Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

I've seen lots of comments recently in response to the Google & Facebook advertising issues suggesting that Google should be split into X, Y, and Z.

Most of the proposed splits seem like they would do absolutely nothing to address the issue at hand, though. The problem in digital advertising seems to be that Google controls the marketplace, as well as both the buy & sell sides. Even a "breaking apart" that proposes splitting "search" from "advertising" would do nothing to address the issues that are getting raised at present.

I'm not an advertising expert, but these issues seem pertain to the buy-side, sell-side, and marketplace associated with digital advertising. Any company that still controls all 3 of those will retain the existing problem.

View on HN

Just ban advertising straight up. This will kill Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the other companies ruining the web. Not one tear will be shed at this point.

Also, make it a huge liability to store any kind of personal information. Apply heavy taxes on every single bit stored. These companies should be trying really hard to forget all about us the second they send our HTTP responses, not hoarding our personal information like a bunch of stalkers. Make it exceedingly expensive for them to do it and they'll stop.

You know as well as I do that that will never happen and would probably destroy the economy. As bad as these companies are, flat out killing them is not a good idea.

If the economy can't survive the loss of these abusers, it deserves to be destroyed. If we do something, we gotta go all the way. Half-measures do nothing.

You do realize what the destruction of the economy would entail? That it would mean that many people would lose their livelihood and suffer?

It turns out that people actually prefer getting products for free with ads to paying for products. As bad as google and facebook are, they are providing what people want at the exact price point they want.

I think banning online ads will be awesome for economy.

Serving ads is doesn't create any value. By now, it's just a tax to be payed to google/facebook.

Why do you think banning online ads gonna destroy the economy?

These internet companies don't even pay a lot of taxes, we allow them to move profit across jurisdictions to optimize.

If the economy only stands because of people consuming things they never would've bought on their own it deserves to burn. This mentality is killing us along with the planet.

I really want to see a society wide experiment on banning ALL forms of advertising, be it digital or physical.

What happens when a Chinese knockoff Google comes along and captures the online ad market? Now you've created a new version of the same problem without any leverage.

I have slightly simpler proposition - ban digital advertising.

Or at least ban the 'dynamic' one - the one which tries to match the user's preferences. Just static, random ads akin to TV or billboards next to the roads.

How would that address the issue of Google rigging the bidding by owning the bidding mechanism, marketplace, and managing publisher inventory? There would still be a real time auction taking place for each impression.

A huge part of this document is about how Google has exclusive access to user ids. If nobody can use user ids, then they don't have those advantages anymore.

exactly.

and it also puts the lid on profitability of walled gardens - as you cannot sell those cohorts to advertisers.

It would be a net gain for society as a whole

My view is that this is an issue finance has already solved. Just regulate ad exchanges for fair practice, require disclosure or transparency to identify anticompetitive behavior, and then license the fuck out of everyone who participates in the market. Seems like the industry has grown enough and clearly is suffering due to lack of sufficient management of externalities and monopoly powers.

The harder part is executing on the above strategy. You will need new institutions or see an expansion or extension of existing institutions. Imagining the FCC trying to do this seems both a likely approach and an incredibly ineffective one.

I would add too that improved regulation of consumer and private data would help significantly. This is probably more likely than the above.

This lawsuit seems like the perfect timing and impetus to get serious about regulation in the digital ecosystem. Just hope we don't fuck it up.

> The harder part is executing on the above strategy. You will need new institutions or see an expansion or extension of existing institutions. Imagining the FCC trying to do this seems both a likely approach and an incredibly ineffective one.

I completely agree and that's what scares me more and more about big tech. We let these huge companies grow for years without really considering the scalability of managing them and now we find ourselves desperately needing to regulate them but not really knowing how.

It reminds me of the content moderation problem with Facebook, the cost of hiring enough humans to adequately deal with content moderation there would quite possibly bankrupt the company, and they know that.

How do you find a sustainable oversight/regulatory strategy when the companies themselves were founded largely on their desire to not figure out those kinds of problems in the first place?

> Even a "breaking apart" that proposes splitting "search" from "advertising" would do nothing to address the issues that are getting raised at present.

Alone it wouldn't help, but what if you split search from advertising, and forced the "search" part to up advertising to the highest bidder, not just from google ads?

If Google Search really was its own company and with its own shareholders, getting the most money for a bid would be more profitable than colluding with the rest of former Google.

Google should be sliced horizontally, not vertically. Each resulting company would own a percentage of current business.

sure lets slice the computers, engineers and offices horizontally as well

downvote all you want but the parent comment makes no sense - you can't horizontally slice products - that would only make sense if Google had clients that could split fairly among several sub-companies. But sure keep armchairing.

It's simple, you just have $GO deliver the left half of the searchbar while $OG handles the right.

You say this as if it were a bad thing.

And while it may be hyperbolic to literally slice engineers, anyone who engaged in a criminal conspiracy (from coder to CEO) could be tried and, if convicted, jailed. Having this happen broadly would certainly be illuminating for anyone working in this space in the future.

As a public company, it's arguably already sliced that way. What difference would it make if it's sliced further?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com