Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai involved in ad collusion plot | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai involved in ad collusion plot

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125 pointssimonebrunozzi12 comments

I don’t get what the ‘collusion’ is about. FAN competes with AdX, among other exchanges, in real time. The highest bidder wins, be it FAN, Google or say, Pubmatic. Open Bidding has in fact made participating networks compete on equal footing.

> Much of the case rests on the concessions Google allegedly made to Facebook in the wake of the Jedi Blue arrangement, including lower fees and longer timeout limits in exchange bidding. One newly unredacted portion of the complaint claims that the concessions gave Facebook a clear advantage in winning auctions.

Price isn’t the only dimension in an auction. Fees and timeouts would give a clear advantage.

> This would be a puzzling result, to say the least, if Facebook faced the same competition for inventory across auction houses.

There's also targeting matchup and ad inventory (variety of ads available for the impression). We see FB getting raked over the coals, time and time again, about how much targeting information they collect. THIS is where it would be leveraged.

The allegation is that Google conspired to let Facebook win a specific % of auctions. It's unclear whether that allegation will stick.

Whether this has merit is not dependent on the quality of this article. Whether this likely sticks depends largely on the willingness of the judge to delve into the details of auctions. Whether it actually sticks is not necessarily a reflection of the merits of the case.

Probably, the defence will drown the judge in technical minutiae to give up. Judge may rule that there is no case to save face instead of admitting lack of knowledge or willingness to learn.

Judges, especially in the Ninth Circuit, are more than adept at dealing with technical minutiae. They also have access to technical consultants with decades of industry experience as needed. Go look at Judge William Alsup’s rulings, particularly Oracle v Google (https://casetext.com/case/oracle-am-inc-v-google-inc-3) if you have any doubt about that.

That looks like a good read. It has been added to the queue for a proper dive. A cursory look at the explanations reminds me of some of the finer eli5 answers. This definitely warrants a reassessment of how judges can handle technical technological cases.

Absolutely. Here's the article I read, which is quite a lot better. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/14/facebook-...

Sundar sundar the google pretender, Zuckerberg, ad collusion and plot

It is notable that all these anti-trust actions are coming from states attorney generals and not from the DOJ after all the anti-trust talk coming from the new Biden administration last year.

DOJ is very bias depending on which party is in power with exception during Trump years. Both Google and FB/Meta were instrumental in assisting Biden, I don't expect DOJ would be doing much.

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