What does this mean lol. Isn't the real reason that newpapers a shuttering because no one reads newspapers.
>> 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
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.
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.