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.
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".
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.
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.
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.