Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
but publishers receive stable share of click cost (67%?), so they should be happy with this arrangement.
1. CPC: google has strong incentive to generate clicks, because that's where they get revenue: advertisers are charged per click.
2. CPM: publishers get their guaranteed CPM if that's their choice.
There's serious nerd sniping potential in asking how best to construct an automatic bidder, especially with the speed and scale requirements in place. It's an incredibly deep problem, and I don't believe there is a single right answer.
The problem is that it is unwise to trust an bidding algorithm designer whose incentives are aligned against yours. Google benefits from higher winning bids.
In the ad tech space the only winners are the people building and operating the adtech; everyone else is a sucker.
The only truly novel version of it which I have seen emerged from the Turkish hypercasual games space, where they managed to construct a giant audience everyone else thought was worthless, funnel them into their games, and then use the attention in the games to sell access to this apparently worthless audience.
Of course the audience actually were worthless, because all they were really interested in was new free hypercasual games, so the real suckers here were other devs that paid to access this audience but didn't have the adtech chops to make the most of it before the players moved on, and they funded their competition in the process.
RTB bid requests have support for the normal auction based bids but also indicating possible private marketplaces which may come into play depending on the exchange and seller, meaning that the highest bidder will have indicated to the world their price, but not won the auction, so they may (erroneously) conclude next time to try bidding higher, leading to price distortions.
I suspect a large proportion of advertisers still believe the whole thing is a nice transparent fair auction process, and have no idea of how convoluted it has become.
Valuing a bid is a complex and interesting task. Ever since Second Price auctions started dying out DSPs should have moved to essentially algorithmic trading. A price calculation depends on tens if not hundreds of factors that are evaluted on a per auction basis.
Advertisers have been demanding more transparency into where their money is going for quite some time now. If you're an advertiser and your DSP isn't giving you detailed reporting into the fees they're being charged then it's time to move DSP.
Bloomberg Radio April 17 2025: https://www.youtube.com/live/iEpJwprxDdk?si=9WaFIJENUwyIJvpk
That entire industry is a horrifying shitshow of sociopathy, at the expense of absolutely everyone else, both viewers (supply side) and advertisers (demand side).
its about Display Ads business, which is 10% of Google revenue as per article. So, everything there can be broken up without destroying Google.
Not "is it strictly necessary for them to be broken up to prevent them from reoffending"?
100% I would expect them to reoffend. No question whatsoever.
https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/google-is-found-guilty...
The Google ad exchange favored its own platforms, limiting the ability of other exchanges to compete fairly in bidding for ad inventory. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-giv...
Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on who will win a bid, again to inflate prices. https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-rig...
Google entered market allocation agreements to create an unfair playing field. https://www.winston.com/en/insights-news/avoiding-antitrust-...
This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should drive the price down, because fewer advertisers are competing for the same potential ad impression. The article describes Google's influence as "Google controls the auction-style system," which is a bit more open-ended about the specific alleged practices.
It could depend on how they 'limit the number of bidders'. If they sell seats to be able to bid, then the bids are lower to account for that, and publishers get a share of the bid, not the fee bidders pay. I'm guessing though...
"The US argues that Google used its financial power to acquire potential rivals and corner the ad tech market, leaving advertisers and publishers with no choice but to use its technology."
> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-giv...
I had a hard time finding any specifics in that article. It's about closing arguments and does not even mention the number of bidders.
The DOJ press release [1] would be a better citation.
> Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on who will win a bid, again to inflate prices. https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-rig...
Note that this link is just to the definition of bid rigging, not an accusation against google.
> Google entered market allocation agreements to create an unfair playing field. https://www.winston.com/en/insights-news/avoiding-antitrust-...
This is an article "Avoiding Antitrust Issues In Search Term Ad Agreements".
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1563...
Frankly, I think what the parent comment is doing is flat-out lying. Or else they were doing some kind of test to see if people actually read citations.
The last two you quote are especially egregious. E.g. saying "Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on who will win a bid, again to inflate prices. https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-rig... gives the clear implication that the link supports the antecedent. hammock's comment is complete bullshit.
Note that this link says absolutely nothing to support the sentence before it. Which isn't a surprise given that limiting the number of bidders could hardly drive the prices those bidders are paying up. But the issue isn't even mentioned.
There's a case to be made that on top of google being broken up, the market should be heavily regulated in order to restore trust for market participants.
Advertising is an intentionally complex system so that companies can clip the ticket at multiple stages throughout the process. Google should be broken up, but the whole ad tech system needs to go into the bin if these problems are going to ever get fixed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/02/15/how-muc...
> Three industry studies showed less than 50 cents of every dollar goes to showing ads.
Every penny of what is spent goes to showing ads, by definition. However, that doesn't mean that every penny goes to the publisher. The advertiser may look at the 60 cents being spent on everybody between them and the publisher and say "hey, I'm getting ripped off! I could be paying 4 cents/CPM instead of 10 cents/CPM!" but each middleman (usually) adds some kind of value to increase acquisition rate. For example:
* Identity providers who have lists of user IDs that belong to "high CTR" audiences (users more likely to click ads)
* Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's location is so that they can target locally-focused advertisements to them
* User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted
* Exchanges which conduct auctions across multiple DSPs to get a better price for publishers while also making more inventory available to advertisers
At one company I worked for, we allocated impressions ahead of time. Based on prior years' data and viewer ratings of TV shows, we could predict the future, determining how many viewers a video or TV show would get, and then selling the advertising inventory based on that prediction. That shit ain't free!
All of these things are designed to increase your acquisition rate from x% to y%, where x > y. Sure, you could just pay $5,000 a month to a website to show a banner ad directly, but a larger % of your money would be wasted on users who are utterly uninterested in your banner.
This is the argument that gets made, but very rarely is it true.
From Neumann et al in 2019 [1]
"When investigating gender (being male) and age (three different tiers: 18-24, 25-34 and 35-44 years) individually, we find that digital audiences for gender are on average less often correct than random guessing (accuracy of 42.3%)."
If the accuracy of targeting is worse than random guessing on average then it's value is less $0.00. Advertisers would reach more of their target audience by simply buying more media instead of spending money on 'targeting' even after you discount wastage to $0.00 in 'value'.
I agree with everything you're saying about programmatic *in theory*, but I would argue that in practice the whole system is just broken.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3203131
Instead of selling "clicks" and "impressions", just sell the damn banner ad. The advertiser sets their budget and target audience, a few suggestions of websites where to run a banner for (x) days show up, the advertiser picks some of them. On the other side same story and the website picks which ads they want to run.
Many other models are possible.
I wonder why we don't have such competitors. Ah right, because Google abused its monopoly position. :-)
> * Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's location is so that they can target locally-focused advertisements to them
> * User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted
That's horrible! In a better world such practices would be made illegal and those involved would be hung, drawn, and quartered.
I tried to buy ads for “Foo photography” as people in my town literally type that in. And my budget wasn’t enough to buy all instances of that search.
I didn’t need geotargeting for my local business.
Comically google kept trying to geotarget. Every time it did this I would get people all over the place who searched “photography” and a large percentage was burned. I kept trying to turn off geotargeting.
I guess this is a big and probably unbridgeable divide, some people think this sort of thing is obviously evil and others, like me, actually prefer it very strongly over a world where all advertising is untargeted but there is massively more of it because it's so much less valuable...
However, mine and many other folks' position is not preferring untargeted intrusive annoying ads over targeted intrusive annoying ads. It's preferring almost zero ads with maybe the rare, non intrusive easily avoidable ad on certain appropriate websites[1]. That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo.
[1] a shopping website having a _single_ banner on the home page announcing an ongoing sale for HP laptops is OK. However, if I search for lenovo laptops and I see a HP laptop as the first "sponsored" result....(Looking at you amazon).
And about tracking, I absolutely don't want my librarian running to my travel agent telling him I recently looked up france travel guides. The digital equivalent of this happens daily to everybody. It's simply a no-no for me, there can never be a justification for it.
The fact is that if you ban these two classes of practices, the whole of ad tech comes crashing down. I hope everyday for this to happen.
And so you're paying for the content you're reading as well?
im not talking about piracy here - I pay for multiple streaming services and yt music provided the resulting experience is ad free.
But ads on your news/shopping website? Regardless of if I pay or not I'm gonna get upsells and ads. That simply does not fly. In any case, intrusive ads are a no-no. If your platform utilizes intrusive ads, I have no remorse for any loss incurred on your part.
"What, paying for MY news? How dare they"
This is already the case for most newspapers. Helas, most users prefer the free but ad-ridled version.
> Even the ones that _do_ have a half-decent, "ad-free", paid option, if you actually pay and visit their website, you will be sure to see ads related events in the network tab. Disqualified.
You should report this to the publishers. This is usually and genuinely not what they would like to happen if they provide a paid version.
> For the case of tracking, like I (again) stated above: if my library goes over to my travel agency telling them what travel guides I have been looking at, I have zero remorse for the library's revenue stream, even if they satisfy all of the requirements above (such as offering a completely intrusive-ad-free paid subscription).
Most of the time the data itself will never be sold. What happens is that a brand or ad agency will buy pre-filtered traffic or ask the publisher to operate a campaign on specific user segments. This means that the data never leaves the site that collected it.
There are of course external companies that become third-party data providers as a business model like credit card companies or telecoms. But even then, data providers try to protect their own data by operating campaigns themselves rather than selling the data.
> If there are alternatives that don't indulge in these completely unethical practices, I would love to, and I do, use them. However, there are exactly zero news websites like that, so it leaves me with no choice but to "steal" whenever I read an article.
Just as an added piece of context, due to publishers surviving (and I really mean it) thanks to advertisement income, they also have little in-house tech talent that can actually make sur that things like "absolutely 0-tracking if it's a paying user" is correctly implemented.
Do what you will with this information.
> Finally, if your company ever does something like using Wi-fi SSIDs as an alternative.
Only mobile apps might have the SSID (and only with granular user consent on app install). Websites do not have access to this information.
However external data providers are used to retarget specific audience segments on said publisher's users.
If you want to sell ad impressions at reasonable rates, you'll need to provide audience segment targeting, otherwise the ad performance will be too low for brands to continue buying it at previous rates.
In a comment elsewhere in the discussion: accuracy of targeting is worse than random sampling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719816
2. Ads have existed for as long as commerce existed. Google became a trillion dollar ad behemoth before it started collected everyone's data by simply offering contextual ads.
Literally nothing in the ads business requires you to collect and sell so much of user data that it would even make Stasi pause and re-think.
I could provide a long answer but the gist of it is that the study is flawed. Among the reasons, they don't differentiate desktop and mobile traffic which is a massive measurement problem. They also use Nielsen DAR which is in itself a heuristic method of determining what age and gender a user is and thus is not a great pick as an oracle.
The study also does not mention click and bounce rates which are good proxies for targeting success.
Beyond the performance, the marketing and sales aspect of targeted advertising is also a strong selling point, no matter the performance.
> Ads have existed for as long as commerce existed. Google became a trillion dollar ad behemoth before it started collected everyone's data by simply offering contextual ads.
No, it didn't.
> Literally nothing in the ads business requires you to collect and sell so much of user data that it would even make Stasi pause and re-think.
It does because contextual advertisement does not provide enough volumes and lower performance (lower click rate, higher bounce rates, lower conversion rates).
Example: If 1/100 people read hockey-related content and out of those people, 1/100 pages read is about hockey, it means that you're reaching about 1/10000 page views.
Now if you do implement user tracking, you're available inventory is 1/100 page views.
Show me a non-flawed study that shows you need vast amounts of user data and tracking, for each user, throughout their lifetime to deliver ads
> No, it didn't.
Yes, yes it did. The skyrocketing revenue is attributable to increased internet usage across the globe, and Google outright owning a large chunk of it.
> It does because contextual advertisement does not provide enough volumes and lower performance
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
> Example:
Example: if you collect and sell vast amounts of sensitive user data without user's consent, and the outcome is indistinguishable from random noise, are you more effective?
Example: if targeted ads are found to be somewhat more effective than contextual ads, is the lifelong invasive tracking of every user action a preferred tradeoff?
(It's quite telling how people defending targeted advertising never address the elephant in the room)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
> Example: if you collect and sell vast amounts of sensitive user data without user's consent
The users do give consent and this is handled by Consent Management Platforms and passed in the programmatic advertisement auction chain in the form of TC strings.
The fact that you don't know this is also quite telling.
> [...] and the outcome is indistinguishable from random noise, are you more effective?
But it isn't, and if you are making claims, please provided sources.
Why would brands and agencies pay additional fees for data if they would provide no uplift?
> Example: if targeted ads are found to be somewhat more effective than contextual ads, is the lifelong invasive tracking of every user action a preferred tradeoff?
Are users prepared to pay for the difference?
If a service cannot be offered at a certain scale without such practices, it should not be offered at that scale. Before you start talking about how this enabled google's innovations, remember that the path we have taken to our current innovations is not the only path that could have been taken. By correctly squashing out immoral avenues like today's ad tech, we lay the path for the same innovations to happen taking a different, more ethical path. Sure, it could be that that would take more time and certain innovations would be delayed by an entire era[1], but note that we could also be going 5x faster than today w.r.t TPUs or whatever if we enslaved and forced enough people to work for Google's ML infrastructure team and nobody/nothing else. But we don't do that, do we?
[1] on the flip side, certain innovations may also come an era early
To whit:
Most the big projects Google started or acquired, and that are still available today, Google started or acquired before targeted advertising. Google itself, Docs, Youtube, Cloud, Android...
Targeted advertising is not a requirement for innovation
That sounds like an opinion and one tha isn't shared by the hundreds of millions of users Google has o it's services.
The worst part is that I completely agree that advertisement and at the very least targeted advertisement, shouldn't exist.
Problem is that users prefer not paying in cash so companies find alternatives.
If advertisement or privacy really mattered for users, we would already have alternative Facebook, YouTube, etc, but it isn't and so we don't.
User ended up preferring the classic version, even when they were informed of its inner workings.
"Ad company does survey confirming that people like their ads and definitely don't want an alternative"
is not the win you think it is. Are you hearing yourself?
You're free to step in at any time with actual viable alternatives, studies, etc.
May I remind you once more that the possibility to create this magical Internet world you guys live in is already there but somehow nobody builds or uses it. Maybe there is a good reason for this?
Ads don't require pervasive and invasive tracking
> but somehow nobody builds or uses it. Maybe there is a good reason for this?
Yes. Because unrestricted unlimited capitalism will always exploit any possible niche and avenue, and people will cheer it on until it's too late.
Yes, the unethical path is easier and more importantly, faster to take. If it is not explicitly disallowed in the system, it will be taken.
> Popular among users
Google is popular due to their superior search capability/really good workspace product and of course youtube is brilliant. The whole point is to try and achieve these same things while also maintaining ethics, even if it takes a century longer. Like I said in a previous thread, you wouldn't enslave people to work on Google's TPUs, would you? Even if it would help us achieve AGI in one week.
You can't say, let the users decide, when there is information asymmetry. No one using a phone today is aware of the slavery in the rare metal industry in Congo etc, as much as they are aware of the number of megapixels in their camera.
If you are really in the "let the users decide" camp, then there must be 100% information symmetry. Add to the iPhone box a detailed report of every single part of the supply chain. Add a video of the slave in the mines, not just the PPE suit in the high-tech-looking lab.
Google search should market themselves as selling your ad information to various businesses.
You can't let businesses push the positive side of their business more than the negative side, cause an information asymmetry, and then say that users should be allowed to decide.
If the negative side of the business is hidden in a T&C document, then the positive side should also be forced to be in a T&C. They should be on equal footing. This would mean effectively banning marketing. Which of the alternatives do you prefer?
Back to the point, If you disallowed intrusive/targeted ads, then purely ad supported journalism would be unsustainable, thereby forcing businesses to charge for most of their news. Copy this ditto for other industries.
Doing good things like this could also naturally facilitate other desirable things such as a simple payment system for internet services and remove other blockers needed for the system to work, which we don't have today despite all the trillion dollar tech companies. Why? They have the brightest minds, but the economic incentives need to be set exactly right. Today, those bright minds are being used to add dark patterns to user interfaces, deceive or even outright lie to users, and doing cunning things like tracking my location using their Wi-fi SSID even when I explicitly turned off location. These tracking systems didn't come out of nowhere, nor are they easy to build. They exist because the incentives let them, caused them to exist. If the incentives instead caused more ethical businesses to exist, the same human/otherwise capital would be converted to more ethical systems.
No. The users are tricked into giving "consent" through a plethora of dark patterns.
When dark patterns are removed, users refuse to give the information
> But it isn't, and if you are making claims, please provided sources.
Have you provided sources for any of your claims?
> Are users prepared to pay for the difference?
Still waiting for any source of your claims that:
- targeted ads are more effective
- ads require lifelong collection of any and all user data
- that without pervasive and invasive tracking ads are somehow prohibitively expensive
Well you're free to bring this up to the various data privacy national organisations in the EU.
But I see that we're moving goalposts.
> Have you provided sources for any of your claims?
One of many available links on Google:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016781162...
> ads require lifelong collection of any and all user data
Data collected has an expiration date. This is also part of GDPR compliance.
> that without pervasive and invasive tracking ads are somehow prohibitively expensive
We're now going in circles, but essentially you're ad performance (brand attribution, clicks and conversion) will determine your expected purchase price per thousand impressions (CPM).
If your targeting isn't competitive, your inventory will not be bought or at a lower price.
This already happens for Safari and Firefox impressions.
> But I see that we're moving goalposts.
We are not moving goalposts. You literally claimed that users give consent to data collection. No, they do not. They are tricked into giving this consent because that's the only way ad industry can obtain consent to livelong invasive tracking.
> Have you provided sources for any of your claims?
> One of many available links on Google:
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016781162...
Let's see what the paper says:
--- start quote ---
Our simulation study reveals that more than 50% of audience segments (i.e., 23,407 out of 45,440 audience segments on the right-hand side of the dashed vertical line in Figure D2 in Online Appendix D) require a minimum increase in performance larger than 700% to be at least as profitable as no-targeting. ...we find that more than half of the audience segments require an increase in CTR0, CR0, and m0 larger than 100% to be at least as profitable as no-targeting.
Approximately half of the audience segments on Spotify require a higher increase in CTR0 for the advertiser, suggesting they might be less profitable than no-targeting.
--
By highlighting the questionable profitability of many audience segments, this paper aims to help advertisers decide whom to target.
We suggest using our model to calculate the break-even performance for many segments and then order these segments by break-even performance from smallest to largest.
... our findings also reveal that untargeted campaigns may yield higher profits.
Our proposed model has limitations, as it relies on inputs that may not be readily available to all advertisers
--- end quote ---
So. Questionable profitability, untargeted yield higher profits unless you ignificantly increase performance of targeted ads, a suggestion of an unproven model relying on data that may not be available to advertisers.
Yes, this truly is a paper that proves the amazing great efficiency of targeted advertisement, especially when offset against lifelong invasive tracking and wholesale trading of user data.
> Data collected has an expiration date. This is also part of GDPR compliance.
1. GDPR isn't available worldwide
2. Ad industry claims "legitimate uses" for a bunch of data and end up with "oh, we'll maintain your precise geolocation for 12 years" https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
> If your targeting isn't competitive, your inventory will not be bought or at a lower price.
So what?
> This already happens for Safari and Firefox impressions.
Good.
No, they're not tricked. There are obvious cookie banners with the possibility to see the list of vendors and reasons for collecting the data and consent completely, partially or reject.
I'm sorry, if you don't know how advertisement works for news publishers there's not much to talk about.
> Our simulation study reveals that more than 50% of audience segments (i.e., 23,407 out of 45,440 audience segments on the right-hand side of the dashed vertical line in Figure D2 in Online Appendix D) require a minimum increase in performance larger than 700% to be at least as profitable as no-targeting. ...we find that more than half of the audience segments require an increase in CTR0, CR0, and m0 larger than 100% to be at least as profitable as no-targeting.
This might be correct for Spotify, however it isn't for news publishers. Data costs usually represent 10% to 25% of media cost, which means that the uplift of targeting should be at least these values which are nowhere near 100%.
> 1. GDPR isn't available worldwide
Sure, but since a lot of sites have European users they usually stay in line of the strictest guidelines for all users which is generally the GDPR.
> Ad industry claims "legitimate uses" for a bunch of data and end up with "oh, we'll maintain your precise geolocation for 12 years"
Not "ad industry", "one bad adtech actor", but we're already used to incorrect takes.
If the legitimate uses are invalid (which I believe that they probably are) they can and most likely will be fought in court.
> So what?
So journalists don't get paid.
I am old enough to remember the world before targeted ads (and internet), and back then I did not see more ads than today - on the contrary!
How do you know that the waste is higher with the banner ad?
Some companies like Google are incredible at this. Google is not a "monopoly" in this space. In fact the world has far too many Google equivalents but absolutely no one comes close to Google in generating top dollars for publishers. I am saying this after working for 10+ years competing against Google.
But since Google is playing both sides and has so much sway over the market, they're able to manipulate things. Even if they're not manipulating things to their benefit, it's still not great to have a single party have so much control.
but that is the value of a marketplace, aligning buyers and sellers via the price mechanism
Every setup where someone makes the platform and sells stuff built on top of it is inherently abusive. You just don't know when the abuse will come and against whom.
There's certainly some tension between advertisers and publishers, in that advertiser would like to pay less and publishers would like to be paid more; but there's a lot of things an ad exchange can do that are good for both. Selecting ads to display that result in meaningful downstream conversion is good for both advertisers and publishers, because they'll both get paid and maybe something about the user getting something they want too.
Showing inappropriate and ineffective ads isn't great for the advertiser, and it might make the publisher money in the near term, but it can drive users away and tends not to be sustainable --- advertisers stop advertising in venues where they don't get results.
The value of a good ad exchange for the publisher and the advertiser is when it provides reasonable matching at a lower cost than the parties arranging advertising directly. Possibly some amount of assurances for both sides too --- the exchange should ensure the advertising code and destinations aren't going to compromise the publisher or their user and should ensure that the ads paid for are actually seen (to the degree possible). There's room for the exchange to profit from scale while still being lower cost than self-managed advertising.
Of course it matters if a middleman is skimming off 70% of the revenue in a given market.
> it is incredibly efficient
On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"?
> What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
Right, which is why it is illegal to prevent there from being a next best alternative via anti-competitive practices which is precisely was was proven in this trial after a detailed examination of the evidence.
One where the market maker is taking up the cost of providing a market. E.g. Steam takes a 30% cut for providing the infrastructure required to distribute games. Some people/companies can do it for less but it is the best option for a majority of sellers.
If the market maker did not the seller would get more revenue but would also eat the cost directly instead of paying someone else to do it.
This also neglects the fact that the programmatic market routes billions of dollars intended to be spent on real media (ad placements on real news websites etc), to fraudulent mobile apps and websites and bot traffic.
Serving the ads is probably much more expensive than serving the news site, since there is a ton of heavy algorithms to determine what ads to show.
Total costs for each depends on how much it costed to make the news article so is hard to say.
Static text is much cheaper than dynamic content. News isn't anything that couldn't be served out of a .txt or sqlite CMS.
News providers seem wholly uninterested in providing anything better and actually competing with better content providers
Does a landlord on a literal physical market take 30% of revenue? I find that unlikely.
How did we arrive here, where supposedly ‘efficient’ digital marketplace is a form of rent higher than actually building physical rent, and expenses on wages and materials for a typical business?
Ad platforms too are fundamentally about letting someone perceive ROI lesser than their real ROI, for your own benefit. For me, it falls under the same category as all of the above - zero productivity endeavours.
Maybe we should go back to the previous millenium and make usury illegal. Should fix all of these problems, albeit in a nuclear fashion.
Which is why market makers like Google quietly work very hard to discourage, prevent, interfere or buy their competition.
We seen dumb platforms with linear tv. Go watch any TV with an antenna.
Could you explain more on this. What do you think makes Google Ad or DoubleClick so special? And
>What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
Correct me if I am wrong, you are suggesting even if publisher only earns 30% of the revenue they still earn more than on other alternative platform?
Also users should benefit because they are getting relevant ads. Linear tv is notorious for non relevant ads like all the drug ads for conditions you don’t have. If you’re forced to see ads, wouldn’t you want ads that are relevant?
This is why I block all ads, but still appreciate super bowl commercials.
And I have discovered that this actually works on me. I like the Nike ads, so on the occasions when I buy sportswear, I have positive feelings about Nike stuff. I spend 100-10000x more on stuff that isn't sportswear, but I think Nike gets more value from me watching that ad than anyone who advertises some "relevant" SaaS product or whatnot.
Why would any advertiser pay the same in such a scenario?
They would obviously value your attention much less on average if that was a hard limit.
My emotions matter. If I see a scary person who is not my friend, I yell "put him down" in my head, and take actions.
If that scary person knows more about me than I know about myself. I bark like a small dog. Arf! Arf! Arf! In English, that roughly translates to "Get out of my sight! Get out of my head! Then I'll feel fine again."
If this doesn't make sense to you, then you are suggesting a world where money/truth matter more than emotions. But then why do people make money, if not just to survive? Arf! Arf! Arf! (This originally translated to: "Don't engage with me unless you value low-status people")
Since everyone values emotions differently... there would still need to be some intermediary, like money, for emotions to have any agreed upon value at all beyond narrow circles.
Otherwise what’s stopping, e.g. nihlists, from valuing your emotions at zero or a negative value?
Rewards of up to $.50 for people willing to be scared to death (or, you know, moderate social media content).
With money, we can value emotions. Since everybody has some money, everybody's emotions (outside of children) will have positive value.
Relating to my original example:
I, as a provider of PII, feel scared about my information being sold. If Google has a $100/year option to stop my PII from being spread, I would consider buying it.
However, I predict now some people feel angry. They feel Google should not be allowed to do this. They won't pay Google to stop, they will go to the govt.
Considering this problem, I wonder what is the next step we would need to do to ensure a world of positive emotions and money.
> Otherwise what’s stopping, e.g. nihlists, from valuing your emotions at zero or a negative value?
Well, I think a lot of people value my emotions negatively, especially angry people and corporations. In particular, corporations like to take money and make it time consuming for me to get a refund.
As for people, I am at peace because I cannot change my skin color, face, or personality, but I can adjust my goals to be smaller/non-overlapping.
This is something that people in advertising say a lot, but it's generally not true. I do not want or benefit from you having "better" ad targeting - I will find your product if I want it without the sales pitch.
It’s probably not even possible for decision makers to discern it from noise.
Each user’s comment has to stand up under its own weight so to speak
So then why did you reply if you already knew your comment and the rest of the comment chain was irrelevant?
Pointing out that many people don't like relevant ads is then a significant thing to acknowledge.
You're acting like pclmulqdq brought up the idea out of nowhere, which is very much not the case.
What people think about ads does matter, and does affect the bottom line.
And it's just annoying for you to act like the dislike is just an "individual opinion" but the "people like relevant ads" claim isn't equally anecdotal.
In case you didn’t see, the user has already claimed to believe the entire comment chain is irrelevant, so your a bit late.
> what is your actual argument
Was it not clear? Okay I can try again.
When advertisers claim that relevant ads are something people want, that's very far from being universally true. Lots of people don't want that. Don't let them use that unsupported claim to support tracking.
Note that the desires of advertisers are not part of this particular argument. It's a simple claim and counterclaim.
Anyone can have an unlimited number of irrelevant opinions that they believe to possess this or that attribute, they may even genuinely believe so, yet it doesn’t amount to anything.
Even if the claimed argument was flawless… it seems strange to put a non sequitor at the beginning.
Not all ads are necessarily bad. Eg have you ever seen an ad for an event in your town? Maybe a play or a concert you'd want to see. Those to me feel more like "public notice: thing is happening" and every once in a while I'll actually go buy tickets. But technically, those are ads, just not the kind of exploitative ad you are talking about.
A good ad informs, while leaving the decision up to you. A bad ad distracts you with garbage and/or tries to get you to indulge in your worse impulses
I get those on the local town board, online in the town group I explicitly joined, and from people around. I do not want those on a random page when I'm trying to do something else.
Thank Dog that is a false dichotomy. I am not forced to see ads, my ad blockers are effective. Back in the day I moved mountains to get MythTV working so I could dodge the ads on linear TV
I do not want those creepy greedy monkeys anywhere near my data
No. A thousand times no!
No it doesn't. As explained by the parent, Google is in a unique position w.r.t to the publishers, the sellers and the bidders.
There's a ton of very talented adtech companies out there, but they only get to play an unfair game.
Lots of unrecorded meetings and “no notes taken” sessions
* Google unilaterally changing bid mechanics raising costs 15% https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-changed-ad-auctions-ra...
* Conversion attribution and cookie bombing fraud from both Criteo and Steelhouse https://finance.yahoo.com/news/criteo-versus-steelhouse-clic...
* Phunware click flooding fraud https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/17/ubers-l...
* A nearly unending list of different mobile ad frauds https://www.fraud0.com/resources/ad-fraud-cases-of-the-past-...
* Viewability fraud https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/31/procter-gamble-chief-markete...
* Session hijacking fraud https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/ad-indus...
This doesn't sound like a healthy and efficient industry. Not only do vendors clip the ticket aggressively, they divert dollars that advertisers are intending to go to quality media/real publishers, and siphon it off to fraudulent sites and apps where they generally take a higher margin.
Depending on how busy it is or how exotic your question one can easily be on hold for an hour or two. Then you get the bill and pay 54 euro per hour.
Google thought this was a great way to make money. The ad ran forever.
Makes you wonder which other phone numbers they highjacked.
Would they provide the same service if I copy some website?
There are probably people with large phone bills who didn't notice and ones who thought the tax office was just expensive to call.
There has to be some sort of competition for markets to be efficient, and you're essentially suggesting there hasn't been a viable alternative in a decade.
It can be great compared to next best and they are still harmed by illegal practices that make it worse off.
Not if Google illegally monopolizes the market unfairly hindering 'the next best alternative'.
> Google is not a "monopoly" in this space.
You've made that comment on a post where a judge has ruled "Google is illegally monopolizing"...
> In fact the world has far too many Google equivalents but absolutely no one comes close to Google in generating top dollars for publishers.
They have not been able to compete in a fair market.
This comment has some great examples.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719246
https://upriseup.co.uk/blog/something-doesnt-ad-up-google-ad...
https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2023/01/6371209cd0cce428b526...
Which part of this diagram is responsible for displaying ads of blue sweatshirt when I say "blue sweatshirt" in a room next to the room where my smartphone is?
Was looking over my mom's shoulder last week to see what site she was reading out some information from. It was "google.com" but looked like a third party website, probably this AMP thing? Google really is hijacking everything
Recently someone even posted a timeline of google starting to hide the keywords advertisers are buying and the increase in Google's ad revenue. Eye opening.
Google does search ads mostly, has competition with say, bing, amazon, chatgpt now.
On video ads they have competition with tiktok, netflix (even if they don't do ads I guess), and tv.
Maybe there's specific criteria that have legal precedent or sources, but I don't see it.
Nowadays, many companies backed up by investors with very deep pockets are doing this in all markets: start to buy middle-man companies in a space, it does not matter which one, dominate the market thanks to monopolistic power. Screw the clients making them pay too much, screw the providers paying them too little. Go for the next market.
Google does this for ads. But, with Apple, does the same for app vendors. Amazon does it for all kinds of brands with physical products. Uber does it for taxi drivers and their clients. All of them take a big chunk of the profit while making things more expensive, but they are the only real option to reach clients as they have used tactics to monopolize entire markets.
This should be impossible, because there are laws against it. If it is allowed the future of the economy is one big corporation with all workers working for it, and everybody buying from it. It looks like a scifi dystopia.
Has anyone done a normalized any% speedrun to breadlines on these two fierce contenders? Can monarchy get in on this?
Poor compared to what? The past when we were poorer?
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
... And, to be blunt, if things are better than ever, why is the US sliding straight into fascism?
... And you've gotten very close to the point without touching it. The country has been sliding, this whole time. Reagan arguably started the ball rolling. It just takes a long time to break down the democratic norms in a country this big.
But they're broken down now.
Nobody is being "disappeared". The word you are looking for is "deported". Deportation isn't a new idea or a new thing.
>The country has been sliding, this whole time. Reagan arguably started the ball rolling.
No it hasn't. The US became freer under all of those presidents, except George W. Bush and his surveillance programmes. None of them are fascists. In no case did the country end up closer to fascism after they were in.
The US is nowhere near fascism. The fact anyone thinks it is near it is just more evidence of how uneducated Americans are about the rest of the world.
Trump hasn't damaged or broken down any "democratic norms".
Yeah he claimed his election loss was illegitimate. So did Hilary Clinton! (It was all just a Russian hoax remember? Trump is a Russian agent--all the debunked Russiagate claims). It isn't like he started a civil war over it, unless you're one of those people that believes the absurd propaganda that claims he instigated an attempted coup by giving a speech where he didn't tell anyone to do anything, suggest anyone do anything, or or in any other way encourage or instigate anything.
I'm sorry your preferred candidate lost. I get it. It happens to us all. It isn't the end of the world. Presidents are allowed to act in accordance with the law--including their own stretched interpretations of it until they get kicked back by the courts--and that includes all the things Trump is being accused of.
This isn't about preferred candidates losing. I've had preferred candidates lose multiple times in my life for various positions.
This is the culmination of the process that has been rolling through America responding to an attack on our home soil by creating a Department of Homeland security. This is the last chance for it to stop getting worse. There isn't another step beyond "They can disappear you from the street and drop you in a prison in El Salvador with no trial."
> the Alien Enemies Act
... Is for wartime. It's "Enemies" as in the phrase "Enemies at war, in peace friends".
Who are we at war with right now? If you believe "terrorism," you have understood my point.
What are they up to these days?
Using "end game" as it seems to be here -- for the natural ultimate result -- Marx argued that as a pretty central thesis of his work (through the mechanism of capitalist development -> proletarian class consciousness -> socialist revolution -> socialism -> <stuff mostly left as an exercise for the reader> -> withering of the state -> communism.)
OTOH, a single entity run for the benefit of a narrow group of stakeholders employing all labor, supplying everything, and effectively enslaving everyone through private control of the means of production is not Communism, or even socialism (defined by proletarian control of the means of production) but just monopolistic capitalism (and, yes, this is where a major non-Leninist Communist criticism of Leninism, and its descendants like Stalinism and Maoism, that feature totalitarian control of a command economy by a narrow self-perpetuating party elite stems from.)
People always criticize that, and yet those systems delivered: They raised the Soviet citizens from mud huts to apartments within one generation. One thing that is prominent in the stories about the fall of the Eastern Bloc and its aftermath is how the Soviet citizens never thought that they could lose 'staples' like free education, healthcare, childcare, housing, food, paid vacations, maternity leave, guaranteed jobs etc in capitalism. They thought that they would have everything that Leninist socialism gave them in the USSR and an additional consumer economy. They were dumbfounded to find out that wasnt the case.
If the US killing people when they cant pay for healthcare or pushing the homeless outside city centers in the winter to have them freeze to death does not make capitalism 'cruel', then those systems werent cruel either.
Doublespeak poisons the mind.
And if one would bring up 'political persecution', capitalism persecutes the politically non-compliant harder than any eastern bloc country - and did so both in the 1950s and still does it today.
They do have a lot to do with “Communism” if by that you mean Leninism and its derivatives, all of which are state-capitalist systems in practice (in theory as a transitional developmental phase to socialism, but few ever transitioned out except a few like China that transitioned to something like the fascist form of corporatism, which is in many ways, as an economic system divorced from the rest of fascism, a midway point between private capitalism and state capitalism.)
and by socialism i mean the 4th international, the 3rd international, et al, whence were spawned many socialist parties that called themselves socialists, but which are in full agreement with what casual observers would call communism and or marxism. it's all distinction without difference.
source: i used to be an active communist
No, they didn't; the people who did the latter were different people, decades later than the former, who, despite claiming ideological continuity, departed radically from the theory of the former. The original critics saw capitalism as (like socialism, but prior to it) an imperfect but necessary developmental stage on the road to the end-stage of communism, while the people who built the totalitarian dystopias saw it as a thing to be avoided entirely, adapted Marxist theory to bypass it, etc.
> and by socialism i mean the 4th international, the 3rd international, etc.,
Obviously, the 3rd and 4th international were not the people who wrote the original critiques in which capitalism was named
> but which are in full agreement with what casual observers would call communism and or marxism
“Casual observers” are called that for a reason.
> source: i used to be an active communist
Not at all surprised; you seem to still deeply hold to the propaganda of one of the Leninist-derived branches, even having abandoned it as an ideology/identity.
i won't argue the rest of the flaws in your response because you are clearly a bitter-ender
That’s what so remarkable: we have a robust system of antitrust laws in this country, they just haven’t been enforced in decades. Thank god the Biden admin started trying to use them again, and that Trump hasn’t stopped these cases in their tracks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...
Laws, otoh, are not magic. Making a law doesn’t solve the problem. Laws require people with guns to go enforce them. The government has no incentive to use force against the people lining their pockets, and so laws tend to be enforced primarily on the poor and the working class. Only when the majority of the votes of the public could be swayed will government attack the donor class.
Even if they play games with the auctions to keep the price up, at the end of the day X company is spending $5 per thousand clicks (or whatever) because they think it's worth it. Google can charge whatever they want, they run the platform, and it's not as if anyone is forced to use them.
I just don't see how you could in the same breath (how the government basically has) that the app store isn't a monopoly, but Google ads are. There's other ad companies, there is no other way to get an app on iOS.
Specifically, part of the case found google liable for “unlawfully [tying] its publisher ad server and ad exchange” in violation of the Sherman antitrust act. Basically, google has locked down both the supply side (sites with space the sell for ads) and demand side (market of advertisers bidding on that space) so it can play both sides - and (crucially!) it has integrated them so as to lock in both advertisers and publishers. That’s how you unfairly build a monopoly.
And funny that you use the App Store as an example. Two years ago google lost an antitrust case brought by epic games about their android store practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Google?wprov=sft...
>Two years ago google lost an antitrust case brought by epic games about their android store practices:
It's wild this ever happened when their competitor literally doesn't allow third party apps installed in any way.
>supply side (sites with space the sell for ads) and demand side (market of advertisers bidding on that space) so it can play both sides - and (crucially!) it has integrated them so as to lock in both advertisers and publishers.
You could argue every grocery store does this, they provide the 'supply side' (shelving), brands negotiate for both shelf space and shelf positioning. There's not a super obvious bidding market like Google setup, though ironically Google's method actually makes it easier for smaller companies to participate. Getting a small item in a major grocery store chain is a major move that many companies simply can't do.
An example from the case would be: Google bought Admeld. Then it disabled it's real time bidding feature. This created short term losses for them but gave them long term advantage in market control.
> Even if they play games with the auctions to keep the price up
Then it should be noticed, competitors should form, and the market should move away from this provider. Yet this has not happened because Google keeps buying those competitors.
> and it's not as if anyone is forced to use them.
Technically? Yes. Practically? No.
> that the app store isn't a monopoly, but Google ads are.
Our federal courts are separated into districts. Not all of them use the same precedents and market logic when deciding cases. This is probably why congress passed a law that prevents large companies from removing cases to the district of their choice and instead forces them to hold the case where the prosecutor decides.
The latter point is one reason why this case ended up differently.
> There's other ad companies
Loss leading, exclusive contracts, and price fixing are all crimes that can be committed in that environment. The bar for anti trust isn't "100% market domination." It's actually pretty nuanced. That's a good thing.
There is no other way to get an ad on sites that use Google Ads, just as there's no other way to get an app on iOS. These seem to be perfectly parallel to me: in either case you can pay a company to get access to their user base or you can choose to not pay that company to get access to their users. But if you make that choice, in either case you're locked out of a large market.
I agree with you that there's a strong argument to be made that the cases should have been decided the same way, but I also think they made the right call with Apple, so that leaves me reevaluating my gut instinct on this one.
Please clarify your statement
Quality ads would be at a huge premium.
Convincing all of these sites that Google, Meta, or other services, are "superior" for ads genuinely seems like incredible marketing. They've siphoned up enormous amounts of money and in return put in place a miserable user experience while making media companies wholly reliant on them.
Sell "dumb" ads with effort made to make the ads simultaneously stand out and fit into the theme of the site. Like how quality newspapers do it sometimes.
Buffett is a rare gem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful
It never managed more than modest success and never expanded far outside its initial sphere. It shut down in 2018 because it was unable to compete with all the monopolist walled garden ad spaces.
There are various small projects that could claim to be successors to that ethos -- but (to a rounding error) no one has heard of them because, contrary to your claim, the revealed "premium" that users place on "quality ads" is dwarfed by the premium that advertisers place on aggressive attention vampires (and the latter are the ones actually paying)
I understand why such a company will never make big money, but I don't see why it couldn't operate and survive. Running a small-scale ad network incurs small-scale costs. I guess the problem would burnout of people maintaining it.
I manage to keep them mostly out of it by paying for worthy games and deleting the rest.
However I would in fact happily welcome _some_ ads. Ones that would simply inform me of existence of masterpieces like Tiny Bubbles or Monument Valley rather than peddle anything. This idea of a tiny ad network with curated content comes up in my head often. Sure it won't make any money it would do some good.
People like to disparage Apple Arcade as some sort of failure for not having enough "AAA" titles, whatever they are supposed to be.
But yet, Apple constantly adds new titles to the catalogue, and you can play them all for a reasonable cost without vile ads for gambling, casino, adult and microtransaction games!
Also, in my experience the games all seem to run fine on old-ish hardware like the iPhone 11.
Google is on top because they do the best job; I use Yandex primarily, but I switch back to google all the time for coding related questions. In terms of advertising, there's billions of views on Facebook/Instagram/X to get, in addition to all the other sites. I get they're a big player, but I worry we're just beating Google because they're down, not because it's good for the consumer.
It's just a term that gets simplified by journalist and articles, because no one is familiar with monopoly power.
From the court filing:
> Plaintiffs have proven that Google has willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising.
As someone who runs a large platform in the music niche, every independent interesting webapp in the kpop community besides me has been killed by Google's ceaseless enshittification and I'd be thrilled if everyone who worked there had their stock options reduced to 0 to atone for what they've done to the internet.
You think a court hasn't considered that angle?
Aside from that:
> now AI is taking over, which will further weaken their grip.
Maybe you've missed that they're pulling ahead of OpenAI on the AI front?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...
Companies become monopolies often through doing their job the best. Companies stay the best because they're monopolies.
Everything else. Cloud provider, operating systems, browsers, hosting business apps, phone licenser, Internet provider, smart home manufacturer, and various moonshots. Their ad company is a monopoly because of those other services.
Google as an ad company that can't leverage those other lines of business to gain an advantage over other ad companies still has a viable ad business. They can compete on the basis of that lone company's strengths.
("If you're nothing without this suit, then you shouldn't have it")
I see your point, but also, if Google continued to own all these other things, it would still be a terrifyingly large spread, no?
Who gets what part of the company is the wrong question to ask. The org chart would get split along those business units. In all likelihood, the company called "Google" would be the software side, since that's where search lives.
(NYT really ought to add “illegal” to their title.)
> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Kind of funny how they basically predicted Google's degradation years in advance.
This is a conundrum humanity must address if we’re to survive over the long term, IMO.
Who's to say that this is not actually an evolutionary adaptation that allows the more ruthlessly led tribes to dominate their enemies? The stat about 1/25 of individuals being sociopaths is very telling
DNA isn't destiny.
That's precisely how we've changed so drastically is an evolutionary blink of an eye.
And now, our cultural evolution has reached the point where we're even able to change our own genetics with planning and foresight in a single generation. So it seems to me that the blind watchmaker is essentially irrelevant now.
Greed is humanity's greatest weakness. When faced with the opportunity of unimaginable wealth, most people would sacrifice their ethics and morals, assuming they had any to begin with.
I don’t think they are inherently ethical, but they were young and naive with good intentions (Do No Evil, and all that). The position they put forward is ethical. But that youthful naivety is what the less-ethical (though still quite intelligent, as you point out) take advantage of.
Further, again as you said, greed is at the root of it.
Hopefully that clarifies my point?
Google bought Doubleclick for $3 Billion. Today it is worth $22 Billion. When Google got into ad-tech, they drifted away from their core market: users. And started to endorse the other side that turned users into products.
But stage 3 is just as crucial: once the advertisers are locked in, make things worse for THEM just for your benefit. That’s how google makes such obscene margins on adverting. Publishers and advertisers would love an alternative - but google has done an excellent job of preventing that through unlawful monopolization tactics. Hence thus case, and why it’s so important.
That said, I feel like going after Big Tech is a massive misuse of resources. Not because it's not a monopoly (it is), but because there's a far more important monopoly that should be broken up: healthcare insurance.
Something like 7 corporations dominate 70% of the healthcare insurance market. The AMA had a study last year that concluded these insurance companies are charging monopoly pricing.
This is why Americans are paying astronomical prices for healthcare.
This is IMO by far the most pressing issue. Yet the FTC is seemingly spending all its time going after Big Tech, which has a comparatively lower impact on the quality of everyday Americans' lives.
(But talk is cheap.)
If you want to see more, get Lina Khan to be chair again!
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...
Anything informational now I use ai.
If Google comes up with the plans, it's better than some antagonist.
Mail. Internet browsers? Does it really need to be stated? Open source. Kubernetes. Open source. Tensor architecture. Freely released.
I don't see the argument for breaking Google up other than people are holding some vendetta against Google for being successful AND a pretty good citizen in the overall landscape so to speak.
If anyone needs to be broken up it's Microsoft. Microsoft actively harms every other competitor by bundling all their services together to the point where businesses won't even look at other software (teams? Azure is basically sold on nepotism).
Their cloud generates a couple of billions in profit each year.
Besides that, I don't think giving away anything for free justifies any activity. If we're trying to compare to Microsoft, remember that Internet Explorer was free, and modern day Microsoft literally owns Github.
Google is not anti-competitive. At no point am I forced or even "guided" into doing business with Google, at any stage, in any department. There are 8 billion other ad-networks out there, and there are plenty of mail providers to choose from, and plenty of search providers to choose from, and plenty of cloud providers to choose from. If you're on gmail (even business), or Google Cloud, or Adsense, there really isn't much stopping you from switching to something else. There's no real lock-in.
You cannot say the same with Microsoft. A lot of businesses are so dependent on MS's offerings they might as well just be glorified subsidiaries. You don't really have an Excel drop in, or an AD drop in, or a messaging app drop in that comes with all the other services. Google doesn't hand out Cloud credits with the express purpose of roping more of your business infrastructure under one company.
Internet Explorer was not free. You needed Windows. And if you had Windows you HAD IE, regardless of whether you wanted it or not, or even tried to remove it.
While you're welcome to this opinion you might want to address the fact that Google has recently lost THREE separate trials, each of which individually and separately produced a verdict that they are, in fact, in violation of laws against unfair competition.
Can you use Gmail, Google Drive, Chrome sync etc and opt out of allowing Google to use any of your data for advertising services?
All of that I can do _for free_ with little to no hassle.
This was not the case with IE. You are not doing a fair comparison here, and it's bordering on dishonest.
DoubleClick for Publishers placed restrictions on how publishers could work with non-Google ad exchanges and tilted things in favor of Google's exchange. Third-party exchanges weren't given information about the specific impression before bidding and an advertiser bid submitted on AdX could win even if there was a higher bid submitted on a third-party exchange. DFP also banned publishers from setting higher price floors for AdX than for third-party exchanges, but allowed setting higher price floors for third-party exchanges than for AdX.
In response to Google's unfair ad auctions, publishers eventually started using "header bidding", a technique for getting real-time competitive bidding from multiple ad exchanges. However, Google still controlled the largest ad-buying platform, DV360. DV360 was the top buyer on every third-party ad exchange in addition to AdX. Google modified DV360 to automatically lower bids submitted to third-party ad exchanges such that they were always below an advertiser's maximum budget. When the publisher ad server received the bid, it would use it as the floor price to solicit more bids on AdX. DV360 would then bid the publisher's maximum budget via AdX, taking the win away from the third-party exchange.
The decision also goes into why ad networks are not a substitute for the combination of publisher ad servers and ad exchanges: "Although ad networks are another tool for connecting advertisers to publishers, the sophisticated publishers who receive the majority of open-web display advertising revenue do not view ad networks as substitutes for ad exchanges because ad networks offer very limited control and are unable to place bids from disparate demand sources in competition with each other." The government never claims that Google has monopoly power in the publisher-facing ad network market (i.e. AdSense).
Do yourself a favor and research a little bit.
Any other business burying money into various endeavors would have to cut losses at some point, which underscores the point of an unfair monopoly.
Google isn't operating at a loss in all products. About 12% of revenue is cloud; about 12% is everything else. Their business apps is estimated to be a billion-dollar business on its own. Cloud is profitable, and earns probably 1.5-3 billion dollars a year in profit.
Google has a massive graveyard full of killed projects, they are cutting their losses, few companies cut as much as they do:
Split off Android to swim on its own and we get an iPhone monopoly. Split off Workspace and we go back to the days of MSOffice's monopoly. Splitting out Chrome essentially kills the World Wide Web as an application platform as no one else wants to support it. Cloud would probably stand alone competitively, but if not it's going to be an Amazon monopoly.
Basically Google is strong in search and ads (also AI, though that isn't a revenue center yet and there's lots of competition) and second place in everything else. IMHO it's very hard[1] to make a pro-consumer argument behind killing off all those second place products.
[1] And yeah, they pay my salary, but I work on open source stuff and know nothing about corporate governance.
Why? Android appears to be profitable.
Which is to say, the parts of Android that are "profitable" are the parts tied to the broader corporate product suite.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Pixel devices? Android devices being paid by Google to use Google's app store, browser, and default search engine? What does any of that have to do with whether or not Android is separated?
You really think Graphene/Lineage/etc... devices have a chance in the market vs. Apple Computer?
What does that have to do with whether or not the Android 'division' of Google would survive being spun off?
Again, there are Google-free Android phones in the market today. They do very poorly.
You walked right into that one, sorry.
As you hint at it, "the World Wide Web as an application platform" specifically happened more because Google was wrestling with Microsoft over the future of personal computing than because of its inherent qualities. (And then they both got sidelined by Apple's iPhone, but Google (unlike Microsoft) did manage to both enter that battlefield and hold that front.)
They essentially created a test market for their competitors, then simply acquired the ones who presented any kind of competition or had decent enough management to properly manage the very thin margins they were working at.
So yeah, even when the govt thought they had leveled the playing field and allowed competition, all it did was give those baby bell companies another competitive advantage.
In what way? They all just re-consolidated back into monopolies. I have one choice of telecom provider in my location: if I don’t like Xfinity, I get to eat shit. At least Ma Bell had to get the government’s permission to raise prices; frankly, I’d prefer having that back.
It's fairly straightforward to argue that the internet as we know it wouldn't have been possible without the Bell labs split up. There were dozens of large telecommunications companies that were enabled by the split, and those companies built much of the equipment used in the early internet.
Not to mention Unix.
Instead we ended up paying for dark fiber with companies having no incentive to use it.
you mean, before monopolies?
Both monopolies and monopolistic actions are illegal, each alone is enough to be in violation of the law.
This probably calls for even stronger consumer protections, since the natural limit of human scalability created something of a limitation as to how large and dominant a company could be.
How you can argue such things are democratic are beyond me. There is nothing democratic about trillion dollar corporations that can ruin your business for refusing to play their game.
All of a sudden, Adsense revenue has gone to basically zero. $90 of earnings from Sunday has even disappeared.
There is no way to contact a real person at Google. You can just post in their dumb little forum and someone with no authority who doesn't even work there will reply to you with the same pointless info from their FAQ.
If things go the way they have been, it seems like roughly $2k in revenue that's been pretty consistent for the last decade is going to be basically zero this year and there's nothing I can do about it.
Thankfully, this is just a side project and I'll be fine, but its not hard to see how they could screw someone over who relied on it.
I don't see how this is ruining your business. A vendor is not playing well with you, just go to another one?
They didn't screw you over. You chose to use them. You didn't pay them, they're paying you.
If you don't like that arrangement, feel free to join a partner agency that can buy and sell ads for you on the ad exchange or go to a different ad network.
Then, if they do something you don't like, you actually have very real power to compel them to do something.
Remember, you get what you pay for.
Is a farmer "a failure who shouldn't have a business" if some asshole buys up every single railroad, port, and truck in the country he lives in?
If your business model is to make yourself completely dependent on a single third party, then you shouldn't have a business.
It's completely reasonable to use adsense to generate revenue and then be upset when they inevitably fuck you (and they will). It's not a chance to make a (completely uninformed) "ah, that's your own fault" comment, deflecting from scumbag practices google engages in.
I'm sure you also believe that she was asking for it because she was wearing a short skirt and your dad was right to hit you because you wouldn't shut up.
This is insane. In no free society would this be just.
They need to rightfully be broken up to ensure a free society for everyone, not just the cohort of people that own alphabet stocks.
If Google blocks my access to the only viable ad network do you really think it's reasonable to say I need to set up my own ad exchange?
Hackers call every big business they do not like a "monopoly". What's next, Burger King is a monopoly? I dislike Google more than most and would never buy nor sell ads with them, but they have no monopoly on advertising.
> What’s next, Burger King is a monopoly?
I think this just illustrates that you’re not grasping the concept. Of course Burger King isn’t a monopoly. With my car when looking for a drive through dining experience I can go to McDonalds. Or Wendy’s. Or whatever. When operating a small to medium size web site that depends on advertising for revenue the viable alternatives to Google essentially don’t exist.
Situation 2: You want to let others advertise their products or service in your space. There is an endless amount of companies which you can contact to make advertising deals. If you are too lazy to do that and want a third party to take care of it, then you can use Google as a middle man. But they are not obliged to do business with you.
If the justice wants to go after Google, then they could (and should) prosecute Google (and Meta, and Twitter) for all the scam and malware ads they permit through their platform. That is billions of dollars of money laundering, and the CEOs should be imprisoned for this. For life.
You’re commenting on an article with the title “Google is illegally monopolizing” which is reporting on the official verdict of a federal trial where Google was well represented and lost.
Just like there is a difference between theft, burglary and robbery.
You might even argue that there’s no other definition less abitrary than this one, and it’s your understanding of what the word means that needs revision.
An appeal to authority is an excellent way to argue when the authority in question has the ability to determine and define the answer in question.
Calling a company an illegal monopoly at the ci conclusion of a trial is analogous to calling a person a convicted murderer because a court says they are.
Do you have your own definition of a kilometer too?
You and me however, are not involved in any way, and do not have to respect anything this ignorant judge says or decides.
It's also not one party, it's successive Democratic and Republican administrations that prosecuted the cases.
It's also not just Federal, the most recent victory was also prosecuted by the Attorneys General of 17 separate states, also from a mix of political parties.
Google is a monopoly engaged in anti-competitive actions that have severely harmed the markets it participates in. That's a demonstrated fact at this point.
You're welcome to advocate for a redefinition of the words we're using here, or just to legalize monopoly power, which presumably is a political goal you have and would have the effect of causing judges to reach different outcomes based on this new law, but there's no value in arguing with reality.
Breaking up Google will help everyone everywhere.
Any that you’ve had good luck with? My research on this has come up with no good options for non-game apps.
Imagine for a second that, instead of 1 Google, there are tens of thousands of alternatives. Offering good customer support becomes once again a competitive advantage. No sane customer thinks "yep, I want no recourse at all in case of problem so google's profit margins are bigger for the sake of their stakeholders".
Moreover, the cost of doing customer support grows less than linearly thanks to economies of scale, from which Google benefits disproportionally, and here again Google chose profits over quality at the expense of the consumer.
For example, prohibiting Apple-Style search deals would mean that Google gets a smaller amount of traffic, but that traffic would come with zero cost. That could end up being more profitable. A similar argument applies to Chrome or any other customer acquisition vehicle.
The real barriers to making Google competitive are fixable but require a different sort of regulation outside of antitrust.
A historical parallel is when tobacco advertising was banned, and cigarette companies because more profitable. Advertising greatly affected which cigarettes people smoked but had a smaller (though still real) impact on whether they smoked. So the companies kept most of the revenue with none of the advertising cost.
why would anti-trust rules prevent _anyone_ from bidding? Apple can sell their browser search, just like mozilla can sell firefox search. And anyone with a browser could do the same. Unless the anti-trust rules somehow become so overarching that the selling of space for advertising becomes illegal?
Context is important.
The engine is also used in several other web browsers, many of which do not have the clout to survive solely on ads. Yet another reason Google claiming this is absurd.
If the rules were targeted at Google only then Google's lawyers would argue this is unequal application of the law. Even if the courts rejected Google's argument there'd be a real risk end up with exactly the same situation but with Bing in a couple of years time as they become the default search on every device / browser.
If "pay for default" deals were banned altogether then Firefox might be seriously hurt, which isn't exactly good for the competitive tech ecosystem.
After the FCC agreed that the fairness doctrine applied here every station was required to run one PSA for every 10 tobacco ads. The industry, realizing that nobody would stop advertising without being forced to, actually lobbied Congress for the passage of the law banning it. One reason total revenue went up was that stations were no longer required to run anti-smoking PSAs.
If the default search were randomly assigned and Google investors were nefarious the investors (not Alphabet) could simply help launch 30 different subpar search engines. Then if a user landed on one of those as a default search engine: the user would switch to Google.
If google actually went about organizing the worlds information, that would be wonderful.
Aren’t they? It doesn’t sound like those two interpretations are mutually exclusive.
This isn't what Google does, they generally lower prices for consumers and the competition is only a click away.
I’m genuinely curious because some apps can be hard to monetize in any other way.
> This isn't what Google does [...]
Odd, then, that this is the second case within a year where Google has been found, in fact, to have violated the Sherman Act. This suggests that your description of what the Sherman Act means, or of what Google does (or both) are wrong in significant ways.
It was not established by legislation but rather as a matter of conservative legal doctrine. Before Bork the commonly held evaluation standard was based on the Rule Of Reason.
The Sherman Antitrust Act didn’t establish any guidelines for how it was suppose to be interpreted (the whole thing is only a few pages in length) and the Clayton Act only expanded upon what actions could be considered as part of an Anti trust case.
The consumer welfare standard has no basis in legislation, only legal doctrine.
It’s unfortunate we haven’t codified anything more concrete, as the consumer welfare standard has a number of flaws, as admittedly did prior legal doctrine.
The Rule of Reason was more rigorous, though not flawless, as far as market competition goes though, my view is it is a better legal doctrine overall and could be updated to better address todays and future concerns, particularly with digital goods and technology.
The market consolidation we've seen since, and the concentration of power, have been absolute poison for both liberal democracy and the good aspects of capitalism, so far as contributing to the common good.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
Facebook has >$100B ad revenue [1]. Does that compete with Google? Reasonable people can probably disagree about exactly how much so. From an advertisers perspective they compete for the same marketing budget, but from a consumers point of view they feel like different products.
Things get even more tricky when we compare YouTube to TikTok, or Amazon search result ads to Google search ads.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/544001/facebooks-adverti...
Here, the products are Google Ad Exchange (Doubleclick Ad Exchange) and the Publisher Ad Server (DoubleClick for Publishers) which are now Google Ad Manager and the customers are publishers selling space for ads on their websites.
Website publishers can't really use Facebook as a direct replacement, so they're not in the same market.
They are not doing well with certain areas like social, GCP, messaging, enterprise etc. But it's not an existential threat.
This is truly how the average person outside of the tech bubble thinks.
The general public collectively has the memory of a goldfish, and seems to have the strongest opinions about things it understands the least.
If im Google or anoother tech company im going to be Divesting from the United States as much as possible.
I think the only real risk is that Google could just buy Trump out on the matter, now that we live in Russia of the West, resolving a dispute like this can just be lining someone's pockets enough.
From a purely idealistic view, I'm disappointed in how many people and organizations have "obeyed in advance" to try to curry favor with Trump.
But idealism aside, its also just weird to me how oblivious they all are to the fact that historically it ends badly because it will always be an entirely one-sided and fully transactional relationship where absolute loyalty is demanded of them but zero loyalty is returned to them. And they will be thrown under the bus as soon as it is expedient.
Its almost comical how badly being a Trump ally has worked out for so many people (eg. Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, etc)
For example, it seems like nobody uses Oracle products anymore, yet Oracle stock is at an ATH.
Microsoft Windows is less popular than ever and yet Microsoft stock is at an ATH.
Apple peaked years ago and yet ATH.
Does anyone still use Facebook regularly? FB stock is ATH.
Something doesn't add up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)
Oracle did what they always do, buy shit out and then milk people for money. That's all they do with it, and why nobody actually uses Oracle's JDK anymore.
The economy moved away from being founded on Marx's C-M-C to firmly being fixated on M-C-M' which in plain English, means "We now use Money to make more Money, leveraging Commodities as an intermediate step. The Money is all that matters, not the social benefit/harm" -- IMO, that helps explain why, even though many people are suffering financially, the market is at an ATH.
This is the classic sign of a company that has achieved monopoly.
They don't serve their customers any more because they don't have to.
1) Fix your search engine. Stop ignoring keywords, your product as it is currently sucks
2) Stop antagonizing people with user hostile actions in Chrome
3) Enough with the ideological censorship
Also, what censorship are you referring to? Them complying with the new regime in advance and removing pride month from the calendar? Or are you playing into the conservative fantasy of being supposedly censored online despite evidence of the contrary [2] ?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/google-calen...
[2] https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/publication/false-accusation-the-u...
What's this referring to? It seems to me they've stayed out of the culture war stuff (compared to Meta who is wading in it, for example).
From the money perspective it was Google. But I agree on Facebook's contribution, as they've pretty much created an advertising cartel together
I would argue that monster.com and craiglist, which collectively removed the majority of newpaper revenue, were probably the nail in the coffin. You can see some of the decline pre-internet in this 1999 take: https://niemanreports.org/newspapers-arrive-at-economic-cros... ... which already laments the decline of journalism.
Pre-internet, editorial boards were fundamentally gatekeepers of knowledge. They were certainly not unbiased, but for the most part they had a level of integrity. Now, one can find (or have pushed) any "narrative" one chooses, whether or not it bears any resemblance to reality. While Google does make it easier to find any/all of this content, I would argue that the intrinsic incentives of social media platforms for more engagement are probably the high order bit.
That's an interesting take that I've never heard before. Do you have any source that goes into detail?
Notably high profits from long-distance dialup calls kept online services stuck at 2400 bps for most of the 1980s. Futurists circa 1960-1970 thought online services were going to become widespread about 15 years than they really did and AT&T was the #1 thing to blame.
US wages paid to manufacturing jobs are going down year-over-year, because of automation, and, uh, other factors. But the amount of products that are produced has grown year over year... Or was growing, until waves at everything in 2025.
The fact that we actually were enforcing antitrust at the time absolutely prevented MS from getting a strangehold on the consumer internet as it was taking off. It's the reason you're posting on this forum in the first place, as it was essential to the success of tech startups in the first dot-com era.
Then we stopped enforcing antitrust laws, and after about 10 years or so the new market leaders had developed the stifling set of monopolies we're all dealing with today.
Breaking up Google (which seems inevitable, this is the third distinct recent case where they've been proven to be a monopoly) is likely to be good for literally everyone, including even Google shareholders.
Unless the argument is that shareholders don't know what's good for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
So when we talk about "the shareholders" we also include the CEO.
I guess the argument here is that that actually doesn't work and the CEO would prefer being in charge of a larger company even if it personally costs him tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
That's what I'm skeptical of.
And just in general the incentive of management is to preserve monopoly because it’s a lot less work to sit and collect monopoly profits than to actually compete and win.
The principal agent issue here is that management can sit on their ass all day and make a lot of money instead of working like hell to compete and possibly getting replaced but ultimately creating more shareholder value.
We can't to any P2P shit on the internet, instead everything goes through a middle man who will take your money or flood you with ads.
We have bandwidth limitations on every connection, even though bandwidth is cheaper than it's ever been.
The only universal communications system is still... Regular-ass phone calls and e-mail, which is like 100+ and 50 years old respectively. Everything else is proprietary and doesn't work with other systems.
We have to launch tens of thousands of satellites and beam data into outer fucking space in order to get internet to people.
Most of the "internet" all runs in 1 of 3 cloud providers.
We are forced to use Chrome on Windows, or use a Phone to browse the web or deal with endless captchas and having to prove that we are humans.
Search engines are all fucked and barely work. Everything is full of junk and trash. Now we need that chip production to run massive data centers to train some AI on how to sift through all the trash.
I don't know who else to blame but the tech industry itself.
That trial found Microsoft guilty of antitrust practices and ordered the company to be broken up. What caused it to be a waste of time was that Microsoft appealed the decision, which bought them enough time that the 2000 election happened and the Bush DoJ decided to give them a slap on the wrist instead of continuing to pursue a breakup.
I know nothing about the Microsoft decision nor the politics involved. I am simply commenting upon the quote above. An Appellate Court rules, in large part, based upon the record before the trial court and the arguments presented to the App Ct. It is therefore certainly possible for a change in administration to impact an App Ct's decision if the change in administration changed the nature of the briefs and oral argument presented by the DOT to the App Ct.
Again, I have absolutely no knowledge of the details in this case. I'm just pointing out that a change in administration can certainly have an impact upon an Appellate Court's ultimate decision by altering the nature of the presentation to the Court.
Actually it helped the telecom industry prosper because of independent innovation. The innovators became separate from the utilizers. This allowed both sides of the industry to mature into full three-part businesses.
I will give you that it killed other shiny unprofitable technologies. But imagine if that same thing happened with IBM? Where would IBM be today? How many old tech would be shown the door? How many companies would be buying the latest and greatest innovations?
You're ignoring the reverse causality. Antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the 1990s/2000s put them on edge, and made them think twice about strong-arming their competition. Back when Google was starting to make a name for themselves, MS strongly considered adding a warning on Internet Explorer, telling people to "beware" of any results they see on Google. MS eventually decided against it, because of the antitrust magnifying glass they were under. Having a level playing field allowed Google to grow exponentially, and eventually rendered MS' monopoly irrelevant.
Monopolies use anticompetitive tactics to preserve their moat, and continue being monopolies. When antitrust legislation works effectively, this moat disappears, and the monopolist is eventually overrun and becomes irrelevant.
Are we gonna pretend W<Intel> never happened?
Especially this:
> the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.
US&A has already turned into idiocracy.
Throw in some "that thing sells ads" and endless tarpit discussion ensues with no clear conclusion.
We should be better than this.
Is this lowest percentage of market for a company being found monolopy?
You can read decision here. No mention of search.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...
Of course this doesn't mean the monopoly is in "search", but before you complain that I just grepped the document for the keywords without reading it, here's the actual relevant text:
Plaintiffs have proven that Google has willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising. For over a decade, Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets. Google further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive policies on its customers and eliminating desirable product features. In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web. Accordingly, Google is liable under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.
I really don't know what to make of your comments here -- either you read the document and decided to just spin it as some braindead decision, or you didn't read the document and just wantonly claimed it didn't mention "search".
In so doing, they leave Google no choice but to reluctantly comply in behaving like a monopoly.
This flagrant behavior is punishable by exposure to pages and pages of spam, advertising, inauthentic content, nonsensical AI summaries (unless 'fucking' is added to the query) and malware.
Our reporter tried reaching out to a few representatives of the people to see what they have to say for themselves, but they were too busy doom-scrolling YouTube shorts or TikTok to even blink their eyes.