Gannett CEO: Here's why we are suing Google for deceptive business practices
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
If you look at Adsense reviews online there are hundreds if not thousands of similar stories. Straight up theft.
The middle road option if they want to delay KYC checks would be to have customer support available to unstuck people when the system fails.
To spy on them and report them for non-crimes, and to deny them services because the specific numbers are above arbitrary thresholds, at arbitrary thresholds, and yes... even below those.
If you're already empowered by the feds to do all these things, what's a little dishonesty on top of all that? As long as you don't fuck over the feds themselves, they'll surely look the other way when bilk free advertising dollars out of those probably-terrorists.
This is a huge problem with most tech companies. There is little to no human support which ends up with a complete loss of access to accounts and, sometimes, funds. Because the accounts are usually free or funds lost are way too tiny to warrant a suit, there is little to no accountability.
>Make a software platform everyone just agrees to click through EULA's for >Someone realizes, wait, this is a contract. I'm supposed to be able to negotiate. >Nigh impossible to get in contact with legal. >If you do, they just ignore you. >Get more people to do it. >Business goes under rather than actually try to exist in a world where everyone doesn't just mindlessly accept terms. Or >To many small claims court cases, National Court system encourages private arbitration >Still too expensive.
To be quite frank, and though I'm loathe to make encourage people to send business at lawyers... We live in a world that is entirely the result of our refusal to challenge terms. So many abusive businesses would disappear overnight if suddenly their legal bills went through the roof.
There's no good faith in the vast majority of contracts anymore because all of it is take it or leave it levels of abusive.
This pattern of facts doesn't look like a terrorism prevention system, it looks like theft, you would have a good case in any court with this pattern of facts.
This is why, to this day, none of the businesses or startups I've been involved with have used Google products if we can avoid it. At the startup I was a founding engineer for we hosted on AWS despite Google's venture fund being one of our investors. Google's products just can't be trusted.
I'm guessing that you didn't see a lawsuit or small-claims suit as worthwhile, given the amount of money involved?
If Google is doing this to a large number of relatively small-value accounts, maybe it would be reasonable for a class-action suit. IANAL, but I'm guessing Google would do anything to avoid a discovery process regarding this.
When you sign up for AdSense, you agree to arbitrate disputes.
That's similar to how insurance companies operate in US. They'd take in customers, let those customers pay for the insurance every month, happily taking their money. But then, if there were any significant claims filed, they'd go combing through a person's medical history, application form mistakes, etc, and find an excuse to kick them out of the plan. "Oh, you didn't disclose that you had strep throat 7 years ago on the form, so we can't pay your $10000 one night hospital stay...". Affordable Care Act should have fixed that apparently, but who knows.
It's good to know Google is playing by the same rules.
When you buy a Marketplace ACA plan, you are not required to provide a detailed health history.
Just to clarify what I'm sure rdtsc meant, since that statement can be read two ways.
The ACA codified into law that they cannot do that over a decade ago. He is almost certainly just questioning if they are breaking that law.
Among other things, the ACA no longer lets them charge you different rates if you had strep throat 7 years ago, so the only questions through the marketplace are your county (or zip code?) of residence, your sex, your smoking history and your age.
That's for clarifying. Yeah, I just meant that I had a vague understanding that this kind of stuff should not be happening any longer based on ACA. But I stopped following years ago. Knowing those companies, guessing they probably found other ways to screw people over.
Cry me a river.
Our local newspaper (the Oxford Mail) is published by Newsquest, the UK subsidiary of Gannett. It is dreck. Pure unreadable dreck. All the 2008-era clickbait techniques you can think of; churnalism that does little more than repeat press releases; stories taken straight from Facebook "Spotted" groups or Twitter with no added value whatsoever; all surrounded by more animated ads than you thought it was possible to cram onto one single page.
This isn't atypical - pretty much every town in Britain has had its newspaper gobbled up by Gannett or one of two other giants (Reach and National World). Local journalism is basically dead now.
I am absolutely no fan of Google, but Gannett deserves to go out of business and leave the oxygen for genuine local reporting.
Maybe if local newspapers made more money from advertising...
- The money moved away from publishers towards ad platforms
- The publishers all got bought by asshole private equity guys who are deliberately crashing the papers as a cash out strategy
- Wider distribution in the absence of strong anti-trust enforcement rewards conglomeration
So, the situation today is that every small local paper, which was a perfectly profitable business in the 80s is now a two page rag owned by a national chain that has planned out how to maximize profit between now and when their last subscriber dies of old age, at which point it will default and screw their creditors.
Fantastic article about it: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-g...
It's just like with Epic Games vs. Apple: a lot of people hate Epic, which is fine and justified, but who else is going to sue Apple? I'm an App Store developer, but I can't afford to sue Apple. Some local newspaper is never going to sue Google (or Gannett for that matter).
Do they? genuine question, I'm mostly out of the loop. They seem to have built a genuine economy and ecosystem around their products and people love Fortnite.
Players tend to focus their complaints on Epic's "customer service", and use of exclusive titles in their store, with somewhat less attention going to the invasive DRM/spyware aspects of EGS, EOS, and EAC [2]
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckepic/
Darkest Dungeon 2 was exclusive to Epic during the beta period and people were _furious_ on Steam.
Metro: Last Light had preorders on Steam and then went Epic exclusive a few days before release, having sold hundreds of copies on Steam. Steam spanked them and they honored the preorders, but didn't sell new copies until the exclusive was done. This is the reason I never bought the game, even though I love the series and bought the books based on the first game.
I am also against exclusives because I find them anti-user. I don't think Steam ever did exclusives (there are games that are only released on Steam, but not because of any exclusive deals, but because the developer simply never released them anywhere else).
The Miranda rights people claim when accosted by the police in the USA were created by judges during the appeal of Ernesto Miranda's conviction for a smorgasbord of serious offenses. The panel ruled his statements weren't legally taken, and now we can all require the police to make sure we understand our rights before they try to take them from us.
I got so annoyed that I’ve been pretty much declining all google job offers ever since. It got to the point that a google recruiter threatened me that there is a limit on how many times I can decline and I will never be able to get a job at google. Fine by me. Told them to never call me again.
My recommendation is always to avoid google ads if you can
That's literally their job.
"curated" and "algorithm" are opposites.
In any case, the algorithms don't magically write news stories (though maybe they will now with ChatGPT or whatever). The stories are pulled from the very same newspapers that are being criticized here.
Not at all. An algorithm is curation at scale. Algorithms are made by humans and encode the biases humans want to apply without having to push the buttons themselves to properly bin new input every time it comes in.
I assume it ultimately goes back to the search engine, somehow.
EDIT: I found an interesting article
https://law.stanford.edu/publications/why-google-dominates-a...
Abstract: Approximately 86% of online display advertising space in the U.S. is boughtand sold in real-time on electronic trading venues, which the industry calls “advertising exchanges.” With intermediaries that route buy and sell orders, the structure of the ad market is similar to the structure of electronically traded financial markets. In advertising, a single company, Alphabet (“Google”), simultaneously operates the leading trading venue, as well as the leading intermediaries that buyers and sellers go through to trade. At the same time, Google itself is one of the largest sellers of ad space globally. This Article explains how Google dominates advertising markets by engaging in conduct that lawmakers prohibit in other electronic trading markets: Google’s exchange shares superior trading information and speed with the Google-owned intermediaries, Google steers buy and sell orders to its exchange and websites (Search & YouTube), and Google abuses its access to inside information. In the market for electronically traded equities, we require exchanges to provide traders with fair access to data and speed, we identify and manage intermediary conflicts of interest, and we requiretrading disclosures to help police the market. Because ads now trade on electronic trading venues too, should we borrow these three competition principles to protect the integrity of advertising?
Mostly because they actually are the best for most advertisers, both in terms of raw offering (publisher portfolio i.e. "reach" and the tools to understand how your ad campaign is doing and tune it) and the third-party ecosystem of tools that have grown up to manage an ad account. Possibly not the best for publishers (see horror stories of failing to cash out in other threads on this story), but when most of the ads you want to run are in one network, you'll go there. Plus, for all its flaws and the failures that occur from it being a high-value target, for a publisher Google still somehow tends to be the automated ad-matching house least likely to match your readers to scamware that will make them unlikely to come back to your site.
Turns out the problem of automatically matching ads to publishers to human eyeballs is legit-hard and only a few companies have the technical competency to do it well at scale.
That's already public information at this point, following Google's 2020 antitrust case.
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2021/01/19/jedi-blu... [2]https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke...
I don't buy that, just like I don't buy ageed with the concerns over AI training on public data. Not that I don't understand why people are mad to see others generating revenue off of what they gave away. And all the more so when their business model gets disrupted, but I think it's misplaced. I still don't think anybody is owed a business model though. They can stop publishing online if they don't belive they can do it properly, as can all "creators".
a) Megacorp monetizes people through exploitation, and b) Nation-states monetize megacorp by levying pointless fines that effect no real change to actually help people
This might not be a very nuanced take about how things work, but is it really a terrible summary? Whether it's casually evil data-mongering, or industrial accidents like oil spills / train derailments, or more directly evil practices like price gouging for drugs that keep people alive.. we see this stuff play out all the time. Government-levied fines for such things don't seem to be working as a disincentive for megacorp, so how many times can you watch it before going full-cynic and just labeling it as a form of rent-seeking?
I'd like to be an optimist that sees a well intentioned government intervening on behalf of the people, but I'm personally running out of patience and faith. I think a lot of people are the same. I'd certainly stop short of saying the EU is completely corrupted, like they are just redirecting the fine-payouts into their politicians pockets or something. And FWIW, as an American I certainly do appreciate the EU's very civilized push for data-regulation/right-to-repair/etc.
But I think we have to admit fines aren't successful at reforming megacorp, or more specifically I don't think GDPR is fixing the internet. Why are things steadily getting worse despite more regulation? Again, not a nuanced take, but when people are looking for an explanation, at some point it's natural to think this looks like rent-seeking, because it's either that or sheer incompetence.
I kind of agree with this. It seems like they just see it as the cost of business, which is why they never actually change.
That said, the fines seem to be increasing almost exponentially, so I guess we will see what happens when they refuse to pay them.
> 180bn EUR
Yeah a single fine was 4b so thats 2% of their budget annually and of course in aggregate a lot of money.
So it sounds to me like they want their cake and eat it too. Sounds like Europe wants to benefit from data collection, wants to collect rent, wants to look proactive BUT doesn't want to do anything that causes real change.
Im an American so I am not saying that our government is doing things right, far from it as we're basically living in a corporatacracy. It just seems like Europe doesn't have the culture or business incentives to succeed at tech so they try to extract a pound of flesh. Similarly, they don't have the courage to really protect their citizens. Same bullshit as US watered down bullshit, payoffs and laws more holey than swiss cheese.
Edit: more cynical take is that they don't like Google'd power as it threatens them and they use their influence to cash grab and also try and control Google. Really doubt its particularly benevolent.
The EU didnt bring cookie banners. They corps that want to track you did that.
> Italy and presumably other countries are trying to ban AI
FUD
> a single fine was 4b so thats 2% of their budget annually and of course in aggregate a lot of money.
That was the largest fine, its hardly typical. In order to stop paying fines they just need to stop doing their evil shit in the EU - let them keep their evil domestic then its not an issue.
> It just seems like Europe doesn't have the culture or business incentives to succeed at tech so they try to extract a pound of flesh.
We have many of our own successful tech companies. They arent as large as your megacorps because they dont need to be. Note that we also fine our own companies when they abuse peoples privacy.
All of that out of the way, this lawsuit has merit IMO. Google's ad monopoly should be broken up, or at worst better regulated. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, for now, and all that.
But I'm content to grab popcorn and watch a dinosaur fight a dragon on this one. Neither company here has clean hands and it's high time someone spent the money to force Congress and the courts to step in and lay some ground rules for the sandbox so all the kiddies can play together nicely.
It's not even what articles they show on the front page, it extends into the content within the article. (Not that USA Today was ever great)
If you go back to the late 90s when the newspapers first went online they weren't putting all the garbage on the front page.
The only categories in which my local paper can compete and win in are local high school sports, local politics and local crime reporting. And that's not much of a business model.
Do they think the only "publishers" are "us news publications" or just purposely misleading readers?
The main change it recommended was to not load any resource like Javascript from Google as it was slowing down the page.
>The core of the case and our position is that Google abuses its control over the ad server monopoly to make it increasingly difficult for rival exchanges to run competitive auctions. Further, Google’s exchange rigs its own auctions so Google’s advertisers can buy ad space at bargain prices. That means less investment in online content and fewer ad slots for publishers to sell and advertisers to buy. Google always wins because it takes a growing share of that shrinking pie.
I'm unclear on which pie is shrinking. The sources I could find confirm that digital advertising revenues continue to grow and grow [1], while newspaper digital ad revenues have stayed constant (and print advertising has dropped steadily) [2]. Meanwhile digital subscription revenue -- some of which is presumably driven by search discoverability -- is growing nicely, including that of Gannett [3].
So the question seems more about "how much of the growing digital pie should newspapers receive" as opposed to "Google is building its revenues while destroying a market".
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183816/us-online-adverti... [2] https://www.axios.com/2022/06/21/digital-newspaper-ad-revenu... [3] https://www.subscriptioninsider.com/type-of-subscription-bus... [3] https://www.subscriptioninsider.com/type-of-subscription-bus...
It's one thing to buy ads for "best refrigerator", but having to pay for "maytag" to rank against your competitors is extortion. I've seen countless examples of funded, well-capitalized companies starving startups for searches to their brand or trade name. It's happening in my space right now, and I'm already anxious of the ad spend I might have to start paying.
It would feel a lot less wrong if Google wasn't the predominant search engine and if they didn't control how people enter URLs or reach websites.
Why are local news currently needed most?
https://medium.com/@Gannettco./gannett-launches-with-google-...
might be stronger than the antitrust argument