in a practical sense of a corporation.

The CEO can, in most cases, be removed at any time by the board and be replaced by someone else. Without the boards approval none of this can happen.

So if you need to blame someone. It’s the board of directors.

Completely wrong, doesn't even make sense. You can easily have BoD individuals with tiny minority stakes in corporations. Sorry to be abrupt, but I really just don't advise making huge sweeping statements on things if your take is just blatantly wrong and misleading.

Who votes to hire or fire the CEO?

the BoD, next question?

So then how is this the CEO when the board actually controls who the CEO is? The CEO is employed by the grace of the board. The performance and decision making of CEO is implicitly approved or disapproved by the board of directors decision on a rolling basis to maintain or terminate the employment of the CEO. The same CEO that meets with the board on a regular basis to answer questions and provide updates .

Larry and Sergey

The personal stake of BoD individuals is completely irrelevant, and your focus on that suggests you don't understand what "by proxy" means.

> This is the first I've heard of that one-second delay. That's downright evil. Whoever is responsible for that should be ashamed.

That's it. I'm putting a 1-second delay into my webserver right now, when it detects Google Chrome.

This idea is one github repo away from being viral.

That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search...

This whole AMP mess just shows how insidiously evil a HugeCorp can be through sheer system complexity. Was it intentional? Well, I guess court cases will show that, but sheesh... even if unintentional it's extremely chilling.

> That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search...

Then don't add it for Googlebot User-Agents or IPs.

Google probably crawls with non-Googlebot User-Agent strings periodically to test if sites are serving different content to Googlebot and regular browsers.

But this mitigation would still fail. They might test for different content, but they probably don't include a periodic test like this in their timing tests, and if they did, it would just be an outlier.

I have no insider knowledge, but I'm going to guess that they even crawl using actual Chrome browsers once in a while... and penalize deviations from what you serve to the GoogleBot... and also factor in response times for either.

I don't think any single person can predict/know what's actually going on at this point.

In google search console, you can see lighthouse data reported from actual google chrome instances of real users. (I can’t verify this right now)

I think you missed my point.

If you and/or your organization can keep up with all of that... then good for you. That's not the reality for most of the world. And in "world", I include most IT organizations, btw.

EDIT: Btw, do note that I'm not even sure if the alleged issues/problems are even intentional or not... and that in itself is problematic... which was my larger point.

I don't have any solutions.

That's not sufficient. Google checks for different behavior for sites read from Google and sites read from other sources.

They'll drop content like a rotten egg from search results of they see a discrepancy.

Yeah but I really doubt they're using latency discrepancy as a signal. I can think of plenty of ways poor latency could come up on their verification requests but not affect the normal Googlebot requests. Also that's not really something any black hat SEO would involve so Google doesn't really have an incentive to look for that in the first place.

With the upcoming Core Web Vitals, you'll get penalized for this. It measures the aggregate speed of chrome users.

This is already a prominent section of Google's search console and they fire off warnings with with the perceived issues which you validate after fixing, etc. I'm sure it will become a major factor very soon.

> That'll probably just get you penalized by Google Search...

How about a pop-up telling the user that the UX of this website is better on Firefox? (which is true because e.g. it will not show the annoying pop-up)

I'd turn it on for lulz on my personal stuff but yeah it will hurt my domains more than Google's reputation...

I also think that we should collectively fight back against Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

Not handing them data for free would be a start (Analytics & Gmail)

Before jumping to conclusion me might have to hear the other side as well.

Karishma, you were shadowbanned. I've seen nothing in your comment history which would warrant this so I've vouched this comment.

Reminds me of this story: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop

Such artificial delays are already intentionally inserted for the purposes of allowing header bidding, regardless of AMP. Are most users aware of that. What this alleges Google is doing with AMP is making the delay worse, but there is still a delay. This is part of the price the user pays for online advertising. Not just (potential) visual distraction of advertising, but (real) time waiting for advertisers to bid before an ad can be shown. (What does a message like "Page loading..." really mean. Imagine if the message was "Advertisers bidding...") Advertisers might fail to get the user's attention or click, but they are always successful in stealing the user's time, with help from "ad tech" companies like Google. Regardless of whether the user ever looks at the ad, or clicks, she still has to wait for header bidding to complete.

The problem here is that there allegedly an additional artificial second of delay on non-amp ads vs amp ads. This is seen as anti competitive.

Entirely aside from the merits, I'd be so happy if this lawsuit somehow resulted in the destruction of AMP.

> they were just incompatible with things that commonly made sites load slower.

I always thought that was the entire point.

The primary upsell I always heard on here, and I think google's pages on it, was that it could be prefetched without exposing the user's info to the publisher if the user didn't click on it (because it's hosted on google's servers), and the prefetch was what made it faster, as well as being hosted on a cached cdn network.

The things that make sites slower are ads. And 90%+ of those are served by Google which runs the biggest adserver on the internet.

AMP is Google solving for performance from itself, and costing a lot of time and effort for everyone else to deal with.

It's worth mentioning that AMP intentionally adds an 8-second blank page delay if you are blocking Google's third-party js.

I think that was intentional malice designed to get some high-bounce rates for non-amp to have something to point at for publisher. See, over there - w/o AMP you have ScArY nUmBeRs

Yeah. If you block all js, the blank doesnt occur. It's just when you block google js.

It also creates blank layers above the actual content.

have noticed this with a growing number of websites; they load fine/fast if you block .js but show a paywall/annoyification when .js is enabled... "if you insist"

I'm glad Google is being investigated, and I am even more glad AMP could be going away. It completely ruins mobile experiences because it blocks preferred apps from opening their respective URLs.

What do you mean by this?

When you click an Amazon link in Chrome, it usually opens the Amazon app if you have it installed.

However when you click an Amazon link, if it uses AMP, it usually opens google.com/amp/amazon.com meaning chrome doesn't know it has to open the Amazon app

Note: Amazon doesn't use AMP, just an example.

I hate when web links try to open an app. If your product is an app, I refuse to use it. So no harm no fowl, for me at least, here.

When I’m in the browser, I prefer to stay in the browser. When I visit amazon.com I don’t want the app. I wish there were a way to disable this behavior on a domain by domain basis.

I like how Firefox for Android does it: "Open in App" is the first menu item when you're on a site that has a matching app installed. Best of both worlds: user retains control of their app / browser experience, and can easily opt in to using the app.

Somehow it always opens Google Drive app wherever I try to open https://drive.google.com in Incognito mode in Firefox for Android. In hate it very much and it doesn't even ask me. (I'm not authenticated with that account on device, so it makes impossible to access documents without login on Android)

This indicates that the app claimed the URL, so to prevent that you'd need to go into the app settings (at an Android level) and stop Google Drive from claiming those URLs.

Ohhh man! You are awesome! Thank you 10000!

On Android, You can open settings > Apps and notifications > Amazon > Open By Default > Clear Defaults. Then set 'open supported links' to 'dont't open' or 'open'

When a universal link opens an application, there should be a link in the top right of the screen to open it in Safari. If I remember correctly, when you choose this option, iOS will save your preference and stay in Safari instead of opening in that particular application in the future.

Internal Conspiracy. Rico Act stuff. Corporate criminals . . .

Aren't AMP pages able to be preloaded while you're at Google before you click on the link? I thought that was half the point of them. I can't see how that couldn't reduce loading times.

AMP pages artificially delay the loading of non-AMP elements, including non-AMP ads by 1 second.

This means if you want AMP, you better switch to an AMP advertising network. Who makes AMP advertising networks and also gets to make the rules about amp.js that changes behaviour, and adds in arbitrary restrictions (like a 8 second blank page if you block Google's tracking javascript) at will?

That one second delay is straight up evil. Extremely shitty, unethical behavior.

A Google employee commented above about the design reasoning behind this, and it's worth reading and understanding the linked GitHub discussion:

> It looks to me like the design for this was https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133

To be clear, I'm not defending Google here, but I just want to point out that it's possible to be "evil" (for whatever that means) without being malicious. That is, I don't think any Google engineer was thinking "Haha! We'll slow down all those non-AMP ads deliberately!" The thinking seems to have been "We want to be somewhat 'backwards compatible' to allow non-AMP ads, but we don't want those ads to kill AMP's performance benefits, so we'll still load them but only after the AMP content has loaded and rendered."

However, this is exactly the mindset that I hate about AMP, and it drives me a little nuts when I see Googlers defending it. I get that your intentions are good, but don't you realize that it's not an accident that the primary beneficiary of AMP is Google, e.g. by keeping users in the SERP instead of going off to sites where the content is hosted, and by making everything ideal for the ad network you own? Googlers have to come to realize that essentially all of their engineering decisions are constrained by what makes more money for Google, not what is best for users. Sure, faster page loads are great, but do you honestly think Google would have supported a tech that made page loads faster ig it didn't cause people to look at more Google ads? I mean, if Google really supported what was best for users, they'd support more privacy controls a la what is coming in iOS Safari, but of course they don't because that's bad for their business.

I hate AMP and hope it dies, but I don't hate it because I think there aren't some user benefits to it, I hate it because it is a further attempt by a single company to own even more of the Internet.

>We want to be somewhat 'backwards compatible' to allow non-AMP ads

It requires some pretty absurd mental calisthenics to be able to see AMP as an upgrade on the open web.

Can you elaborate? The argument is that AMP is part of the open web, that it’s an open standard everyone can use and lots of people do use. That doesn’t exonerate Google for (allegedly) using anticompetitive practices to push and shape the standard, but I can’t see a critique of AMP as a project that wouldn’t apply equally well to WHATWG’s management of HTML. I think this is something where a lot of people just don’t know how the sausage is made.

The fact that google runs a cache is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

The fact that google does not let you disable AMP from your browsing experience is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

The fact that google will prefer AMP over non-AMP links even if this means looking for a newly launch site with dynamic content (that can't be amp'ed) will get buried by articles about that site because they have AMP, is part of AMP, and open for criticism.

ie: AMP the """standard""" may be good, but everything google did with AMP is fucking horrible, and utterly and irreparably stains AMP, if only for enabling these things.

And the fact that google benefits from AMP, AND also started AMP and shaped AMP, just kinda nails the argument that you can't seperate out AMP from how google uses AMP.

Im referring to AMP the caching service run by Google. That is very much a walled garden.

If they turned it off tomorrow the standard would still exist.

FWIW, I had something of an impression that Google AMP was kind of a hacky attempt to "fight back" against Facebook Instant Articles, which made browsing random news on Facebook "more fun" and faster (etc.) than using the web (and particularly Google).

It was. It is now retroactively justified as "a way to speed up web" or somesuch.

It never was more than a way to grab traffic, market and money share.

> Seems damning.

The claims in a lawsuit aren't doing their jobs if they don't seem damning.

> Also glad to see that google's preferring of amp sites in searches is going to get them in trouble

Presuming the outcome of a lawsuit from the fact that it was filed may be ill-advised.

I had to log into my HN account just to say HOOORAHHH!

I've been SEOing for 8 years now with endless debates with dev people about AMP. I pushed to have it simply because "if google says jump, you say how high".

There's a bunch of insane tactics with the Ads model. For example the Ads quality score which is a totally ambiguous rating out of 10. They will then rate the page based on a whole load of variables and determine the rating - if you get 4/10 you are going to be paying more for your bids due to being penalized for low-quality BUT they will still allow it.

Now trying to figure how to improve and get it up to 10/10 is an entire process in itself. There's going to be people coming out of the wood work saying that the Quality Score is easy and so on but to me is just smells of unfair practices to exploit each cent out of advertisers.

I think even those who see through Google's shenaigans continue to abide by what Google says as there's no other choice, pretty much exploitation of monopoloy powers. If anything fruitful comes out of this action, it would apply utmost to North Amercia, EU has already doing what it can, but what about rest of the world?

I mean, how many can knowingly risk loosing website from the front page if they don't use AMP or worse don't display Google Ads? How can a layman even know their website is being penalised for not doing those, whom can they complain to when anti-trust regulations are non-existant in other parts of the world and even if they exist monopolies tend to keep the bureaucrats/politicians well fed.

So yeah, HOOORAHHH! if you live in U.S.A.

Thank you for putting this out there. Google in its current form needs to go as a de facto monopoly.

I am not hating on Google, just that I hate I have no alternatives but jumping the hoops Google puts out there.

Are you wishing for other strong ad competitors? Or are you wishing for alternatives to add?

Sometimes it seems the overwhelming sentiment at HN is that ads (especially targeted ones) are bad for the world. But it seems like nearly everyone is relying on them for their livelihood.

Hard to say for definite. The problem as I see it, is that if I have to pay for ads I have no alternatives : either Google for SEO or Facebook for Social, although one could argue Twitter, Reddit, or somesuch might be a bit more competitive.

With Google there is no option. They set the rules, they own the game and I can’t spend these dollars anywhere else if wanted to. This creates an imbalance, both for Google itself and for customers (ad payers)

I am overjoyed that Google is finally getting payback for AMP.

Small sites don’t have the resources to support it, and are therefore at a major disadvantage compared to the big clickbait news factories, who of course have the resources to build entire second versions of their pages for AMP.

Meanwhile, if you don’t comply with Google’s AMP demands, you likely wont appear in the “articles for you,” suggestions every time you open chrome on mobile. Nor will you be featured in certain content carousels on Google search. This can amount to shutting off 30% or more of your traffic.

If Google wanted to make the web faster, they could have just tweaked the search algorithm to more heavily favor faster sites. Problem solved.

Google can only force the adoption of AMP because of their monopoly power. They claim it is an “open source” project but this is questionable. 90%+ of commits are Google employees. It’s not like “the community” designed it or has any power to change it.

I always cite AMP as the most cut and dry piece of evidence that Google is a harmful monopoly. I continue to be astonished that higher ups at Google ever greenlit the idea in the first place.

I love Google and what they’ve done for the internet, but it’s clear they need to be reigned in.

google being evil here..

> Wonder what all the redacted is.

My guess it's related to the page rank algorithm.

How many Googlers knew this and kept quiet? They should be named, shamed and then shunned.

This should be criminal, if it isn't.

>>212. Google also [redacted] of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one second delays in order to give Google AMP a [redacted] [redacted] slows down header bidding, which Google uses to turn around and denigrate header bidding for being too slow.

See comment by jefftk. Seems to explain it.

This is actually pretty explosive news. Several of the ongoing antitrust cases involving the tech giants would require a more relaxed definition than the current antitrust standard which necessitates linking direct consumer harm. This standard was established by a somewhat radical pro-free market court decision that reversed an earlier interpretation that viewed monopolies in and of themselves as a condition subject to antitrust litigation (without the direct consumer harm piece). The current definition poses an almost insurmountable challenge for regulators as all companies need to do in order to avoid meeting the statutory requirements for antitrust is to refrain from colluding and/or abusing their market dominant position (engaging in anti-competitive practices). It seems like Google and Facebook crossed that line in a pretty blatant way which is quite shocking considering they are fully aware of the consequences. They opened themselves up with this one in a way that could lead to their undoing. Crazy stuff.

> Google and Facebook crossed that line in a pretty blatant way which is quite shocking considering they are fully aware of the consequences

If they're stupid enough to do this there's a lot more candy in the sofa.

More than you know. Break down the ad auction, DFP, ad exchange, Adsense, and see what insanity they have been calling business as usual. There are so many ways they’ve stole from the rest of the ad business with monopoly practices. This goes back to Atlas and why there is no such thing as a pure play ad server. Header bidding was the last best hope for democracy in the ad marketplace, but has killed the mobile webs batteries, bandwidth, and paved the way for AMP, which is another de facto ad monopoly.

I ran ad ops at a header bidding outfit serving in the 10 figure impressions each month. You’d see pubs be ecstatic to have 30% of their ad revenue be non-Google, with most closer to 90-100% sold, served, and tracked by Google.

They have the world’s most complete record of the thoughts of humanity for the past 20 years. They sell audiences of all ages to the highest bidder, take an auction fee, fees for ad placement tools, fees for ad selling tools, exchange fees, data fees, platform fees, mandatory minimums on giant contracts, and virtually no support. It’s a monopoly over billions of dollars and trillions of minutes of people’s time. And it’s one hell of an AI.

Can you explain how the public is harmed? I (think) I get the affect on various players in the ad ecosystem.

Can anyone quantify the harm to the public?

This affects the whole online ad market, not just Google's competitors. That's a whole lot of "the public" that's directly affected.

How do you quantify it? I don't know, how about we look at how much money Google is making?

Is every dollar that Google earns a dollar of harm to the public?

Why can't it be? Every dollar of harm translates to more than a dollar of knock-on effects

One has to have a theory of (public) harm. There are a bunch of them from a legal perspective, and maybe they will carry the day. They don't necessarily make sense from a non-legal colloquial perspective.

From a non-legal perspective, one of the big harms (I would argue) is in the destruction of the business model for small ad-supported publishers. Google was taking 80% of money that should have gone to them, and digital and physical publishers (like local newspapers) have had a mass extinction.

That said, out of the ashes, rises the phoenix. Substack and other subscription models owe their opportunity to Google's monopoly, and in many ways they're the mammals in this ecosystem of dying dinosaurs.

> Google was taking 80% of money that should have gone to them

This seems to presuppose an alternate universe in which Google doesn’t exist but ad revenue is the same?

No, a universe in which Google exists but wasn't committing fraud as monopolistic mobster middleman, handling both delivery and measurement of delivery. Google did and does what any mobster does- claim the vast majority of the value and let a trickle flow back to the producer, striking deals ordinarily understood to be illegal to maintain their position, while creating reports for producers that conveyed a false view of their role in the middle. Few producers survive with the mob as their distribution.

> Can anyone quantify the harm to the public?

Drive down ad rates for non-google content, which severely hurt other digital publishers, like news sites. This made it basically unsustainable for them to survive on advertising. Thus, hurt local reporting and investigation, which in turn allows corruption and ineffective government, eventually hurting democracy.

Three ways that I can think of quickly:

1. Ads cost more which raises the cost of doing business which raises the cost of goods.

2. It also makes certain borderline businesses infeasible -- there would be a whole class of businesses that don't/can't exist because they become unprofitable if you have to pay the ad monopoly/duopoly piper on top of normal expenses.

3. You could also argue that FB's continued dominance is another societal harm stemming directly from the alleged actions. If there wasn't an ad cartel, it would be easier to start new ad-based social media companies. (Wouldn't it be crazy if Google+ being neglected and then shutdown was a part of the negotiations between Google and FB?)

Lots of presumptions in the above, but I think a strong case could be made for each.

This is 100% true -> (Wouldn't it be crazy if Google+ being neglected and then shutdown was a part of the negotiations between Google and FB?)

Same for

Amazon closing down A9 search

Google buying up Affiliate Networks and closing one down and basically banning affiliate from most of Google Search and

doing @#$#$-all with Google Shopping

100% Division between

Amazon - shopping Google - search Facebook - social

with outward illusion of 'rivalry'

Bezos is 4th angel investor in Google

Qunicy Jones in an interview says he used to have a weekly dinner with

Elon Musk, Google founders, Bezos

It's Qunicy Jones so no idea how reliable. But wouldn't that be interesting - if Google and Amazon founders were doing dinner every week or every other week

Actually you just kind of convinced me of the opposite -- that there was nothing nefarious with Google+. Clearly these companies have a track record of getting out of non-core businesses where they don't have expertise and/or don't have much to gain.

Google buying up affiliate networks and shutting them down is just plain consolidation of monopoly -- not conspiracy to divide up the market like the other actions. (It still deserves antitrust scrutiny, but for wholly different reasons.)

And weekly or bi-weekly dinners? Conspirators go to great lengths to have legitimate pretenses for any meetings. Trade shows are/were notorious for where these cartels get business done because everyone has a legitimate interest to be there. You also want plausible deniability.

Because more competition in the ad space is invariably better for consumers. The alleged practices at play are illegal because they are known to harm consumers. And this is sufficient to demonstrate harm. For example, collusion is illegal not because someone necessarily sues and says “I was harmed by this” but because collusion invariably harms consumers. That’s the whole motivation behind collusion/price setting. Seems clear as day to me though I inquired with my friend who works in antitrust litigation and this was the response:

“There’s the broader principal that if they’re setting prices illegally they may not be harming consumers right now but they certainly could. Second, consumers are hurt when innovation/competition is curbed, and that is what they allege the deal’s purpose is. The bottom line is that if there were illegal deals and they can prove there were, those agreements are per se violations and you’re not really looking at consumer harm. This is what the case is alleging.”

The brief actually sums this up really well. The claims start at p. 100, which is where they allege harms but they provide good explanations throughout.

Edit: Note about the the brief.

The thing is, the “consumers” of the ad space are the advertisers, not end-users. They’re the product

So monopolistic practices will harm the consumer (advertisers), but do they really harm end-users? Does a monopoly in farming harm the cows?

TL;DR Businesses just pass these costs on to their consumers.

Businesses have somewhat standard target gross margins, customer acquisition costs (CAC), LTV:CAC ratio, etc. and will determine pricing based on multiples of these variables. Ad spend is often a huge component of CAC and this directly feeds into what companies need to charge their customers in order to use their products. The assumption that businesses will just eat a higher cost as sort of consumer benefactors is quite naive. I can assure you they won’t.

The end users buy the products of the advertisers. In a monopoly ads cost more and to make a profit advertisers have to increase their product prices. In turn the users pay higher prices for the products that are being advertised.

The business has to pay more to acquire customers, which drives up the cost of goods. Indirectly the consumer pays in mobile bandwidth costs, and publishers are forced to show ever-more ad units, refresh every 30 seconds, paginate articles, or add content recommendations, all because AdTech takes 85% of the ad spend that use to flow more directly between publishers and advertisers. Much of that went to the cost of staffing a sales team, but those folks were doing human review on campaigns, so ad quality was high and fraud was low. With unlimited digital ad variations, ad networks have to police a mountain of potential bad ads, which can be directly malicious to the user.

I can spin up 1000 banners and text ads, but only spend a dollar. See the problem? They all still need review. Instead, GOOG relies upon AI and user reports, which they promptly ignore. Meanwhile, they serve up so many mobile redirects that publishers have to pay yet another vendor for protection against the crap Google doesn't vet. As a publisher I'm not really interested in showing my audience ads that automatically redirect them away from my content and to a scam $500 Walmart Gift Card landing page. Yet, if I want to have access to Google demand, I have to take the bad with the good. What choice is there? Exist and use Google, or pass on 60-90% of revenue while competing for the same audience?

As an advertiser I have to count on Google's reporting to tell me if I'm making positive ROI and they are constantly finding new ways to convince me that they made the sale. They bill for ads that were never seen and clicks that went to nowhere. Occasionally you'll see a discount on your bill for "Invalid Clicks" but you'll never see anything auditable about it. If I don't police my site list, I might end up funding websites run by terrorists and/or money launderers. Honestly how many US citizens who are shopping for cars do so on .ru domains? If you're not vigilant, that will be 20%+ of your ad spend. Yet, if not Google or Facebook, where can I reach a relevant, large audience with a small and variable ad spend? Not with DSPs, not with agencies, not with direct ad buys.

there's this related thread by Cory Doctorow from last week

https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/13368328196753162...

I suspect they regard themself as 'too big to fail', in the sense that they might think that the practical implications of such a breakup would deter anyone from even considering this scenario.

Interesting, I have never heard this argument before. I don’t think there is a case to be made that the individual entities that make up Google or Facebook couldn’t operate independently. Google Search, G Suite, Google Cloud Platform, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. are all viable businesses in their own right. Many of them would still even qualify as “tech giants” eg WhatsApp is absolutely enormous with 2B monthly active users. In other words, a breakup wouldn’t result in failure and therefore wouldn’t satisfy the too big to fail criteria.

At least for Google, it would be interesting how much technical effort that would require. I don't work at Google, but lets say some large subset of their systems runs on Borg. The cost of separating out GCP and Gmail for example could be quite large. Not that that's necessarily a legal defense, but the technical ramifications of a breakup are interesting.

Dont you run the risk of creating a super monopoly if Gmail, Maps, Youtube etc that are split dont survive. The only choice is Apple and maybe thats why they are so keen on this, because the govt hands them ultimate control

Antitrust does not discriminate against a single company. If Apple is in violation of antitrust regulations either today or at some point in the future, regardless of how they got there, they would be subject to the same legal action. So no, theoretically speaking and practically speaking, this is not a risk.

That's not how it works in practice though. There's no US legal action against Apple, they can reap Billions and billions of dollars with their own monopoly before any action reaches them after Google and Facebook are crippled.

This is the big issue with targeted anti trust vs. industry wide regulation.

The government isn't suing apple for antitrust because someone else decided to do it for them: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/10/cydia-a...

The timing of this case, the Google case, and the FTC facebook investigation is interesting.

The case in the US would be around the market power of Facebook, Google and Amazon. That vertical merger case is being run by the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. The European Commission is also investigating the same three companies under its EU Merger Regulation rules. The EU competition enforcer has opened a case against Google for some e-commerce practices.

Yes, They also do a lot more than this

stuff like

astroturfing

click fraud

fake submissions on forms

etc

They basically operate completely recklessly

We are getting a lot of attacks from Google. I took screenshots just today of them doing fake submissions and they don't even hide it. From Google servers

Basically, their modus operandi is

A) Silent Agreement between Amazon, Google, Facebook and a few other companies (not sure which) to divide internet among themselves

B) Use any and all method to slow down any company growing fast

Usually this is 'plausible deniability' methods such as removing apps from app stores, kicking you off your payment processor, dropping you in organic search, shifting your adwords to 90% fake clicks, etc

C) If above methods don't work then they start using illegal methods i.e.

modifying search results when people search for you hacking attacks using gmail to hide your emails to customers and/or not deliver your invoices to new customers click fraud on other ad networks (Bing, etc) fake submissions

Contrast the HUGE number of enterprise side and B2B companies that are going public

now compare with how few customer to business companies are doing the same

It's not random

any customer facing company that is begining to do well has to face

Google disappearing them from Search Facebook disappearing them from Facebook and Instagram attacks from a few other Silicon Valley Companies

There is going to be A LOT of candy in the sofa

It's going to be Snowden level stuff

There will be a list of

Top 10,000 companies to kill off

and also

Top 500 threats

And there will be a playbook of all the methods to use to wipe them out

There will be even totally crazy stuff like

sending spy employees Trojen Horse VC Investments

etc

> It seems like Google and Facebook crossed that line in a pretty blatant way

Well, I mean, everything always seems blatant when you read the complaint in a lawsuit by itself.

OTOH, there's a reason that the legal system doesn't just take the complaint and decide based on that.

> 16. Having reached its monopoly position, Google now uses its immense market power to extract a very high tax of [redacted] percent of the ad dollars otherwise flowing to the countless online publishers and content producers like online newspapers, cooking websites, and blogs who survive by selling advertisements on their websites and apps. These costs invariably are passed onto the advertisers themselves and then to American consumers. The monopoly tax Google imposes on American businesses—advertisers like clothing brands, restaurants, and realtors—is a tax that is ultimately borne by American consumers through higher prices and lower quality on the goods, services, and information those businesses provide. Every American suffers when Google imposes its monopoly pricing on the sale of targeted advertising.

Seems like a KO punch under the Sherman Act.

Where’s all the people pointing out that it’s not a monopoly since nothing is stopping you from rolling your own ads platform, you’re just not entitled to reach, and Google can charge what they want?

If you call it DoubleClick then you might even get acquired

Whenever I see this type of response in these discussions, I wonder if the people writing them got their definition of monopoly from Wikipedia or from Hasbro.

Usually they just make up their own definition on the spot.

huh? I suffer due to targeted advertising? I'm better off watching ads for trucks and heartburn meds?

I don't think a newspaper has a God given right to a certain percentage of all the ad dollars, and I don't see how Google's business model amounts to a tax. What "costs" are they even referring to? How is a search engine supposed to collect revenue for the services rendered? Google connects users with information, and content providers with eyeballs, and does a better job of it than anyone else. The world before Google was a worse world, where these connections didn't happen.

This argument is so specious and just full of unsubstantiated use of buzzwords. IANAL but if it doesn't pass the common sense test I can't see it getting far in court.

Isn't what it's saying about google having monopoly power over online advertising in general?

For a change I don't think this is a complaint about it being targeted, aside from the fact google is uniquely able to target.

You suffer because one company has monopoly power over targeted advertising, so companies must pay it whatever it asks for, which means higher prices / worse products.

I think the complaint is saying your targeted ads are higher than they naturally should be because google is using monopoly power to raise prices.

So google raises prices, companies pay higher prices and then charge more for goods. This the harm can be calculated by comparing the price of ads under monopoly vs ads without monopoly and then multiplying by some average margin over cost.

Google dominates online ad serving. Those ads cost more than they should with competition. That cost is included in the price you pay for products.

It's not that complicated and has nothing to do with Google's other ambitions or products.

Google dominates search, but most of the items listed related to programmatic which is pretty competitive. The other big players are not small names.. amazon, Verizon, at&t, the trade desk, etc.

Nobody is as big and widespread as Google. They dominate programmatic too. The open market is secondary and highly influenced by whatever runs through Google's network.

"The world before Google was a worse world"

Well, except for the surveillance society Google and others of its ilk ushered in.

And except for the huge concentration of power that megacorps like this and their owners accumulate, that relegate most of the rest of us to lifetimes of kissing their asses and shining their shoes.

I just want to point out that this, "The world before Google was a worse world" might be true before 2000 or so, but certainly not for the past decade. Remember when Google result pages had sparse ads, that were clearly and boldly delineated from "natural" search results? Google was great then in helping me find stuff, I knew when I was clicking an ad, and the best products and services could still rise to the top of "natural" search results without paying a "Google tax". I also didn't get ads that followed me everywhere I went on the Internet, but I still had good relevant ads because Google had plenty of context from my search terms.

These days, nearly the first entire page of results is ads, which for most people look nearly the same as natural results. Google even gets most people to click on ads, and collect their pound of flesh, when the user typed the name of the business in the search bar. Google doesn't really need to worry that much about competing with other search engines for better natural results because they've mostly killed them all off. IMO Google's search engine peaked about a decade ago and has just gotten worse since.

How is it a tax for them to charge for a service? Do other types of media not charge for ads?

That's not the argument. The argument is that they charge an exorbitant, consumer-harmful amount, which they are only able to do because of their monopoly position and anti-competitive practices.

The tax is that a businesses have to raise their prices in order to afford Google's ads, which are only able to be priced so high due to illegal business practices. That means you, the consumer, are paying synthetically higher prices for everything because of Google's ad monopoly. Paying the Google tax.

Not to mention that because Google is the de facto owner of Internet search, it essentially pits businesses against each other, forcing them to engage in a bidding war for limited space at the top of search results.

This, unsurprisingly, leads to higher and higher expenditures on ads, rather than on improving the product of a business. In the end, consumers end up with mediocre products with above average prices - advertising costs being passed on to end consumers.

These costs can be quite significant (I work in e-commerce space), ranging from 10% to 20% of the end price the consumer sees.

What’s your solution? When many people want a limited resource, its price goes up. Nothing would change with more competition.

Is anyone else wondering why Visa and MasterCard aren't being targeted for antitrust? All of this applies to what they do with credit card fees.

I'd love to see them be targeted for antitrust. In my opinion credit card fees are far too high...

Probably because there is enough competition on the credit card and payment market; do they have a monopoly? Are they driving the competition out of the market?

Another interpretation here: US regulators have been asleep for decades, and they haven’t taken much of a look at a number of companies abusing their monopoly positions.

There's that too, and the US political system ensures that that is kept in place - companies hire lobbyists, lobbyists cozy up to politicians, money is funneled to said politicians' election funds, and politicians are either formerly business leaders, or have a cushy high paying job waiting for them after their term if they play their cards right.

I think with all this (and the cases vs FB, Apple, etc), the tech sector didn't manage to pay and influence the politicians enough. Which is quite telling for the US' political systems.

Enough competition? Collectively, those two control 90% of the credit/debit transaction marketshare as of Jan 2020. Almost every move and change is mirrored by the other -- they don't even try to hide the fact that they practically operate in unison.

Almost all credit card companies have stipulations that merchants are not allowed to charge less for people paying cash -- forcing cash paying customers to pay the same price as those who cost the merchant a CC fee. This is basically a 3% tax we are all forced to pay on everything we buy.

Because this is a political act rather than one based on principal.

Would you say the same for today's lawsuit from 38 other states and territories as well?

https://coag.gov/app/uploads/2020/12/Colorado-et-al.-v.-Goog...

In another thread, someone mentioned that the regulatory difficulties of operating a credit card company are so high that no one has started a new one in decades. So theoretically, removing some of the regulatory capture would help unseat Visa and MasterCard.

Fwiw, there is also Amex and Discover. They're far smaller players though.

> These costs invariably are passed onto the advertisers themselves and then to American consumers

IIRC the total ad spend has not changed much in the digital age. So it's more appropriate to say that these ad dollars are starving all content-making media. And it's not hard to argue that it has led to a deterioration of media quality in past decade

As someone who held numerous briefings helping to put this case together, I think it is extremely strong –– in fact, it will be difficult to imagine a cognizable defense. My congratulations to the several states who joined together to delve deep into those deleterious actions in the ad market which have so harmed the open internet.

good to know

Held briefings in what capacity? It looks like you're an investor, not a lawyer

Looks like https://www.publir.com/ has a stake how ads operate, he's a founder there.

> 141. Google also has violated users’ privacy in other egregious ways when doing so is convenient for Google. For instance, shortly after Facebook acquired WhatsApp, in 2015, Facebook signed an exclusive agreement with Google, granting Google access to millions of Americans’ end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, photos, videos, and audio files. As Google discussed internally, WhatsApp [redacted]. They did not know that Google [redacted]. As internal documents reveal, upon signing the agreement, Facebook and Google started [redacted], without letting users know. Rather than being concerned about this fundamental breach of privacy, Google internally was [redacted]. In an internal document discussing the deal, Google discussed [redacted] In other words, Google is more concerned about bad publicity than about users’ privacy

Oh my.

I legitimately can't parse what this is saying between the outrageous redactions.

> granting Google access to millions of Americans’ end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages

This doesn't imply that Google (or WhatsApp, for that matter) can read these e2e encrypted messages, right? I am wondering what information they actually get from this.

From whatsapp faq : "Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive."

Wait, is that whole complaint that Facebook and Google signed an agreement about allowing users to back up their data in Google Drive? Like a user clicks a "connect with Google to backup your data" button? It reads like Google's slurping things in behind the scenes and has access to encryption keys, but it doesn't actually say that.

Is the only contentious part that Google might have done [redacted] with the chats and photos?

AFAIK it does so by default, and it doesn't even help if I disable it as my chats will be uploaded by everyone else anyway.

It most certainly does not do so by default. It will occasionally prompt you to set up backups and you have to choose the frequency and method.

Ok, thanks for pointing out!

I recognize that in that case I have been wrong and loud at the same time.

I'm sorry for that.

No, you misunderstand antitrust laws. Signing an exclusive deal with your direct competitor who is as much of a monopoly as you are is cartel behaviour. Google then seemingly abused this exclusive privilege.

Google Drive backups option for Whatsapp only applies to Androids with Google Play Services, and for IPhones Whatsapp's only cloud backup option is ICloud. This does not seem close to nefarious at all. NOTE, this is only about cloud backups through the app. If you want you can backup only to your phone and then upload those backups to whatever service you want.

The complaint about this is simply ridiculous, and in fact kind of shows the misleading nature of it's framing. Not that I expect more of that AG.

Yeah, framed like this, backing up in your phone's default cloud, seems a lot more reasonable. If Facebook turned down Dropbox or Google added that to the contract, there might be an issue, or if Google did sketchy things with the backup. Maybe they did, for the framing was disingenuous.

It very much implies that Google can read it, yes.

I've been quite vocal about it but have taken a lot of flak for it because WhatsApp is E2E-encrypted with the newest and best encryption scheme recommended by everyones favorite crytographer so it must be infallible (even if it backs up everything to a third party unencrypted, by default).

So glad this isn't going unnoticed. Does anyone remember that random email Google sent years ago (I suppose 2015 from this), informing us that WhatsApp backups no longer count towards your Drive quota limit?

No press releases, no fanfare about it, nothing. There was a small discussion of the intent of this, but the media didn't seem to care.

Wow wild. That is one of those details that slip by most of us with chronic inbox fatigue. So they not only were gathering the data, they actually made a business exception to their API quotas to ensure the data didn't have to be copied twice?!

The real intention behind this move is even worse: It completely negates the purpose of end-to-end encryption, since unencrypted backups can be easily accessed by governments or Google anytime.

The quota exception was so that people wouldn't be discouraged from backing up to Drive since it would no longer "cost" them any storage to do so.

Fun fact: Apple has effectively done an equivalent loophole by storing iCloud backups of your phone (including Messages) WITH the encryption key on their servers. So they have everything they need to read all your data.

As someone who has been pointing out for a long time that there is more to security than E2E-encryption it feels great to see first that people have stopped recommending WhatsApp over the alternatives and now also this :-)

Is this about the fact that people can backup their Whatsapp messages using Google Drive?

Texas, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah

vs. Google

And the crux of the complaint seems to be:

"As internal Google documents reveal, Google sought to kill competition and has done so through an array of exclusionary tactics, including an unlawful agreement with Facebook, its largest potential competitive threat, to manipulate advertising auctions."

Complaint is based on the Sherman act. Sherman act requires harm to the end customer which be interesting to see how they show a negative impact to the public. I have free email, web browser, maps and other things paid for by google.

Could you make the argument that because it’s nearly impossible to compete with their free offerings, no other company has a chance in that space?

From what I've read, this is the direction some anti-trust lawyers want the interpretation of the law to go in.

For Facebook, but Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok are all counterexamples of this.

Yes, but usually you start to get the legal theory developed before decisions start changing. They have to come up with new arguments for why to interpret anti-trust law differently before the courts will agree with them. Also, public sentiment obviously has a big impact on the courts, as the Obergefell ruling demonstrates.

Hopefully this doesn't work. That will cause enormous harm to consumers, particularly as compute and bandwidth costs continue to fall.

Free to consumers is generally a net good, since it gives them access to things they wouldn't otherwise have.

Google isn't going to give up their free services, that's how they get eye balls (attention which equals ad revenue) the have a Monopolistic advantage. A fly wheel to make money.

>Free to consumers is generally a net good, since it gives them access to things they wouldn't otherwise have.

Unless "access to things they wouldn't otherwise have" is free and fair market competition.

There's a very good reason that anti-dumping laws exist in almost every nation in the context of international trade, and the one and only reason reason a company dumps a product (selling it below 'normal' price) is to kill any local competition that might arise.

YouTube, as far as I'm aware, is offered at a price that doesn't meet its full cost of production, and as such should constitute illegal dumping in any country that has or wants to have a tech industry of its own.

The laws of trade just haven't caught up to this yet; of course, there's nothing stopping countries from updating their laws and banning YouTube and similar sites- unfortunately for them, banning services "sold" in this way would end up causing massive civil unrest, since its citizens now have a bunch of time to deal with the government who took their primary source of entertainment away and aren't as concerned about what the local tech industry might look like in 10 years without unfair competitive practices. Also, the US would take a very dim view of countries that modernize their trade law in a way that restricts how its most valuable companies make their money.

> YouTube, as far as I'm aware, is offered at a price that doesn't meet its full cost of production, and as such should constitute illegal dumping in any country that has or wants to have a tech industry of its own.

This an big misconception that I've seen before of HN. I don't know why that is.

Youtube standalone revenue is $15B/year[1]. Netflix is around $20B/year, but Netflix spends about $15B/year producing professional content and yet still produces around $1B/quarter in profit[2].

There's nothing at all to indicate that Youtube isn't actually highly profitable.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/20/heres-why-netflix-shares-a...

The current legal theory for monopolies is that they're only bad if they increase consumer prices. Tech companies who give out products for free don't seem to do this.

> Having reached its monopoly position, Google now uses its immense market power to extract a very high tax of [redacted] percent of the ad dollars otherwise flowing to the countless online publishers and content producers like online newspapers, cooking websites, and blogs who survive by selling advertisements on their websites and apps. These costs invariably are passed onto the advertisers themselves and then to American consumers

I thought this was a dead horse, but you are not the customer.

Courts have generally interpreted the customer-welfare aspects of the Sherman Antitrust Act as meaning “customer, as opposed to business”, rather than “customer, as in the one making the purchase”. Courts have generally not been bothered when one corporation screws over other corporations if there’s no demonstrated harm to non-corporate entities in the marketplace. The Sherman Antitrust Act wasn’t intended to protect corporations from being out competed, and no corporation has a right to their business model being viable. Corporations screwing each other over so that they can provide the best possible experience for non-corporate members of the market is exactly the “competition” that the act was devised to encourage.

> The Sherman Antitrust Act wasn’t intended to protect corporations from being out competed

But that's entirely different from what is at issue in the advertising market.

Huh, that's funny. And here I thought corporations were people. shrug

The customer in the context of ad buys is every business attempting to do online marketing. You are the product.

> customer in the context of ad buys is every business attempting to do online marketing

Courts interpreting § 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act have generally used the term "consumer welfare," which sidesteps this issue. (The original text makes no reference to this concept.)

but Google ads are successful because their targeting allows you to put the right ads in front of the right eyeballs. It's way cheaper to run a targeted ad campaign than buy up a bunch of billboards on a busy freeway. It's also more effective because people can click through and buy right away. All the ads are sold on an auction basis, so their price is directly connected to their utility to the buyer. I fail to see how the ad buyer is harmed.

This is from the suit and is pretty damning, at least to my non lawyer eyes.

"In the end, Facebook curtailed its involvement with header bidding in return for Google giving Facebook information, speed, and other advantages in the auctions that Google runs for publishers’ mobile app advertising inventory each month in the United States. In these auctions, Facebook and Google compete head-to-head as bidders. Google’s internal codename for this agreement, signed at the highest-level, was REDACTED a twist on the character name from Star Wars. The parties agree on for how often Facebook would publishers’ auctions—literally manipulating the auction with for how often Facebook would bid and win."

Well now I really want to know the internal codename.

Well now I want to know what character they used from Star Wars? I'm going to guess "Darth Bidder"?

DARTH - Dynamic Advertising Revenue Trading Heuristic

e-vader

> "REDACTED a twist on the character name from Star Wars."

If I were a betting man, I'd think it was something like "Fando Calrissian" or something akin to that; FAN from Facebook Ad Network and Lando because of the famous "I'm altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further" dialogue between him and Vader.

The only service Google offers for free is showing ads. Everything else is just the vehicle used to improve or display those ads.

If they have helped the user through A, B, C, D and E, and hurt them through F, you can still take them to task for F specifically. The fact that they funded the rest from profits gained through F isn't really a valid defense.

The end customers for advertising are businesses.

The argument in the complaint is this (paragraph 16):

The monopoly tax Google imposes on American businesses—advertisers like clothing brands, restaurants, and realtors—is a tax that is ultimately borne by American consumers through higher prices and lower quality on the goods, services, and information those businesses provide. Every American suffers when Google imposes its monopoly pricing on the sale of targeted advertising.

Digital marketing is one channel of marketing and arguably the most cost effective compared to out of home, direct mail, direct response, tv/radio, endorsements etc. Google will argue because of cost efficiencies in the market, it has allowed hundreds of brands to effectively compete against established players creating a more competitive landscape.

Here’s an example: Dollar Shave Club launched with a only digital marketing strategy and pressured Gillette to significantly cut prices to the net benefit of consumers. Without digital marketing, DSC wouldn’t have got off the ground.

I think there's a lot of truth to this.

But there is also truth to the argument that more competition would (probably) have driven prices down, and that Google and FB colluding to fix prices in auctions caused this

The. Consumer in this case is businesses themselves. There isn't a magucal difference between B2B consumers and B2C consumers except that B2B's have the luxury of pushing costs down to customers. You don't get to hide behind that you enabled the transaction at all when you acquired everyone else who was also doing so, and colluded with your chief competitor. It's the central trade-off between a Hamiltonian monolith, and a Jeffersonian bazaar. The Monolith can probably get you cheaper prices for a while, but at the cost of any new entrants to the market. The bill is paid in Liberty. In a Jeffersonian bazaar, tge wide variety of competing models and lower barrier of entry keeps everyone honest even if you can't exploit the same level of hyper-optimization the monolith brings to the table. You also avoid tge risk inherent to the Hamiltonian approach of the Monolith destructively influencing everything around it. Too big to fail is less of an issue because there are other fish, not just pods of whales.

Edit: May be confusing Hamilton and Jefferson with Hobbes and Locke again.

I am not disagreeing with you, but I wanted to point out also that if there is collusion between Google and Facebook for pricing advertising, then, doesn’t the consumer end up paying more for purchases because advertising costs are factored into product pricing?

That assumes the amount of advertising is constant, but buyers could simply purchase less, so I don't think it's necessarily true.

It assumes advertisers have fixed ad budgets and get fewer impressions for the same amount of money.

That’s going to be hard to prove. You’ll need to prove the cost of marketing went up when it actually got cheaper due advances in targeting. Google has a legitimate argument that owning vast digital properties allows them to provide more effective targeting and a cost savings to companies.

The Sherman act does not require harm to the end consumer. That standard was instituted relatively recently (Reagan administration, if I remember correctly). Interpretation before that (which the Trump admin has leaned toward) would encompass broader monopolistic behavior, such as collusion that prevents competition even if it does not directly result in a price increase for consumers.

Given how much these issues are going to be discussed in the coming months, it's probably worth giving [1] a read. I selected that article for brevity, recency, and because the author is well known among HN readers.

[1] https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

Video streaming alone creates an argument for consumer harm against most major platform vendors, since nearly every FAANG has at some point been locked out from paying customers within another one's hardware ecosystem. Prime Video and YouTube were unavailable on each other's devices for years, Apple TV briefly wasn't carrying Netflix, Apple services are paywalled behind Apple devices, etc. Additionally, the ones that do work still depend on access to integrations for features like voice control, leading to scattershot functionality across any from third parties.

Google in particular has also abandoned support for open specs in favor of deepening the Chromecast ecosystem -- having both removed DIAL support from later versions of the Cast protocol and Miracast support from Android itself.

And that's before you get into the interop for purchases within these ecosystems, because under the DMCA you can't legally do anything about the incompatible DRM schemes, even for media that other devices are more than technically capable of playing.

Another, related issue is that the additional set of proprietary APIs on top of AOSP amounts to an Android ecosystem that's "open," but renders any implementation that they haven't blessed as a second-class citizen. This has tangibly impacted compatibility efforts by other vendors, ranging from Amazon (Fire devices) to Huawei (loss of Play Services via the ban) to Microsoft (Project Astoria) -- for reasons that, in part, involved maintaining a walled garden of complementary hardware.

To be completely fair about this one, it's not strictly that cut and dry, as the ability to leverage vendors with Play licensing has also forced widespread adoption of solutions like Treble. But over time, large sections of the OS have been abandoned in favor of proprietary Google apps, and the API incompatibility hampers the growth of alternative ecosystems, even if you're another FAANG that can bring your own cloud and develop your own hardware.

To that point - while I personally think Oracle's SCOTUS case amounts to brazen trolling, it's, uh, not great optics for that whole argument that API compatibility is fair use when Android apps across several different categories will break just because updating your EOL'd device or getting rid of manufacturer bloatware will trip SafetyNet -- or because your vendor is a competitor and your device just isn't allowlisted by SafetyNet in the first place.

> Apple services are paywalled behind Apple devices, etc.

Apple TV is available on other devices. Today was announced Apple TV will be avilable on Chromecast https://blog.google/products/google-tv/apple-tv/

Last week was announced that Apple Music is available from Google Nest speakers https://blog.google/products/google-nest/never-miss-beat-app...

Oh! Yeah, I just saw the Apple TV one about 5 minutes ago myself (it was too late to update the above w a correction), but admittedly hadn't known about Apple Music.

Apple services are paywalled behind Apple devices

AppleTV has been in Sony, LG, and other devices for several years.

is this the same texas ag that tried to overturn the election?

Yes. It was a stunt to get a pardon from Trump before he leaves office, considering he is involved in several lawsuits ranging from securities fraud to bribery.

Thats too bad, now I believe think this lawsuit is a scam and won't go any where.

I wonder if of accepting a pardon is admitting enough guilt to get someone disbarred.

Interesting that this accusation isn't in Facebook's antitrust complaint.

Most of the accusations leveled against the FAANGs come down to somewhat of a matter of opinion if they harm consumers. The two dominant players in a market colluding to drive up prices isn't. It's clearly anti-competitive and I doubt there's many that would disagree.

Nothing more than a partisan hit job coming from the biggest leech states in the country.

OK, Google

> Google also provided Facebook with a [...]. Google subjects other marketplaces competing for publishers’ inventory in Open Bidding to 160 millisecond timeouts. Competitors have actively complained that is not enough time to recognize users in auctions and return bids before they are excluded. By comparison, Google [...]. The longer timeouts granted by Google were presumably designed to aid FAN win more auctions to abide by the spirit of the agreement.

Not sure why these were redacted but it seems pretty clear what happened. Is Google actually running the monopoly marketplace and tilting the scales in its own favor? That seems like a knockout right there.

Note: quote above is paragraph 186.

Google started by giving Facebook longer timeout, but they went further. Paragraph 194 says:

> The agreement allocated a portion of publishers' auction wins to Facebook, subverting the free operation of supply and demand.

Now wins are simply allocated to Facebook without competition.

As said above, this is damning, KO, whatever you want to say.

This seems 100% damning to me. There will probably be an entire HN thread about it in the next couple hours.

There was a point at which Facebook and Google were engaged in a death match (for example, Facebook built Connect as a pre-emptive action against a planned Google initiative that had leaked to them). And then suddenly, at some point, the rivalry just sort of ... disappeared.

I wonder how close the relationship really is. This ad deal seems like just one component of something more complex.

As we stray further away from true market competition, this sort of behavior for those at the top to collude against the market versus compete for it is going to be too great for them to resist.

When has it ever been any different?

When our economy was less concentrated. Basically anytime before now.

The proportion income tax returns reporting "self employed" drops every year. The average number of internet service providers a household has to choose from drops every year. This has been going on for 30-40 years now, at various rates of speed.

Things were much worse at the turn of the century. Then we got Teddy Roosevelt and an era of trust-busting. It's time for history to rhyme a bit better.

>The average number of internet service providers a household has to choose from drops every year.

In the US, there's always been only 2 companies with wires going to people's houses, the phone company and the cable company. And for 99% of people, the choice is shitty DSL at 3Mbps which doesn't really count as broadband, or okay-ish cable internet with no upload capacity.

In constrat, in the UK, we unbundled our ADSL monopoly, and forced them to sell access to the cables wholesale. And then let competitors put their own hardware in the local exchanges too.

It still needs more work as everyone seems to have to charge a fixed line fee. There are though plenty of providers with varying prices and qualities. Plus cable (fibre) too.

Competition and capitalism only function if a state heavily regulates the market to be an actual market.

Indeed.

> People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

– The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter X.

The rivalry disappeared when Google+ failed.

The parent was questioning I think whether Google+ failing was a result of something like Google and Facebook dividing up the market and agreeing to stop competing. As crazy as it sounds, it makes as much sense as Google making so, so many bad decisions around Google+ that it eventually had to be put out of its misery.

> _(for example, Facebook built Connect as a pre-emptive action against a planned Google initiative that had leaked to them)_

What was the planned Google initiative? A SSO service?

If this is actually true, it has huge ramifications.

Google and FB have become two of the largest companies in the world. Why? Because they have an exclusive lock on digital advertising.

And remember the illegal non-poaching agreements?

Google might look a lot more like Yahoo if these two scandals never occurred. What would be a fair punishment? I am thinking a fine to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

So you know what's awesome about doing business and breaking all the rules to get to the top?

The government doesn't want to actually debilitate you in an antitrust lawsuit because it could ironically make the nearest competitor a monopoly when your business implodes. Whoopsie! Although monopolies themselves are not illegal as long as anticompetitive practices aren't deployed, the state is still trying to promote competition, and is keen to avoid causing it themselves.

Breaking rules is tight!

There is a book on this reality if you want to read more.

What constitutes anticompetitive practices and why are they illegal? Why are patents and not considered anticompetitive practices?

> Why are patents and not considered anticompetitive practices?

Because they are state sanctioned activities, by Congress in reference to an article of the Constitution.

> What constitutes anticompetitive practices and why are they illegal?

Good question and because the state says so. There are a few, but obviously the incentives for quarterly results are more consequential and lucrative.

That seems like a very circular answer. I'd clarify to say that patents are considered anticompetitive practices. However, they were (as originally envisioned, but certainly not since State Street, possibly earlier) anticompetitive practices that were specifically and purposefully limited in two ways:

1. The filing of a patent requires the filer to disclose the operation of the patented invention such that any art-practiced person could replicate it. Any non-disclosed secrets are protected only under trade-secret law, where the thing is secret only until the secret is out. That's how Coca-Cola has kept the Coke recipe a secret for generations.

2. The patent is enforceable only for a limited period of time (20 years), much like copyright originally was (14x2). Due to innovation pressures, and the fact that companies recognize they build on one anothers' works, that enforcement window hasn't been extended. Instead, companies rely on patent thickets to keep competitors out for the proscribed period of time.

As mentioned above, modern patents aren't actually subject to these limitations. Modern drafting lawyers do everything they can to exclude required information in the patient itself so that it can't be used for reproduction, while still claiming patent enforceability on the result. Additionally, patents are also awarded for a vast array of inventions that would've been previously considered unpatentable descriptions of ideas (software and process patents in particular). See Jefferson (e.g., knowledge and candles) for some of the original reasoning behind the system.

In other words, since there's no billion dollar industry buying laws requiring fewer and smaller patents, the scope of patentability keeps increasing to the benefit of already entrenched players.

I'm sure that helped someone, it isn't different from my answer and you only focused on patents not the "circular answer" for the universe of what the state says is anticompetitive. The real answer is a dissertation on enforcement actions and circuit court behaviors, which I was not going to write and there is no one answer.

Regarding patents, the article of the constitution is an instruction to Congress to secure rights for a "limited time". So maybe you needed to explain that since I guess it isn't common for people to know what the constitution says, in my world I just assume that.

Yeah, I probably should've posted my comment aside your comment instead of in response to it. Regardless, I was trying to draw attention to the tradeoffs involved in the formation of the current system beyond simply saying "that's how it is." Being explicit about how we got here is just as, if not more, important than understanding where we are. It teaches us how the current situation has and might yet change over time.

The first part of the first question gets answered in the court room, if it isn't answered by a settlement first.

The second part of the first question has different answers, depending on who you're asking. The dominant position currently is that only anticompetitive things that harm consumers should be illegal. (If you only consume free services like, say, Gmail, by definition you cannot be harmed under this theory.) Less radical theories also hold that the marketplace should be competitive, and there are other theories.

Making patents illegal would be pretty weird, given that a patent is a monopoly that wouldn't exist without government intervention.

> government doesn't want to actually debilitate you in an antitrust lawsuit because it could ironically make the nearest competitor a monopoly when your business implodes

The government isn't a monolith. There are promising political careers in store for those who crack these eggs. That's a powerful incentive.

It's happened before! Patman did a great job of anti-trust until he was no longer capable of doing it.

With all the money going around these days, it would take a real all star to fight back monopolies, but I have hope!

The Department of Justice is the only federal enforcement agency with teeth. It is effectively a monolith.

The FTC and SEC only refer and can sometimes come in with fines and administrative remedies but they are easier to defeat. DOJ can get fines as part of a criminal suit.

The states are whatever.

The new EU can be interesting though. Best of luck to them.

But in the US it is clear what is going to happen and why.

> states are whatever

Not sure if this is sarcasm. The article is about a suit, brought by state attorneys general, seeking to break up these companies. That’s plenty toothsome.

It isn't sarcasm, good luck to those states. They are trying to act as a parallel union of states because the national government does not serve their interests and as individual states they are completely ignorable.

Ask the tobacco companies if a major national lawsuit by multiple state attorney generals can have an impact.

Spoiler alert? Because my point is that its the only way for states to matter and there is an irony that the federal government - derived from the states and representing them - is basically a parallel country with the same overlapping geographic boundaries.

> The states are whatever.

The state attorneys general extracted hundreds of billions from Big Tobacco as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement.

Sorry, but the states are hardly "whatever."

The EU on the other hand levies pitiful fines repeatedly, and nothing changes. Then, at the same time they pass rules like GDPR, which disproportionately harm small competitors and thus help monopolies like Google and Facebook that an afford to comply.

I'd put my money on the several states' attorneys general.

what book?

The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives

Seems relevant, also by Eisinger:

https://www.propublica.org/article/robert-mueller-russia-inv...

thank you kind sir

sweet, thanks. Have you read it? Did you enjoy it?

I enjoyed it a lot.

That's why I think capitalism needs a mechanism to prevent a scenario of "too big to fail". Companies like Facebook should never be allowed to have their Whatsaps, Instagrams and Apple should be split from Apple Store, Google Search from Ad Sense and Ad Words and Gmail and so on to ensure that there can be competition and a free market on a micro scale. For example a search engine over a certain size should be selling access to an API for displaying ads on the same terms as they would sell it to Ad Sense, so competing advertisers could also use the platform. These companies wouldn't have access to Gmail data as that would be a completely separate company and by law prohibited from sharing any personal data. I also think in general ad targeting beyond certain threshold should be illegal as it is not used for marketing, but to manipulate people into buying products they don't need or want. Ok, enough waffling...

I don't fully get what is illegal about what they did.

Perhaps unethical, but in what way is rigging the ad market illegal that oil companies, lodging, airline, and auto manufacturers don't already do?

It's not illegal because they're the ones that write the laws. There's nobody to go after these companies anymore. Too much money to go around. Patman was the unsung hero for a half a century in US politics

"What would be a fair punishment? I am thinking a fine to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars."

Those who were responsible for it would still probably walk away billionaires and millionaires.

I'd be extremely dubious of any lawsuit emanating from AG Paxton. This is the guy who just asked the Supreme Court to set aside the election and let Trump serve another term with absolutely no legal basis. And we know Trump has been trying to punish Silicon Valley for perceived bias. And Paxton is also under indictment for a load of charges of official misconduct.

That doesn't mean this case is automatically invalid but I'm taking it with a grain of salt.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-16/google-su...

> Texas leads 10 Republican states in Google antitrust suit

I am not an expert in US politics, does the political alignment of the states that are pushing this case have any kind of wider political significance? Is there a political interpretation of this case?

It might be more damning if the states were from both parties; there is a political interpretation in that Google employee spending is known and of the US$ 6.2M that is being spent 88% of it is on Democrats and only 12% on Republicans, so there is both serious money and serious skew there. But that's not terribly decisive, it'd just be nice to see a bipartisan lawsuit for completeness reasons.

There are also some aligned reasons; like things like net neutrality are considered Democratic issues.

More broadly, the problem is essentially that there is this sort of civil-war-producing toxic polarization at play (and it will be at play until we change the laws to have a party-proportional House; it is caused by an abstract mathematical theorem). That the toxic polarization even exists at the state-executive branch of attorneys general is somewhat remarkable and an indication of how close the US is to something disastrous in the next 50 years or so.

>and it will be at play until we change the laws to have a party-proportional House; it is caused by an abstract mathematical theorem

For the uninitiated, read about Duverger's law[1]. Not sure if this is the "theorem" you're referring to, but this happens to be one of the few things that stuck with me from my mandatory political science courses.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

Probably. Paxton just led the charge by 17 republican states to overturn the election in the supreme court. And Google has been in the president's cross hairs for a while. Especially since youtube banned election conspiracy videos.

There's no doubt that this is a politically motivated case. As many people pointed out, these are the same states that tried to overturn election results. There's no way this is a coincidence. After all, Google is a powerful anti-conservative force.

That said, a large (if not the majority) fraction of liberal folk also strongly dislike Google. So there's a good chance for a bi-partisan effort to dislodge Google from its place of power.

The real question is how did a heavily liberal institution get so much hatred from the liberal side of the political divide. This especially stands out during these times of extreme polarization, when the principle "an enemy's enemy is one's friend" is very popular.

I suspect the root cause is that Google is torn apart between its liberal beliefs due to its connections to the Silicon Valley, and its conservative tendencies as a for-profit corporation. This conflict causes an enormous amount of internal and external damage.

On top of that, Google (and other big tech) became so powerful that it's in the cross-hairs of many politicians and activists. This makes it much more difficult to maneuver in the political world.

It would be interesting to see whether and how Google executives will attempt to solve these problems.

The most interesting thing is the allegation of coordination between Google and Facebook on page 5, paragraph 12.

that is super interesting

Waiting for when they realize there is a silent agreement between Amazon + Google + Facebook

and that they do coordinated attacks against their rivals

and also against any company that is growing quickly

The Sherman Act is brilliant. High prices - gouging. Low prices - stifling competition. Same prices - collusion. It simply doesn't allow for any sort of equilibrium.

Thats so reductionist as to be meaningless? Prices are a continuum, and have more values than 'high, low, same'.

Aren't you missing the biggest point of the Act? The free market equilibrium that you mention is what it seeks to correct.

It's not about the prices but the monopolization it attempts to break. If there is only a single entity dictating the prices in the market, then it doesn't matter what the price spectrum is - the motive is anti-free market

Can you give any examples of coordination against competitors besides the Apple wage fixing scandal?

This thread has several

I'll add a few (while including a couple from this thread)

Let's see

1) Google Facebook - why was Google+ ignored and shut down

2) Why has Facebook never launched a search engine

3) Amazon + Google

Why has Google completely ignored books and not done anything?

They grew Chrome into #1 browser using Search dominance

Why the heck have they ignored books?

Why did they buy Oyster (the first ebook subscription service for Apple devices) and immediately shut it down

paving the way for Kindle Unlimited to become the dominant

4) Why did Amazon shut down A9 its search engine? Every other area they are willing to throw billions of dollars. In search engines they didn't even try

5) Amazon + Google

why is Google ignoring Shopping

why did Google buy one of the biggest AFfiliate Networks and then close it down

6) Amazon + Google

Why is Amazon so high up in search results for every single @##$ product review and product

Does it have to do with amount of money Amazon spends on Google Ads (which would also be illegal)

or a secret/silent agreement (even more illegal)

7) When companies or organization get attacked (such as corporate organizations) how is it that it is always a PINCER attack and always at the same time i.e.

Google will 'demonetize' the site at the same time as Youtube demonetizes the ads (Youtube is still owned by Google) as Paypal will kick out the site (separate company, acts in concert) as Twitter will block accounts

So 3 separate companies and 4 separate divisions all decide on EXACT SAME DAY to go after a company or a site

This playbook is used to attack both

a) republican/conservative sites

b) companies that are growing very fast

to that throw in Facebook

8) Why do fast growing companies that are a threat to ONE out of

Amazon, Google, Facebook

all suddenly face shadow bans AT THE SAME TIME from all three companies i.e.

products dropped in Amazon Store search

organic traffic from Google drops

Facebook reach drops

There is someone/something

World X Council or something

And some companies are apart of it

They have divided out parts of the Internet

And when someone is a threat to grow too big

ALL companies attack that fast growing companies

They have a hitlist of

10,000 or 5,000 companies to keep an eye on

and

500 biggest threats

and they go after these IN CONCERT

Got it. So you have literally zero examples besides your wild, baseless speculation.

The potentially interesting part seems to be redacted? What is under that black box could be anything from incredible to mundane.

Google collaborates with many of the FAANGs - like Apple and the contact tracing APIs - so I'm really curious what made the cut here with Facebook.

Did you read the paragraph posted?

It's pretty clear (in the context of a monopoly complaint):

In March2017, Google’s largest Big Tech rival, Facebook, announced that it would throw its weight behind header bidding. Like Google, Facebook brought millions of advertisers on board to reach the users on its social network. In light of Facebook’s deep knowledge of its users, Facebook could use header bidding to operate an electronic marketplace for online ads in competition with Google. Facebook’s marketplace for online ads is known as “Facebook Audience Network” or FAN. Google understood the severity of the threat to its position if Facebook were to enter the market and support header bidding. To diffuse this threat, Google made overtures to Facebook. Internal Facebook communications reveal that [redacted]

and

In the end, Facebook curtailed its involvement with header bidding in return for Google giving Facebook information, speed, and other advantages in the auctions that Google runs for publishers’ mobile app advertising inventory each month in the United States. In these auctions, Facebook and Google compete head-to-head as bidders... [snip].. The parties agree on for how often Facebook would [redacted] publishers’ auctions—literally manipulating the auction with [redacted] for how often Facebook would bid and win.

Nope, I missed that part. That definitely seems like bid rigging collusion if true.

This seems like the textbook definition of market division.

From the first Google result for "antitrust law market division" (https://www.classlawgroup.com/antitrust/unlawful-practices/m...)

> In almost all circumstances a market allocation agreement will be illegal under antitrust law. Federal antitrust law treats a market allocation amongst competitors as a per se violation of the antitrust laws. Other types of potentially anticompetitive behavior are only illegal if their anti-competitive effects outweigh their pro-competitive efficiencies. But per se violations are automatic violations of federal antitrust law.

This is 100% identical to the illegal stuff robber barons used to do

when two railroads were in competition and it was killing profits, they would sign a silent partnership and one would take upstate NY and the other would take NYC to other parts of NY

both made profits

Read the biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt

he did a lot of this

It doesn't seem to touch on the most glaring abuse in my opinion, which is the widgets on their search page that directly competes with websites bidding for page ranking.

Bingo. I'm not in that space directly anymore but long ago I had developed a video platform that complied with Google's own documentation for videos in search engine result pages. YouTube also provides this as a first party feature. You can guess which one always shows up first...

The ubiquity of YouTube's artificial boosting in SERP is by no means the only reason that it was successful (see copyright infringement) but it sure did help provide YouTube an unfair advantage from another Google service.

Yup, Google replaced the videos tab with YouTube SERP in top spot.

Search for "CNN video" in the videos tab. You get plenty of results from cnn.com.

I'm pretty sure this falls under the claims that Google gives its own services preference in search results. Didn't read the formal lawsuit yet, but something related to this has to be in there given how much it is talked about by politicians and the media.

Monopolistic price setting is also reflected in the way bids are working, as Google is also setting the minimum threshold to enter the auction.

Another harmful market practice is squeezing extra advertising dollars from businesses, by taking away the knowledge where the money goes and control over how it's distributed (Google Play campaigns). By doing this Google managed to allocate the stream of money across their other services (e.g. YouTube), even if advertisers don't want to do that. Since it's automated, they have no choice.

I wonder if there is going to be any class action suit. I had a nicely growing blog and tried to help it grow with ads. I found that the ads were not adding much benefit and I got much more people coming in just through the word of mouth. However, once I stopped paying for ads, suddenly my site was not getting search traffic as good as before and organic traffic from Facebook died as well. When people posted a link to my content on their feed, their friends would rarely see that. Then also suddenly my Ad Sense revenue would never go past a certain threshold. Then I had to close the site as I couldn't handle it financially. Of course it could be a coincidence...

It's not a coincidence

I've experienced EXACT same thing on a much larger scale

Step 1: You start paying for Ads

Step 2: You start making a certain amount of money from Ads

Ratio is very good. So it is a win win

Step 3: They drop the quality of ads/quality of traffic

Step 4: It's not worth it to you any more, so you turn off the Ads

Step 5: They kill your organic traffic

Step 6: They switch it to someone willing to pay a lot for ads

3 Problems

A) Organic Traffic is allocated based on who is willing to pay the highest extortion fee

not on quality

B) If you start growing/prospering without their ads and without their organic traffic, then they don't just let you go

Then they start pollluting your search results

When people search for you they show every @#$#$ negative thing they can

They try to kill your traffic which was ALREADY coming to you

they also kill your reach on Youtube etc

They also start putting your email newsletters into wrong folders so your email list also gets hit. Only for gmail. Yahoo, outlook etc are fine. Only gmail starts dropping your emails

C) If you are still doing fine

then astroturfing starts

People make completely nonsense false claims about you

Then it becomes #1 search result when people are searching for you

If you start paying, all of it disappears and business as usual

If you stop paying, suddenly it all restarts

I am getting the popcorn out. Google especially and also Amazon and Facebook are going to get really @#$@#$ if there is a proper anti trust case

these companies instead of building newer businesses and better products (like Apple and Microsoft) focused all their energy on screwing over their competitors and even their partners

Not saying I don't believe you, but those are some pretty damning allegations, do you have any evidence?

"The halcyon days of Google’s youth are a distant memory."

Cheers to the legal assistant who won't get nearly enough credit for this.

Also related: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-16/google-su... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25450133, but we merged most comments hither).

The subtitle of the New York Times article is misleading if not flat out wrong: "The suit focuses on the advertisements that generate a vast majority of the company’s profits." The DoubleClick ad exchange most certainly does not generate the vast majority of the the company's profits. Search ads are completely independent of this lawsuit.

In the context of the article (which also talks about the other separate case brought against Google) the fact that this goes after advertising - which does "generate the vast majority of the company's profits" is accurate in the emphasis on Google's income. The fact that it only goes after one part doesn't make that untrue or misleading.

> Many of the details of their arrangement are redacted from the complaint, including Google’s internal code name for the deal, which was inspired by a Star Wars character, the complaint says.

Wondering if the name choice was relevant to the situation itself. Is there a Star Wars character that got into a shady agreement with their rival?

Prequel trilogy is basically about a war where both sides were controlled by one character, Chancellor Palpatine.

that would be something. If they were stupid enough to name their project Project Palpatine

> Is there a Star Wars character that got into a shady agreement with their rival?

I'm thinking it has something to do with Lando Calrissian. After all, there is that famous "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further" dialogue between him and Vader.

https://archive.is/Hrs8u

Whether you agree or disagree with this lawsuit, the first paragraph is not a promising start:

> The halcyon days of Google’s youth are a distant memory. Over twenty years ago, two college students founded a company that forever changed the way that people search the internet. Since then, Google has expanded its business far beyond search and dropped its famous “don’t be evil” motto.

Larry and Sergey may technically have been "college students" but it's pretty rare to refer to graduate students pursuing PhDs as "college students." This use of language is disrespectful IMHO and a strange way to open a lawsuit. While this isn't exactly false, it is unnecessary.

The same is true of the sentence about the motto. They dropped the motto and moved it to their code of conduct when they became reorganized as Alphabet. They replaced it with "do the right thing." [0] Again a twisted, if mostly true, interpretation.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil#History

I can't read the pdf because for some reason it flashes every second on whatever brave is using for pdf rendering.

Do they discuss why states have standing to sue for violations of the Sherman act? Maybe this is a common thing but states trying to enforce federal law in federal court seems strange.

> Maybe this is a common thing but states trying to enforce federal law in federal court seems strange

Any inter-state action would be in federal court. Think about it for a minute ...

Sure, the question is more about "why can the states do this by themselves, without the DOJ signing on"

The "why can they" I can't really address, but the "why do they" is interesting: state AGs (including TX, who brought the suit) are occasionally directly elected positions, and hence tend to feel more political pressure than the federal DoJ. Another comment on this page has brought up the idea of the Chickenshit Club; feds only bring cases they know they will win to burnish their personal careers.

It's fairly common in antitrust. Section 16 of the Clayton Act [1] gives states power to bring federal antitrust suits on behalf of their residents, and states will often bring both federal antitrust claims and state antitrust/unfair and deceptive trade practices claims in the same suit, as the states here are doing. Incidentally, if you're interested in the surprisingly expansive role of state attorneys general, the National Association of Attorneys General has published a fascinating (though pricy) book that goes into the common powers of state AGs in more detail than anybody would want.[2] The website for James Tierney's State AGs course at Columbia also has a lot of interesting readings.[3]

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/15c [2] https://www.naag.org/publication/state-attorneys-general-pow... [3] https://www.stateag.org/syllabus-2020

>Section 16 of the Clayton Act [1] gives states power to bring federal antitrust suits on behalf of their residents

I think this is the key point I was looking for. There's a specific grant of authority here.

I can’t understand why a company that already controls everything would risk this legal action for such a short term gain.

Could it be a particular leader, like a VP, acting on personal incentives against the overall good of the company?

It feels like governments round the world in the last month or so all woke up and decided to file lawsuits against big tech.

Does anyone else find it odd that after years and years all of this stuff seems to be happening at once?

Big tech has jumped the shark with the 2020 election. They now ascribe to blatant political censorship and propaganda. They have monopoly power and power over our democratic process. They censor what content users get to see and what users can write for political reasons. They are controlled by and for foreign powers. I don't see how society can move forward without dealing with the big T problem now.

> They are controlled by and for foreign powers.

"Controlled by"? Could you explain what you mean, and what your evidence is?

Perhaps “heavily influenced by”, based on a need to be able to sell their services overseas?

Censorship and propaganda aren't primarily antitrust issues. They're First Amendment, tort, and Section 230 issues.

First Amendment issues are hardly specific to tech companies. We have partisan media conglomerates, news outlets, academic institutions, event companies, foundations, religious organizations, and so on. All of those affect the political process. Few are shocked by that notion.

If you want a political explanation for the wave of antitrust suits, you could just as easily look to the side bringing the suits---repeatedly, a bunch of Republic attorneys general---as to the companies on the receiving end. I happen to be very sympathetic to unrolling the Chicago School ideological grip over competition law. And I wouldn't be surprised to see some interesting settlements come out of these suits. But it's not hard to make a case that violations of these laws are widespread, not just in tech, but that the choice of who to pursue in the current moment largely comes down to partisanship.

> They are controlled by and for foreign powers.

Not sure what you're on about. Last I looked, these are public companies. Their top stockholders are founders and investment firms.

Bingo!

It was apparently off limits to discuss how the family of one presidential candidate made so much money overseas for doing so little, and might this have something to do with how a member of that family perceives policy?

If the [redacted] government offers $10 million in “forgivable” loans to a family, might they be expecting to recoup that “investment” in some way?

Nope, nothing to see here, move along citizens. Ignorance is strength.

Yeah, the list of plaintiffs definitely has an axe to grind.

And hey, how about those voting machines, while we’re at it? A solution in search of a problem.

Perhaps governments around the world looked at what's been happening politically in the US this year, and said "We need to turn down the gain on those huge echo chambers."

Further, does anyone else find it odd that most of the states leading this antitrust suit are all Republican-led?

The claims in this suit are damning and non-partisan.

Had Big Tech not angered conservatives, they probably would've continued looking the other way. And the Democratic states/politicians are still looking the other way about this issue. (Don't forget that most of these companies support Democrat politicians.)

Seems we may only get justice because Big Tech angered the wrong people at the wrong time, not because their actions finally reached a threshold of wrongdoing.

Better to have justice for the wrong reasons than no justice at all.

Not really, this signals -- or maybe reminds -- other companies that it's fine to be a monopoly as long as your politics align with the preferences of the GOP.

Or support Democrat politicians.

Interesting, would really like to know what the ideal government solution would look like?

Also, if Facebook and Google are charge with antitrust, I expect Apple and Amazon to follow suit..

Could bringing suits against both Facebook and Google within weeks of each other be used in court to argue that the case is politically motivated?

I mean, Google has been setting floors on ad buys for years because they have no competition. It’s definitely anti-consumer as it drives up prices.

Comically, their manipulation to have higher per click rates may be better for society by reducing the number of ads. But in antitrust law, I think the customer is only the customer of the product being manipulated.

Others have said that "real people purchasing goods" are still the customers for antitrust; you get there by saying that when companies have to pay google more for their advertisements, the cost is passed on to consumers.

So many redactions

Anyone know what "The emerging new network of [REDACTED]" on p.84 is?

"224. The AMP approach of controlling publishers content foreshadows Google's future plans for a [REDACTED] that will control what publishers own. In this emerging world of \"[REDACTED] Google plans to control and monetize publishers' content. Publishers will generate content and comply with even more stringent policies than AMP, while Google will [REDACTED]"

Youtube?

This complaint (and all anti-trust) simply comes down to how the legal body defines the market and to what extent Google dominates said market, no? It'll be interesting to watch this work through the system.

Hating on amp. Is like hating on your teacher for teaching you something you don't like. People only tend to see the things right infront of them.

... and what are the potential consequences for google? I slap on the wrist and a fine that is 0.01% of the amount of profit they made from all this?

Deregulate it into baby Googles like they did Bell so these states can capture a portion of taxes on that sweet Google corporate revenue away from California.

Nothing will fundamentally change for the consumer, only who gets paid.

I was able to actually go and buy a telephone after the Bell break-up. Before that, it was not possible to own a telephone. You had to rent them from the phone company. So that was a pretty fundamental change.

For only a short time, until perhaps the baby Googles reform into a single company again much like most of the baby Bells.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System#Evo...

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/att-breakup-spin...

Despite the reconsolidation, the Bell break up gave consumers answering machines, cheap long distance service and modems.

Which company gets to keep the google.com domain?

Break up into multiple companies that have to bid for placement with buyers.

Treble damages of undue profit paid out as taxes to states over 20 years.

Forced commoditization of marketing data for sale to any other advertiser.

Separation of Chrome, AdWords, Search into different companies.

There’s lots of potential remedies that are really bad for Google as it stands today.

Best case is probably like Microsoft’s where they spend tons of money and time, there founders leave, and they stop doing the things in the complaint.

> Forced commoditization of marketing data for sale to any other advertiser.

This would be horrible for consumer privacy.

Commoditization doesn't need to be "make data public".

Can simply make a separate company that holds the data and offers using it as a service to other companies, of which Google is one.

Yes and no. I think it will greatly reduce its value and allow for easier regulation. Part of what makes it hard to regulate, I think, is it’s unclear what actually exists and how it’s used.

> Forced commoditization of marketing data for sale to any other advertiser.

I'd rather see the data deleted. Let them start over and this time their data collection practices should be regulated.

The people who made millions and billions from this will be laughing all the way to the bank if those are the only consequence they face.

Are you suggesting that the executives should face prison or fines? I don't think it's fair to blame them for taking advantage of market conditions; that's just capitalism.

If anyone should be blamed, it's the people who were supposed to regulate these companies to stop them from getting to this point, especially since their evil practices have been known for a very long time.

The world has missed out on 10 years of potential competition and innovation because of that.

> that's just capitalism.

Sure, it's a consequence of (unrestrained) capitalism, but it's not a requirement for capitalism. One can send people to jail for financial crimes, like monopolies, and still have capitalism.

> it's the people who were supposed to regulate these companies to stop them from getting to this point

Well that would be the politicians (and their weakening of regulation). Which is kind of out of the scope of "ideally X", because any such change would by necessity require changing politicians.

Also they are, in a (poor) way, being regulated by this suit. Being caught for a crime and regulation are sorta two different things though. Sort of like health care, regulation is preventative, often healthier and cheaper in the long run. Prosecution is emergency care, an expensive last resort.

> The world has missed out on 10 years of potential competition and innovation because of that.

Or, you know, the actions google took to exploit the capitalist system. If anything this is just a demonstration of the need for more socialist economic solutions.

If the accusations have merit, then they didn't just "take advantage of market conditions" but actually broke the law to their own benefit and to the detriment of consumers.

So they should face the consequences.

I just don't think the consequences fit the crime. It's just a slap on the wrist, and these people will just continue screwing the rest of us over because there are no personal consequences for them.

Any fines that Google and Facebook pay will just be extracted from the consumer. Breaking up the companies won't actually keep them from doing the same in the future, nor will it actually penalize anyone who was involved.

So, yeah, I do think jail time and asset forfeiture from those responsible (if they are guilty) is fair and just.

Of course you can because those executives are influencing politics with their money so they can starve the regulators and/or capture them to prevent things from getting to this point.

The point of anti-trust isn’t to punish individuals but to remedy harm to the consumer. Who cares if people involved with google make more money.

Honestly, a broken up Google is worth more than a unified one. Cynically this may be a ploy just to unleash the value that google has pent up.

"Who cares if people involved with google make more money"

They might not engage in as much harmful behavior if they actually wound up losing money by it rather than making money, and if it cost them time in jail.

"The point of anti-trust isn’t to punish individuals but to remedy harm to the consumer."

Which is evidence that the current antitrust laws are too lax.

Also, I'm not sure how harm to the consumers is supposed to be remedied if the consumers will ultimately be the ones paying the fees that these companies are charged for breaking the law.

The goal is that the benefits will make up for whatever fees get passed on.

If google has to stop colluding to increase ad prices that’s a structural change that will change their profit margin, there’s no way to pass that cost on the consumer.

Anti trust is one of the few places where that cost doesn’t get passed on to consumers since the whole point is to make it so they can no longer just raise prices.

If you want to see how this worked look at the breakup of Standard Oil or Ma Bell, those both had massive benefits for consumers and consumers ultimately saved tons of money.

> Who cares if people involved with google make more money.

Anyone who cares about moral hazard?

Seriously, AMP needs to die as the power-grab over the internet that it is.

And honestly, the worst experiences I have had with AMP was on poor connections.

FWIW, several states declined to participate in the lawsuit since the Texas AG is involved in pretty major corruption and bribery scandals. He is allegedly among those in line to get pardoned by Trump before he leaves office. He also was the one who filed the recent Supreme Court challenge to throw out votes from 4 swing states.

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/05/texas-ken-paxton-bri...

This context is worth noting.

I only skimmed through the PDF, but didn't see any mention of its behaviour in regards to constantly churning the web "standards" and unnecessarily increasing their complexity so much that any competing browsers would be unable to keep up or even begin.

So... who will be anti-trusted next? Place your bets now?

Hopefully Apple for their anti-competitive practices when it comes to the App Store.

Apple could never be this evil, they have shiny webpages and logos on their devices. Them taking 30% of everything you pay, from every software you run, from every hardware you buy is just their natural right for such great amazing hardware.

Were I a betting man, this'd be my card: https://judiciary.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=14921

Note to self: don't piss off politicians by turning a blind eye to politicization at the workplace when you're a near monopoly doing shady things.

wow, this blowed up. GOOD

Isn’t this spearheaded by the same Texas AG who might need a pardon, and is pursuing the narrative that the presidential election was stolen?

Yes, Kex Paxton is a massive scumbag. It seems the people that work for him did good work here though.

Agreed - I detest Paxton, but this case seems legitimate and if these allegations can be proven in court, wow.

What does that have to do with anything?

AG track records speak to their motives. Normally it shouldn't matter, but this AG is particularly corrupt, so much so that seven staff have quit and blew the whistle.

It's surprising that anything involving him resulted in a well reasoned argument.

Attorneys-General typically have other attorneys working for them.

Cause some people might not be convinced he's out there fighting for the little guy, a week after trying to undermine democracy.

About half the people in the US think he was trying to uphold democracy by removing all doubt that a free and fair election occurred.

I don't care either way, but I wanted to point that out.

Their own party is an ardent supporter of inviolable states' rights. Apparently only when it is convenient for them.

He might not be fighting for the little guy, but that doesn't mean that their interests in this particular case don't align.

Credibility is important.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25449326 and marked it off topic.

Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

This is why they need to staff up their ranks with foreign workers, for which Facebook has been sued by DOJ. No whistleblowers likely if everyone is under visa review.

Now it's clear why "Don't be evil" was removed.

What's it going to take for governments to produce PDFs with hyperlinked tables of contents?

I don't think I've ever come across any legal document/lawsuit or otherwise, that was formatted in a way that made it easy to read.

I know it's on purpose like with Privacy Policies/Terms of Service but I really want to read them and know what I'm getting myself into. It's just that they do such a good job of obfuscating everything with legalese. At least with Terms of Service, there's a handy extension called "Terms of Service, Didn't Read". https://tosdr.org/

Legalese is a technical language. As far as I’m concerned, it’s as close to plain English as SQL: close at first glance, but actully quite distinct.

That's fair for law documents; in the same way I'd expect your peers to understand your SQL.

I just wish privacy policies, which are supposed to be for consumers, were written in the plain English.

I have a long-abiding interest in linguistics, and formal training in programming language theory. English legalese is my favorite pseudo-language. It's also the first pseudo-language I remember learning about, from my uncle. My uncle is a very accomplished attorney (up to the Supreme Court) and his comment was, to paraphrase: "legal texts are usually very clear once you understand them; it is the discovery of facts, and the application of the text to facts that are the domain of lawyers and judges".

In law school the mnemonic was "IRAC": Issues, Rules, Application, Conclusion. A lot of legal writing at least rhymes with that structure.

It's just a dialect with some jargon. Still English, with all its chaos, at its core.

I've seen some miserable formatting in older contracts. I was doubling-checking the documents for a house sale a few years ago, and came across a sentence that was over half a page long without _any_ punctuation. Even though I have a law degree, it took me the best part of half an hour to be 100% confident of the intended meaning and that I hadn't overlooked something.

Tax money. You get what you pay for.

Regardless of you feelings on the merits of the case and feelings about Google, understand this: The Texas AG is under indictment for a felony (https://www.texastribune.org/2019/06/19/ken-paxton-criminal-...). His top staff resigned en masse or have been fired after accusing him of crimes (https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/paxton-employees-res...). He is under investigation by the FBI (https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/10/sub...)

He appears to be bringing cases with the goal of securing a pardon for himself.

Why should the focus of this case against Google all of a sudden be hijacked for this complete tangent? 10 states are listed as Plaintiffs and Texas is but one of them.

That's kinda like saying the other Texas lawsuit to throw out the election results had merit because 17 other states filed a brief supporting it. And wouldn't you know it... nearly all the states named on this suit supported that one too. Who would've guessed?

It's not like saying that at all. It's distracting from the main thread to go on an ad hominem. If you are trying to discredit the people and representatives of 10 or 17 states, then you've got a problem. They have a right to sue and to have their case be heard like any one else. In the meantime, let's talk about the case on its merits.

Eh, while recognizing the ad hominem has value, so does bringing up the credibility of the people bringing the charges. To choose an example more dear to HN's heart, just because someone is being sued by a notorious patent troll who has lost numerous court cases when the people they're suing don't roll over, doesn't mean that the case is without merit ... but it definitely shifts the Bayesian prior in that direction.

Time to sack Sundar Pichai https://pastebin.com/raw/Uk7Y2dnZ

I like to hear from a legal expert if Texas’ arguments here are any better than in their recent election lawsuit.

As a Texan this is really what upsets me more about these fake lawsuits that Texas keeps tossing out, mostly to make political statements. The election suit is hardly the first. Someone appears to have discovered that the state can't be censured or have its legal license revoked. So they are making a mockery of the actual legal power of the state.

But of course anyone who digs into the jurisdictional games the Texas AG has been playing to avoid criminal prosecution wouldn't be surprised at this behavior.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How is that unrelated? The lead AG in this suit filed a different suit less than a week ago with some incredibly spurious reasoning, including that the president-elect of the USA stood only a 1-per-1000000000000000 chance of having won the election fairly.

It's a different suit on a different topic and there is a substantive article to discuss about it. I assume the courts will consider this case on its merits, so I don't see why we shouldn't.

If the thread turns into an argument about the election, the discussion will become entirely predictable, angry and stupid, which is not interesting, which is off topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

This is complete garbage, they were forced to do this years before the Trump election to keep people from abusing ad networks. They were all being abused to screw with the electoral process in the United States and abroad. President Obama even asked Russia repeatedly to stop meddling in the electoral process. Hint, the russians were abusing online advertising primarily. The entire Clinton email fiasco was just a way to draw attention someplace other than ad networks.

Please point me to where the US government ordered Google to inject a one second delay into ad auctions for everyone except Facebook, in order to prevent Russia from abusing online advertising.

Corporate robots all have the same programming.

I was watching the election hearing today. One of the senators said that tech companies are being looked into for illegal campaign contribution to the Biden's campaign. For when they jointly blocked the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story before the election. Twitter blocked the story, and youtube messed with the search results so the story would not rise. Hunter Biden is currently under investigation for money laundering. Suppressing the story on these platforms probably helped elect Biden, since the election was so close.

Edit:

1. Since I'm being down voted, here's the senator in his own words. Starts at 2 hours :36 minutes

https://youtu.be/xHtobbugTJU?t=9374

2. Changed NY Times to NY Post.

For clarification, it was the New York Post. There's no way the NY Times would have published that fact free piece. All legitimate journalistic outlets passed on it, including the Wall Street Journal (like the New York Post, the WSJ is owned by Fox News' parent). Even the author of the NY Post article refused to put his name on it and much of the editorial staff at the Post was against releasing it. In short, it was fake propaganda delivered to them by Rudy Giuliani.

I'll edit my post and give NY Post credit, thanks. The Biden laptop story is not fake. I know its seems fake. Until you consider the possibility that drug abusers tend to be absent minded and leave things behind. The photos of hunter on that laptop are too personal to fake. No one would have the imagination to fake them. If the photos are real, just for a second suspend your disbelief, because, unfortunately, the world is a corrupt place.

Glen Greenwald, resigned over his magazine refusing to publish his story. So real enough for a distinguished journalist to resign over.

Here is a story confirming that Hunter is under investigation:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/15/fac...

Regulate data brokers like commodities brokers.

Easy peasy. Put them under CFTC jurisdiction.

Series 3 NFA exams for everyone. The spot market keep limited oversight, the future value of data markets get complete oversight.

The issue is that those are future contracts that expire in a few milliseconds, so by definition they are almost totally illiquid.

At the same time you cannot really force more time for the auction as users often spend less than a second in front of an ad screen. So you effectively have only a few milliseconds to sell them, otherwise you would have sold an already perished product...

So I'm not sure the existing regulations regarding future contracts could effectively regulate this market.

None of this makes any sense. What even is a "data broker"? And how will taking a random exam help?

A data broker is something from Cyberpunk, I think.

People might think they exist in the real world because they think Google "sells your data", which they don't do, they sell ads. Their business model relies on nobody else getting your data.

Data brokers most definitely exist. They've been around since the 70's. They maintain a lower profile precisely because of the intrusive nature of their business. One I know of was tracking menstrual cycles for optimal ad targeting back in the 90's. Google is the new kid on the block.

They exist, but Google and Facebook are buying from them, not selling.

There are plenty of companies that do sell data. It's just not what people expect in terms of adtech or Google, but they do exist and are often used to run ad campaigns.

Google doesn't (afaik) sell your data directly, but when they sell ads based on categories they've fit you to, that category information can be harvested.

If it's a ad unit which includes javascript or image beacons, if your browser displays it, the ad can send the category information to the advertiser/intermediary ad network/partners/whoever. If it's just a link, then you'd have to activate the link (intentionally or not), but depending on what information is passed to ad networks during the bidding process, there may be pretty significant information transfer anyway.

That has nothing to do with this case or how most of adtech works.

Here we go I figured after the FTC filed against facebook Google had to be right around the corner. It is interesting that it's almost all conservative state filing maybe they want to avoid issues with the DNC and it's close relationship with Google?

This was announced a month or two back, complaint came out today, TL;DR the case theory is weak and perceived as rushed so many, many, states didn't opt-in and are working on their own action

(side note: winks at politically-based conspiracies aren't something I'm used to seeing on HN, it beggers belief that you'd have 36 states, mixed politically, agree to collude in favor of the checks notes DNC because checks notes Google's ex-CEO got involved in politics work checks notes after he exited)

Not quite after he exited. It was while he was Chairman of the Board, and in at least one instance he used his Google email to engage in political work that would get any other Googler sanctioned, but got a pass because he's Eric Schmidt. Had he used personal emails in all cases it would have been ok per corporate rule.

The rest of your claims are indeed tin-foil hat worthy.

> and in at least one instance he used his Google email to engage in political work that would get any other Googler sanctioned

Is that as opposed to Googlers donating to Google's PAC so Google can use it to donate to neo-Nazis and Mitch McConnell?

The complaint a few months ago was different to this one.

That one was pretty weak (IMHO), but this one seems narrower focused and much stronger.

Simpler explanation: political relations have severely broken down all over the country. Maybe the (R) attorneys general and their offices just couldn't get along well enough with the (D)s to file anything together.

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