Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty wild that the case against an adtech giant is based on its monopolistic practices and the harms it is having on publishers, rather than its privacy violations and harms to the general public and to society at large.

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 Google has accused the DOJ of having a "narrow view of the ad tech market" that's outdated and "doesn’t reflect reality."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."

The harms to publishers are more quantifiable than privacy violations, so it should be an easier case. Anti-trust lawsuits are about damage to the economy, not just negative outcomes.

What’s wild about it? This case is about its competitive practices in the marketplace, not privacy

As someone who's very pro-privacy, I'm about to bring the most cynical take I could think of: you could argue that the effective monopoly (well oligopoly, if you also consider FB a part of the problem) on acquiring / processing tracking data at scale creates an uneven playing field for all businesses, who have to resort to using Google's ads&analytics services - or entirely give up any edge that their presence on the open Internet could bring them.

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.

>Advertising has been instrumental in killing journalism as we knew it,

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.

By that logic businesses that buy advertising have supported nascent technologies as they develop. When newspapers were new and the main way of disseminating information that's what they used and happened to "support" as a byproduct. If you read an old scientific american from 1845 the last page was all ads. That's where eyeballs were.

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 doesn't care to support journalism? Why do you say that?

because Advertising has money to spend on its goals, and finds its money is better spent elsewhere, thus Journalism has lost its old revenue model and the business of Journalism is much worse off than it was about 20 years ago.

Advertising never cared to support Journalism, Advertising cared to achieve its goals and Journalism was the best way to do it at the time.

Maybe there should be a distinction between online advertising and print advertising?

They seem to have very different business models.

Yeah, I see this more as a journalism problem than an advertising problem. If people really thought journalism was valuable, they'd happily pay for subscriptions. When people vote with their wallets, quality journalism just isn't a priority, and I don't see why that's Google's fault or problem.

> monopolistic practices and the harms it is having on publishers, rather than its privacy violations and harms to the general public

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.

privacy isn't really a market power problem though, because you can have a market in such data. We need comprehensive laws protecting privacy before an agency can enforce them.

> privacy isn't really a market power problem though, because you can have a market in such data.

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.

I don't find it at all wild. Trials determining monopolies are about fair and healthy competition which is good for consumers. If adtech is simply bad for all consumers, that would be a different effort to outlaw it.

Monopoly is defined differently in the US and Europe. In Europe a monopoly is permitted so long as the ability to exert dominance in one area does not allow gaining dominance in another. In the US a monopoly is disallowed if it leads to an inefficient market that makes customers pay more.

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.

> It's pretty wild that the case against an adtech giant is based on its monopolistic practices and the harms it is having on publishers, rather than its privacy violations and harms to the general public and to society at large.

But then again, "The business of America is business."

That's because the privacy violations are driven by government and deep state interests.

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.

Advertisers absolutely do want people’s personal data. It helps them build better dossiers on individuals. This helps them target ads. Improving ad targeting improves publishers and advertisers profits because consumer responses to advertisements increase as advertisement relevance increases.

Advertisers want broad demographic groups ("English-speaking zoomer from a middle income family"), or anonymized cohorts with known statistical distributions. ("Cohort DFHY12 has 13 clicks versus cohort KHFD35's 145 clicks.")

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.

Having worked with advertisers this is absolutely true.

But if they have the latter data they'll sell it in a heartbeat.

> deep state

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.

Personal data is very hard to turn into profits. Adtech wants statistical distributions, not granular personal data.

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.

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