DOJ claims Google has "trifecta of monopolies" on Day 1 of ad tech trial
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
They do mention one negative societal effect in passing:
> “The result is less news where it is needed most,” Gannett’s lawsuit said. “Communities throughout the United States now do not have a suitable local paper to advise on local events."
Their issue is that there are not enough newspapers(!), which as we all know are the primary source of modern information... Not that the advertising business has corrupted every form of media it touches, to the point where news outlets don't even report events that don't get them views. Advertising has been instrumental in killing journalism as we knew it, and we're all letting it continue to wreak havoc to our other institutions, because, hey... profit.
> Google has accused the DOJ of having a "narrow view of the ad tech market" that's outdated and "doesn’t reflect reality."
Hilarious take, considering adtech has consistently kept the ways it conducts its business hidden from public view. When users of their services are kept in the dark when their data is being collected and how value is extracted from it, is it really surprising that governments have a wildly inaccurate sense of what's going on? "Senator, we run ads."
If social networks are centralized then the operators can do anything the law allows, including invade your privacy, and you can't get out of it because of the network effect. If they're federated/decentralized then you can choose a node (or operate one yourself) that contractually or technologically guarantees that it respects your privacy, and then people would pick those because they don't want their privacy invaded and they would have the choice.
1. We have a few modest protections in law against monopolistic practices that address its harm to businesses, such as those used to slap MS on the wrist for bundling MSIE as a tactic to kill its competitors, and such as the laws used to force a breakup of AT&T (during times of far more ambitious government regulators). We have a very few absolute jokes of federal and state privacy laws, mostly focused on the complete wrong things.
- CAN-SPAM? Let's demand that you have a physical address on your emails, and that you provide an opt-out link, but all political email is exempt, iirc? and feel free to sell your list to the next guy.
- CCPA? Let's focus on cookies and maybe on how people get annoyed by retargeting ads, and do other stupidity to emulate GDPR but not do anything that changes the actual landscape like maybe mandating an ad-free experience of social networks be offered for money, allowing you to be a customer and not a product.
- Do-not-call list: Let's not force telcos to know where calls originate and allow filtering of spoofed VOIP calls coming from offshore. Or at least, let's let them take 2 decades to fumble around attempting that. Instead let's allow a tiny fine -- and let's exempt the biggest offenders: Political robocalls.
> "and to society at large"
2. Our legal (and political) system really has virtually zero ways of addressing even severe harms to society, whether it's school shootings, thinly-veiled bribery of public officials via 'campaign finance,' or a pervasive corporate culture of extortion, exploitation and cheating that companies like Google and Apple love to engage in.
It seems to me like the DOJ is playing the hand it's dealt -- there's little they can do, but this is something.
Advertising for many years was what supported journalism. Now there's a problem that advertising doesn't care to support journalism because their industry believes there are superior methods.
As the internet developed now they support millions of websites as byproducts, many that would never exist otherwise. The ad industry has many bad things but it has for example allowed me to pay for my expenses during university because as a highschool student making small free tool-like websites to learn, and with traffic it ended up allowing me to go to a good university in the country's capital instead of a shitty one in my hometown. And there's probably millions of such stories. This to me is way more democratic than "just" supporting newspapers which by now are just part of huge conglomerates. Even your "local" newspapers and news stations are all just part of a couple of conglomerates. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2022/07/1...
Advertising never cared to support Journalism, Advertising cared to achieve its goals and Journalism was the best way to do it at the time.
They seem to have very different business models.
Advertisers don't need or want the personal data. They're just taking the blame for it because knowing the truth is not comfortable for the public.
Personal data ("A John Connor from Stockton, CA has bought 359 FPV drone parts last month") is the purview of law enforcement and state-level actors.
But if they have the latter data they'll sell it in a heartbeat.
Lol. Did you misspell profits? You make it sound like some magical grand conspiracy. It's profits. Always has been, and we buy into it because we are consumer whores. The corporations are in charge, so there's your "deep state," I guess, a bald-faced hornet people like you love to keep pretending is something else.
You can turn personal data into statistical distributions with enough effort, but that's expensive and fraught with legal perils when you can get the same statistical distributions easier and cheaper with conventional statistical methods.
I could imagine a much better world where the playing field is levelled for everyone by outlawing tracking entirely, but I'll just keep on dreaming.
But then again, "The business of America is business."
Imho both are unworkable and useless definitions for different reasons. But, since this is a US trial, it must be shown that Google make customers pay more for goods and services than they could under fair market conditions.
The problem is that Google (and most of its competitors) offer services "for free". As we know, it's not "free", but customers pay with data taken as payment in lieu.
This means the justice system must redefine "free" to incorporate the market price of that data. This is the real cost the customer is paying.
Nobody wants to do that, because nobody (including government) wants an overt acknowledgement of the economics of surveillance capitalism and the entire modern surveillance industry. It is an entire economy set up in parallel to the visible monetary one.
So the proceedings are being cast in all kinds of unusual distortions to avoid this happening.
Has that ever been true? Every instance I know of monopolies being broken up has been good for customers.
In a way it's like having a single one-million-line file vs a clean separation between API, UI, etc etc.
https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/13/google_click_fraud_la... (I think it was this one but search results are saturated with other litigation and antitrust since)
If you want to increase competition and stop the market from consolidating into a few players it's not immediately obvious that breaking up these ad exchanges goes that direction because it deprives reach from everyone except already large companies.
^^ this is possible because the ads are delivered digitally, not because of any magic power google has.
Even if every website was its own independent advertising space (an extreme opposite), they could all still be open to advertising companies big and small by using “open standards”.
The innovations are all technological.
I genuinely don't know how this doesn't precipitate a market-maker who can match up the two groups and who naturally becomes huge because the best matchmakers will be the ones with the largest populations of both groups. The bigger they are the more and better matches that can exist and everyone (theoretically at least) gets better prices because buyers and sellers are in competition in a larger pool.
In finance lingo, Google is the exchange, the market makers, the brokers on both sides and a good fraction of the listed companies to boot.
Can a search company be forced to allow users to choose their as network? Show me whatever results but I want facebook's ads, or bing's ads and so on.
Pretty sure google's going to ask for 30% of what Facebook makes I guess but that's fine, let's start building a business model on that.
Assumption is that search is a monopoly and that's why they will be saddled with regulations. Frame any other constraints and market solutions can be figured.
> Pretty sure google's going to ask for 30% of what Facebook makes I guess but that's fine, let's start building a business model on that.
Why wouldn't Google ask for the equivalent of what they make with their own ads? Which is likely to be more than what a 3rd party ad provider would make.
Search doesn't make money by itself, it makes money by displaying ads. Why should another company get to capture the profit from that?
The ad exchange buys user profile data from those who collect it (which also happens today in addition to first party collection)
Or, am I missing your point?
The “at least” is unwarranted, and even the “theoretically” is being far too kind.
Of course if you allow a monopoly to develop they will protect their own interests to the exclusion of others, and use their power to entrench their position. Even the oldest theories about markets point out the dangers of monopolies.
Sometimes breaking government monopolies may lead to worse outcomes. In Europe breaking transportation monopolies (especially rail transport) lead to decades-long worsening of services in some countries. Because instead of one company managing everything you now have one company owning moving stock, one company owning rails, one company offering repair services, one company... And all of them delegating and re-assigning blame.
But these situations are more of an exception
if the gov't monopoly was receiving tax payer subsidy, then breaking it up means the taxpayer gets back the cost of the subsidy, and the service being provided returned to private funding model.
If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad - after all, cost was raised. But you have to also consider the savings in the subsidy that is no longer paid.
It's not black and white. Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most.
You've got to consider other costs as well - higher road use means direct costs, direct deaths, and pollution. Some things simply aren't easy to isolate the effects of and bill an individual for; some things are natural monopolies, some things are economic lighthouses, and we shouldn't be afraid of administrating things via governments in the many cases where a true free market simply isn't a viable option.
They never do. They keep receiving substantial government subsidies.
> If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad
No. I view it as "prices went up, service levels have gone down: delays, breakdowns, staff shortages have increased"
> Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most.
Then there would be no public transport, as its costs are prohibitive
If you are willing to pay 100€ for a 1h train ride, that is.
Subsidies allow public transport for everyone.
We don't demand that highways generate direct profits/revenue outside of limited application of toll roads, would you also want every road to be pay-per-mile?
1970’s Airline breakups were very beneficial to customers with lower prices and more routes popping up virtually overnight (though read “Hard Landing” if you want a more nuanced take), 1980’s AT&T breakup was somewhat beneficial in that long distance and cell rates went down but local rates went up (see “The Deal of the Century”), 1990’s California Energy breakups were basically a net negative for customers allowing energy market speculation and manipulation (“Smartest Guys in the Room”), and in a handful of examples like the Soviet Union or South Africa, deregulation lead to outright collapse of essential sectors in banking, agriculture, and energy and set society/customers back decades (“Sale of the Century”/“After the Party”).
There's no "always" here, the world is not that simple.
Breaking up a large company is often going to be good for some sets of customers, bad for others.
Isn't that caused by the "last mile" problem? Even with the split there was always only one company in control of local infrastructure and from what I understand they could even block newcomers from installing their own, citing concerns over possible service interuptions and various kinds of interference. I think Google Fibre even went through several experimental ways to get its infrastructure in place just so it could avoid dealing with any of that.
They didn’t want the Civil Aeronautics Board dismantled because it protected their monopolies over routes and guaranteed income, and they feared new entrants would disrupt their control.
So, while the airlines weren’t formally ‘broken up,’ the airline business, the route monopolies, and CAB were which directly led to the dissolution of companies like Eastern and Pan Am, and the creation or expansion of new entrants like Frontier, JetBlue, and Southwest which were previously prohibited from competing in these markets.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/air-fares
(edit) I said 'DOT' when I meant 'BTS' Bureau of transportation Statistics
this is all gov regulation
Looking at 1995 prices is not relevant to the question: those are post deregulation prices
That sounds more like due to corruption. Also we are talking about breakups not deregulation.
In a way they were breakups, in the USSR at least, since all almost all sectors of the economy were fully controlled by government monopolies.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some divisions of a a company like Stellantis have significantly more autonomy than any of the car companies in the USSR.
Could consumers goods companies adapt to consumer demand by freely increasing/decreasing production? Production targets were still a thing, weren’t they?
e.g. if the production target for the Lada factory was 1000 cars and they were allocated enough supplies for that (but there was enough demand so that 10000 could be sold profitably in the same period) would they be able to freely scale demand or would they be stuck with plan enforced on them by the central “corporate” office?
Again, plenty of modern companies have more control of their production targets, pricing, expansion etc. while being subsidiaries of major corporations than most Soviet “companies” generally did.
You literally named one of the most successful sectors of economy in ex-USSR. Banking sector in most former republics did effectively a greenfield start becoming the most technologically advanced in Europe - if they were able to expand to Europe, they would crush it.
Agriculture? Changed hands from state to private, productivity and yield increased, pre-war exports are all-time high.
Energy? 1990s weren’t great in some republics like Kazakhstan, but having some private companies in the business definitely helped. Not enough is being done on green energy, but that is a different story.
Wasn’t it mostly controlled by foreign banks, though?
That was pretty much unavoidable though. The old Soviet system and institutions were unsustainable and couldn’t coexist with “capitalist” institutions. There was no banking sector (at least how we understand it) to begin with, any company producing consumer goods, electronics, cars etc. collapsed overnight because they were producing garbage products that nobody needed after foreign substitutes became available.
Basically there were only two choices, sell off everything remotely useful to foreign companies and hope that they modernize/fix it or allow the local oligarchs to privatize/steal everything. Arguably the countries that picked the first option came out ahead (but are now stuck with entirely foreign owned banking, telecommunications. Retail sectors with much of their industry either directly foreign owned or incapable of doing anything but subcontracting)
e.g. Belarus tried to hold on much longer, instead it got stuck where it was for several decades with little progress. The Baltic countries crashed and were close to societal collapse for a few years but have been on an almost continuous upwards trend since they recovered.
This was basically a regulatory failure. They broke up the energy market on paper but without making it feasible for new entrants to actually enter the market, which is the sine qua non of making this work. So then the incumbents purposely constrained generating capacity to spike the prices.
Without Googles ad money, so will Chrome - and then consumers are left with what exactly? Safari for those on Apple devices, sure, but thats about it.
If Android is made to stand up on its own, can it? And even if it does, is it competitive with iOS? And for how long? If each major manufactor ends up forking it, even that is a net loss for consumers.
You can split up ma bell, large airlines, and Standard Oil. But a modern high tech business? That is a lot harder.
Correction: Mozilla will probably die. Firefox, or a fork of it, will undoubtedly live on.
With any hope: probably some browsers that care about users rather than consumers
Or they would be worthless if they are not self sufficient and are only there to funnel users to Google’s profitable products (Ads).
Even something like GCP would struggle, and they aren’t necessarily doing that great compared to competition already.
Android or Chrome on the other hand? They have no direct revenue and wouldn’t have existed in the first place if Google wasn’t allowed to do stuff like this from the beginning.
Webkit is open-source though. Wrapping a browser around it is not too hard (that’s how Chrome started after all).
So it might not be a horrible situation. Just like Google now they’b be subsidizing the cost of development to a significant extent which would result in much lower entry barriers without having a meaningful direct presence in the market themselves (outside of iOS/Mac).
I think same applies for Chromium. It wouldn’t just disappear and MS and other companies would probably pick up the slack to some extent.
Hahaha. Maybe if you compare it to getting a master's in marketing...
I'm a user of parts of their ad tech, and I've tried to be a user of more of their ad tech.
It may be affordable. I don't know, because there's not much left to compare it with.
It's probably somewhat effective for loads of people, since it's everywhere.
But it's decidedly NOT "simple". It's a monstrosity. If you come from no ad skills you will have to spend days digging through overly verbose documentation just to figure out which boxes to check. And probably a few hundred to a few thousand to "experiment" and find what's working.
This is absolutely NOT a "spend hundred bucks, get a few interested visitors" solution.
Even at the other end it's getting more complicated. It used to be: here's some HTML, slap it where you want the ad. Now you have to be constantly vigilant that they aren't destroying your site by sneakily enabling Auto Ads or showing interstitials.
When I started this back in '08, there were many of those providers. We could rotate through them to get some variety and get good payouts. ALL of them are now out of business, except Google, who started to magically payout less after competition declined.
As someone who uses them a lot, appreciates their technical ecosystem, who has his bills paid in part by their ad ecosystem, who is generally pro-business and thinks it's fundamentally unfair to punish successful companies for their success, I'll say this: Fuck Google. Break 'm up.
Representing the broker, the publisher and the house is efficient and is how google can spend your ad budget and deliver absolutely nothing in return. It takes expertise (more money) and a long runway to even break even with todays google “ad tech”.
Imo going after for Google for antitrust is like cracking down on jwalking and ignoring the murders taking place downtown.
If you knock Google out of that market you're just going to cement Apple's dominance, in the US where DOJ has jurisdiction, of the most important computing platform for a generation. And mobile is too hard for any newcomers to enter now.
Android spun-out as an independent company might actually be a good thing for the platform allowing it operate and compete on its merits.
And besides, apple are already under investigation by the DOJ anyway.
It’s really that simple. Any feelings to the contrary have no legal precedence to go off of. The EU had to pass an entire new regulation to allow alternate stores and even they don’t say it’s anticompetitive to have no competition , unless you’re above a certain user count.
That’s an awful analogy. Google is clearly a monopoly on many fronts. Sure, apple aren’t great either but you have to start somewhere, and this is clearly not like going after petty crimes compared to murder.
At the pace these things move by the time the DOJ looked at Apple the damage to competition on mobile would be irreversible.
This is really about big tech vs the people, so who cares which big tech company lines up first.
I think punishment is in order for something like that.
Google would gladly have removed them and acted as a broker for anonymized targeting data, but it would have killed other players in the ad ecosystem and given them exclusive power as the distributer of chrome.
Are third party cookies a good thing?
(Context for anyone interested, also note citations 1 and 2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_cookies
Theoretically yes, they are intended to hold some piece of state that is relevant to or derived from your usage and that's not bad by itself. Third-parties aren't always ads either, you might embed maps or AI or countless other things that can use this.
In practice, they have been abused for tracking very widely and they support all these other uses so much that we expanded this idea to include local storage, session storage, indexed storage etc.
An app like this is probably not ideal for outward facing sites but I have seen apps like this serve its purpose very well as an internal app and the simplicity allows it to have less tech overhead.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/v2...
You seem to have missed these important parts of the statement:
> This app can implement super simple auth...
> ...the simplicity allows it to have less tech overhead.
OAuth is not simple, and for something entirely internal, simple is fine.
Safari disables third party cookies, but I didn't call them independent because they have their own ad ecosystem (so of course they want to nerf web ads).
Third-party cookies, as a naive identifier on their own, are comparatively straightforward and controllable. It's all the other tricks around them that make it worrisome.
That doesnt mean there isnt a case or anticompetitive practices aren’t occurring
Corporations are conduits, getting shareholders to multi trillion dollar valuations is worth it when the only consequences will just affect the shell of the corporation remaining
What does this mean lol. Isn't the real reason that newpapers a shuttering because no one reads newspapers.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
They very much are trying to muddy the waters here, so no hate for the misunderstanding. This is the third active anti-trust suit they're currently involved in, after all! Also, as always: AFAIK ;)
Google News has headlines and photos. It used to have snippets, but that was many years ago.
In search results, there is a very brief snippet from the article.
https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-kil...
Basically, decades ago before the internet, newspapers served a role in facilitating communication between strangers, in a rather poor fashion. Individuals didn't have the money to have their own printing press and distribution system, so they had no way of contacting people unless they already knew their telephone number, or knowing what others had to offer. So newspapers had the "classified ads" section so people could spend a small amount of money and run a very tiny ad in the weekly newspaper for others in their town to see, and it was easy for the newspapers to just add a few extra pages with this stuff at the end. The internet simply made this all obsolete.
If the newspapers had been really forward-thinking, they would have created first the social network services and become dominant there before MySpace, Digg, and Facebook came along. But it took them ages to even start thinking about anything besides a business model dependent on printing newspapers.
I think that's pretty shady and in several of these cases she really just wants to spear any old Big Fucking Whale so it looks like she's been successful. That said, "consumer" really does mean other companies when it comes to Google ads, since they directly pay them a TON of money, so if they can prove that Google's monopoly is distorting the market I think this is fair game, 100%. And the ad market has been incredibly shitty for a very long time because if you don't have an audience in the billions you can't even try to compete, so anything that can open that up to some innovation would be positive, and price competition would allow a lot of products to exist and thrive that otherwise would have failed because cost of user acquisition was too high. That is very good for consumers.
Or it could be really negative, depending how they implement it. The funny thing is, despite the company fighting against it strongly, it's uncertain how good or bad it would be for Google shareholders, oftentimes breakups are very good for their stock because as each piece of the company is unshackled from the others, things that would be profitable for the division but get blocked by other interests at the company all of a sudden become possible: IIRC the combined value of the Baby Bells ended up far greater a few years after the breakup, for one example. The only people it's guaranteed to be bad for are the people at the top at Google, who would have their kingdoms shredded up and taken away from them.
In my view, returning from a Borkian era back towards something more Brandeisian makes a lot of sense. "Consumer welfare" to me feels like it assumes a functioning free market system, but antitrust should deal with powerful entities that are already able to distort "free" market functioning by their size and power.
But, I'm politically an anarchist so of course I would have a "big is bad" bias.
>> On Monday, Wood told Brinkema that Google intentionally put itself in this position to "manipulate the rules of ad auctions to its own benefit," The Washington Post reported.
A better way to understand this is that Google allegedly forced publishers to use Google's ad server and ad exchange if they wanted traffic from Google ads. From [1]:
>> After buying DoubleClick, Google tied its control over advertising demand to publisher use of its software. As the DOJ put it in the complaint, "If publishers wanted access to exclusive Google Ads’ advertising demand, they had to use Google’s publisher ad server (DFP) and ad exchange (AdX), rather than equivalent tools offered by Google’s rivals." The result is that it acquired a monopoly across the entire industry, in the software publishers use and the matching engine for advertisers.
[1] - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-post-google-world
If this is true, 2 of the 3 parties here are motivated to bypass Google to increase the money publishers earn and how much advertisers play, are they not? If's not that hard to set up an ad server from scratch. The issue of course is inventory.
But publishers and use multiple ad servers. In fact there are tools for them to pick whichever impression will pay them the most from those available. Advertisers are free to buy on multiple platforms. At least I see no allegation that Google is actually or effectively restricting the use of other tools.
So can't Google use this to say that publishers use them because they pay the most? And advertisers use them because the ads are the most effective? Advertisers in particularly are heavily metrics-focused. In the background, they're analyzing ad performance (in terms of impressions -> clicks -> action) based on audience segmentation.
Now the DoubleClick cookie does have value because it's so widely deployed, Google has a lot of information to derive behavioural characteristics about the user. Just based on what sites you go to, Google builds a profile of your interests, your likely (implied) demographics and so on. You can argue that this cookie is anticompetitive.
But I don't see "cookie" mentioned once in this article.
So I'm really not sure where this goes. It could be the reporting just isn't great on the case because it requires some legal knowledge. I guess we'll see.
It's much harder because of how much behavioral data Google hordes.
If Google were to sell its behavioral user data to anyone, at a fair price, that would increase competition.
If Google were to allow anyone to bid on the search page, that would increase competition.
If Google stopped acquiring competitors with any sign of life, that would increase competition.
If Google sold their pricing and bid matching algorithmic advances that would increase competition.
Lots of links in my other comments in here - in particular you might find "project Bernanke" of interest, if you've spent serious money on Google before.
EDIT: Their exact market share is really hard to pin down... again, definitely a situation that Google encourages. But the trend is clear: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
AdX handles networks of publishers on Google publisher platform. When advertiser buys ads from say Facebook, it doesn't use AdX, right?
I posted this link above, which is a google-published doc that's much, much clearer than the usual "Help" pages: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...
The DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace to **buy** and sell display advertising space.
### Who Participates in the Ad Exchange?
1. The large online publishers (sellers)—websites like portals, entertainment sites and news sites
2. **Ad networks and agency holding companies** that operate networks (buyers)—companies that connect web sites with advertisers
But, again; I struggled to understand these distinctions even with access to internal explainers, and the doc I linked is at least somewhat OOD (it mentions AdWords, which was retired in 2018[2]). So I could easily just be somewhat slow and mistaken on this complex issue :)
[1] https://www.justice.gov/d9/styles/d09/public/press-releases/...
even on DoJ pic they say AdX is 50% of market share, meaning other publishers even when using Doubleclick for publishers go somewhere else, so it seams like google allows it.
Also, my understanding is that even on google platform, there is Doubleclick for publishers, but there are other tools: AdSense and AdMob, which are very simple and without much lock in, publisher can move out whenever he wants. Per some internet discussion AdSense don't use AdX, and per some "reddit experts" it is violation of policy to use both simultaniously: https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/18e3mqs/can_i_use_ad...
1. I could never fully understand how all the google products integrated with each other.
2. The guys we talked to at google were often unable to recommend which product was correct for our use case (it seemed like there were multiple entry points but they all funneled back to one or two common sources)
3. Many of the integrations we wanted to do had no clear criteria for whether google would accept you or not. This led to us wasting lots of time.
4. Our whole company focused on an integration with google for 6-9months. When we were validating our implementation google pulled out, citing antitrust concerns. A few months later they announced a product that competed with us. As google is a big org I'm not really sure if this was coordinated on their side.
I think underappreciated aspect of Facebook's brand reinvention to Meta was the role it played in transforming their brand perception away from evil and toward merely bizarre. I do think a significant part of that transition was to avoid the fever pitch of antitrust scrutiny that they had been under, that now seems to have gone away.
The heat was on Facebook, but they got out from under it. And now it's on Google.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_v._....
Me and many of my friends never interact with Meta and it hasn't been an issue. This isn't the case with Google.
If your home address is on some advertiser's mail list, chance they are on meta's database as well.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-hosted-zuckerbe...
"I believe whatever doesn't kill you, simply makes you stranger." - Mark Salamander Zuckerberg, inventor of the psyop superweapon facebooks that successfully destroyed social cohesion in over 200 nations and 4 billion people, under the flag of social cohesion no less.
"by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising."
There are people who sell Display Ad space ("Publishers") and people who buy ad space ("Advertisers"). Google AdSense is a well-known name, but that's actually their division for small blogs and such -- the big bucks come in from news sites, homepages, and other high-traffic publishers that use a different product altogether. Google isn't a monopoly on the publisher side (say, ads on your "Google Home" screen in the Google app), and obviously isn't a monopoly on the advertiser side; the issue comes about in the middle of the two, the "Ad Exchange" side. Google runs the show, and has spent roughly infinity dollars to keep it that way, even though this whole segment (Display Ads) is a pretty small slice of their overall revenue. The graphic published by the DoJ does the best job of explaining the overall issue, and the pieces involved: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
For example, they staved off Facebook's short-lived attempt to break into the exchange market (a meta-market, if you will!) by drowning the issue in money, then eventually doing the corporation equivalent of "I'll pay you $5 to fuck off": cartel formation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
According to the draft lawsuit, Facebook agreed to reduce its participation in header bidding in return for "information, speed, and other advantages" that would come from staying with Google. Facebook allegedly would receive a guarantee of 90% of auctions regardless of the bids; 300 ms to bid (vs 160 offered to others), along with the ability to identify 80% of smartphone users and 60% of web users.
Article: https://adtechexplained.com/google-project-bernanke-explaine... Major points to anyone who can find the actual slides, they're made for middle managers so very digestible, and they have the hilariously illegal "ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE" warnings up top that Google is now known for. But somehow they're nowhere to be found as of today, even on Kagi.
If nothing else, once the dust settles and the redactions clear this will be a fascinating snapshot of how normal, kind people are made to do wildly asocial things with a smile on their face. I never once met a single person at Google who wasn't kind, intelligent, and well-spoken. And yet...
The anticompetitive schemes they engage in are so complicated and require so much background context that it’s basically impossible to explain to even subject matter experts, much less the casual reader.
Don't define markets and estimate shares... For example, a field like advertising sweeps worldwide, and includes lots of different products and services. Defining a "market" more narrowly, or even defining one at all, can create issues if economists aren't involved. There's no problem with referring to a "market segment,'' "sector," "business/' etc., but just try and avoid defining the "market" for what we offer. Similarly, estimating "market share" is complicated, and it implies a defined market, so guessing or approximating isn't very reliable.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.At that time, the exchange was a second-price auction, and all parties could submit up to two bids (presumably, the top two bids from their own collection of advertisers). Let's call the Google bids G1 > G2.
Since Google already implemented automated bidding strategies, they would submit to this auction (1+a)G1 and (1+b)G2 for certain fixed small value parameters a,b. Project Bernanke computed on historical data the optimal values of these a,b parameters.
Cue government discovery misunderstanding documentation
At the very least it sounds like they were using their position as auctioneer to fine-tune their bidding strategies, which seems like a textbook example of monopolistic behavior. But even that would be a step up from what I/the article above accuse them of.
Other companies in that auction could apply this kind of optimization, too. Perhaps the improvement is not as large for smaller participants, and so, not worth looking into.
I'd say there would be more good outcomes if Google was made to segment in several planes at once, across product and location, and if transfer pricing models were forbidden.
Basically, if the EU and a competent Asian market regulator got involved as well.
I don't see why alphabet can't share s.w. over the federated Google.eu and like, but with datacenter locality maintained jurisdictionally.
BTW, if anyone wants to run "inevitable balkanisaion of the internet" it's an interesting topic. Because it may be true, and it may still be true more benefit than harm stems.
The web has many shortcomings as an app platform but at least you can still build what you want without getting permission from a trillion dollar tech giant.
No doubt there will be much squabbling about definitions but seems pretty obvious that it is. Eg See browser market. There is basically no competition. And the competition is Firefox that Google is funding heavily to keep it alive - arguable to avoid being called a monopoly. That’s basically an admission in itself.
Strongly disagree with this part. The courts have adopted a very narrow view of anti-monopoly law focused on monopolies that increase prices. Politicians have yet to correct the courts on this. This would be a losing strategy for the executive branch.
which google has already done (their search engine). But the payment comes due.
I also have many friends who work there who say it's hard work but the pay is great and there's a clear path to climb. I can't say the same about old brick and mortars.
For one, the entry to compete is very low with something like Google Search, same with web browsers. I will admit that Operating Systems are winner take all monopolies and as any other such monopoly should be regulated.
But everyone has the freedom to download another browser, it's open protocols which anyone can implement. And search? You literally Ctrl+L and type bing.com from a user perspective. From a competitor's perspective you just write a web crawler and run it, it's a CompSci year 1 project.
From the body I assumed it refers to the monopolies of: Operating System, Browser, and Search Engine.
I don't see ads as being a monopoly, that's just the monetization system, of the core products. It's like saying they have a monopoly on money?
I see what you're saying with monetization, but this is slightly different than what you're thinking of: this is "Display Ads", which is indeed a product (or, again, 3+ products) that they sell to others. A name you might know is "AdSense". The whole search part of their business is completely separate, and you're absolutely correct that they're a natural+benign monopoly over Google Search ads, just like Microsoft has a monopoly on Bing Search ads. But, again, this lawsuit is more about the little images and videos you see on blogs, news sites, forums, etc.
Not sure I follow, could you explain how this is the case when the OS market has been much more competitive than the browser market for many years?
OS: Mac, Windows, Linux
Browsers: Netscape, internet explorer, safari, opera, firefox, chrome, brave, samsung explorer, whatever smart tvs use, whatever the wii or the playstation used, etc...
High cost of entry is a core property of monopolies.