Justice Department sues Google for monopolizing digital advertising technologies
justice.gov
justice.gov
Previously on HN (246 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507230
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts
I feel like a huge sucker accepting and taking up Chrome back in 2009. It isn't a huge shock they'd eventually want to extract and harvest "the value". It's the exploitative nature of the capitalist cycle.
I remember thinking at the time it was suspicious to use a browser from an advertising company, but looking back in hindsight, you've gotta hand it to 'em - the bait was pretty good.. fast, performant, and reliable. No other browser engine had this. Even today, I primarily use Firefox on desktop, but with many tabs and windows open it's slower than Chrome. I'm even typing this from Brave on mobile..
I'll update my post.
So how exactly is this cementing anything? It seems like it's doing the opposite. It's giving everyone the same data to work with, rather than giving an advantage to the companies with a higher reach 3rd party cookie.
Say more about tech companies extracting 30% from their platform...
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/26/justice-department-...
And distributors
And sales reps
And ...
Customers with iPhones can't buy through Google Play and customers with Android can't buy through Apple, so the stores don't have to compete with each other. And no one else can open a toy store that sells toys to anyone regardless of what kind of phone they have.
How is this different than X selling X Premium in App Store, Google Play store, and on the open web, and the customer choosing where to buy based on which option has the best price?
¹ https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue#tbpri...
https://developer.apple.com/support/reader-apps/
They exempted media companies because media companies have a bullhorn to rail against their monopoly rents if it affects them. It kind of implies that even X isn't blessed by Apple to do this, but X has its own kind of bullhorn and may or may not find satisfaction for that reason.
But what are you proving with the exception that proves the rule?
I don't know what app stores net margins are. Probably higher than 20%? https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/01/apple-runs-app-store-with-78-...
For digital goods we pretty well know what the costs look like. They'll be paying less than 3% for credit card transactions, even less for bank transfers, and app distribution has costs at the level of "F-Droid does this for free". Or if you want an actual market price, using S3 to store an app of average size (35MB) which costs $1 and gets only one download/month (maximizing storage costs per download), the percentage for storage and distribution would be around 0.12%. Which only goes down if you get more downloads because you can amortize the storage cost over multiple downloads.
Then they have to pay programmers, but this gets amortized not over downloads per app but downloads per store, which rounds to zero. Notice that F-Droid does this part for free too, and with much less scale.
So their expected total costs are approximately 3%, or less because these are the prices available at retail and at their scale they would be lower, implying that their net margins are at least 27%, compared to 2.8 - 3.5% for most retailers.
For most developers, Apple's gross margin is 20% of what's considered a healthy minimum gross margin for SaaS companies, like the ones many of us work for.
Because it's processing payments for a third party, to compare it to something like AWS you would have to use the revenue of the service being provided to the customer as the base. So Facebook uses AWS, what percentage of Facebook's revenue does Amazon get? (Looks like ~0.2%, and that would be the equivalent of their gross margin.)
Now, that number is going to vary all over the place because the proportion of value that a generic service represents for a given business is going to depend more on the business than the service. But that's kind of the point -- that's why AWS charges based on usage rather than a percent of their customer's revenue. Because nobody for whom that is a terrible deal would choose them if they used that pricing model in a competitive market.
> Order the divestiture of, at minimum, the Google Ad Manager suite, including both Google’s publisher ad server, DFP, and Google’s ad exchange, AdX, along with any additional structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm;