I don't think this article explains it well. Google sells ad space on behalf of the publishers and also sells the ads on behalf of the advertisers. It also runs the auction that places the ads into the ad space. See this graphic https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7. Parts of this can definately be broken up without destroying Google.
And crucially, there are leaked emails, other evidence that demonstrate (at the very least historical and occasional) corruption of this dual- (multi?) agency arrangement. Among the allegations:
I'm willing to believe there's an issue with Google's ad sales, but this comment doesn't have the specifics I'm interested in - in spite of all of the citations.
Thank you very much for your comment. It used to be my favorite saying was "lie with statistics". I think it needs to be updated to "lie with citations".
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.
> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory.
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 was argued that this approach allows Google to charge higher prices to advertisers while sending less revenue to publishers such as news websites.
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...
You could limit to one mark and a bunch of planted bidders in an attempt to control competition. If you win with your plants, you get to pay yourself anyway.
I think they meant that Google managed to limit the number of bidders for ad placement - they shut out other advertising groups -, so they could then charge what they want to those who need to advertise their business or perish, and take what they want from websites that publish ads as well (take a larger cut from the 'ad inventory' understood either as ad space or ads to be published). In this sense the linked article states:
"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."
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.
If we're to compare Google's situation to that of finance companies on other markets, even a small part of what Google did would result in a significant part of their execs and maybe a few tech staff wearing orange jumpsuits for these companies. Given the nature of Google's transgression and the way they've been robbing their own customers, they'd deserve it.
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.
When a media buyer puts $1.00 in on one side of the system, on average only $0.60 makes it to the publisher. In some cases less than $0.50 gets to them.
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.
As someone who has worked in AdTech I would respectfully disagree. It is indeed complex but it is incredibly efficient. Also it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue. What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
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.
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.
I was most impressed by a Google Ad that showed up if you searched for the Dutch tax office. It would only show the name "Tax office" with a free to call phone number under it. Only the hyperlink pointed at a paid number 90 cent per minute.
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?
They didn't act alone, the paid number had to be approved by someone and the phone provider also had to accept the bill. I don't have numbers but since I know multiple people who got the strange phone bill my guess would be at least hundreds of thousands of succesful click thoughts. Some called the tax office regularly around the busiest time of the year before they got the bill and found out.
There are probably people with large phone bills who didn't notice and ones who thought the tax office was just expensive to call.
Google let similar things run in Germany that were impersonating government offices (which is illegal in multiple ways), and they never lifted a finger when the malicious ads were reported, because they still made money in the end.
> Also it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue. What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
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.
It was 10 years ago when I was serious about it but I found every monetization venue other than Google was a joke. If you had the right kind of site you could make money with Adult Friend Finder but everything else paid somewhere between 0-10% what Google did and it wasn’t worth the brand destruction that usually resulted.
> it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue
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.
> On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"?
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.
> One where the market maker is taking up the cost of providing a market
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?
Unfortunately a lot of economic activity in general today is just money-on-money financialism. It is all just gambling and rent seeking and dishonesty. These practices are whitewashed and given various names. The one for rent-seeking is "market making".
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.
Are you saying that serving ads costs more than running a news site?
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.
It is 'incredibly efficient' because it is incredibly good at predicting clicks, conversions, or even conversion values. Which in turn makes it efficient. Sure, there is something called "auction" there, but Sothesby's or Tattersalls generally don't have buyers bidding based on what some machine-learning prediction AI computed in a jiffy (or maybe they do these days, who knows).
There are three parties. Media Buyers, publishers and users. As a publisher, you can go with “dumb” platforms that don’t deliver quality users to media buyers because of relevancy, you’ll make less money m. Apple ad platform is 40/60 split but for media buyers, it’s not efficient so we spend less money on it. Assume publishers make less money with it as well.
We seen dumb platforms with linear tv. Go watch any TV with an antenna.
I am on the purchasing side. Google is very efficient when delivering traffic especially their Max Performance product. Probably the cheapest of all platforms. So they are serving relevant ads to users who engage with the ads. This is win for me and I assume also a win for publishers who get revenue due to higher engagement.
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?
No, I personally want to see ads that are as irrelevant as possible. I hate getting a sales pitch forced on me, and would rather see something funny or entertaining showing off an irrelevant product in a clever way than whatever your customers want to shove in front of my eyes.
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.
I don't give a shit what advertisers want. I was merely pointing out to someone in the ad business that I don't want to see relevant ads when they made the statement that I do.
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.
The advertisers are the ones trying to claim that it's a win-win situation because people like relevant ads.
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.
They specifically said their original point still stands, and I agree with them.
> 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.
How does that follow? And why is your agreement relevant either?
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.
My individual opinion is (presumably) not unique. They also absolutely can tell who is a decision maker: around 2015, people used to serve facebook ads specifically to VCs to get investment in their startups. I'm sure targeting has only improved.
This doesn’t make sense as a reply, it’s not relevant how many others share your opinion, because it’s not aggregations of people replying to each other on HN, but specific users.
Each user’s comment has to stand up under its own weight so to speak
It doesn't make sense financially. But money is not the only thing that matters.
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?
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.
I don't think relevant ads are healthy for the many people who do not have enough self-control to resist temptation. Ads are essentially playing mindgames triggering fear/jealousy on these people to steal their money. For the people who do have self-control, they don't need other people trying to tell them what to buy.
That's a good argument against bad and exploitative ads.
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
> have you ever seen an ad for an event in your town?
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.
Every ad on Reddit is currently from "hims" and has the message that your hair will fall out and your dick will stop working if you don't take their pills.
How about you and the people who want "relevant ads" opt in, and everyone else gets a sane default of not beong tracked and having dossiers compiled about them. You could even implement it with an HTTP header, maybe "Allow-Track"?
This. $1 spent on ads at Google gets a better return for advertisers than that same $1 spent almost anywhere else. For publishers, no one generates more revenue per ad space than Google (without reputation destroying ads).
Ads are not only annoying but play an extremely crucial part on tracking you across the web. People defending google cannot seem to wrap their mind around the fact that it's one of the most lucrative way to carry out mass surveillance at scale. Paying for the service only partly avoids the service to stop giving you ads. What about the insane amount of telemetry they collect? It's a lost cause
Yes, platforms need money. So why should a platform not charging its users be permitted? It's dumping. It's anti-competitive behavior unfairly disadvantaging any other business that wants to enter the market the ad platform is pretending to be in. It also creates a ton of perverse incentives.
You phrase it like it would be a good thing to manipulate people into buying stuff they don’t need, to generate an artificial demand by exploiting others.
> If you’re forced to see ads, wouldn’t you want ads that are relevant
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
>Thankfully HN is finally at a stage people can come out and talk about Ad tech without being harassed or attacked.
Is this comment some sort of performance art? When was the last time any post about ads wasn't filled with people posting about how advertising is evil, all advertising should be banned, ads on the internet are "stealing personal information" and other things like that?
There may have been a point where the way ads are delivered on the internet was positively received on HN but it has not been for at least a decade.
They weren't positively received in any computer nerd spaces, at any time that I can ever recall—with the sole exception of the "non-evil", well-marked, text-only Google ads that they used to run. There was a lot of "everything except these is bad".
Now google's as bad as any of the old pop-up flash advertisers, plus they intentionally trick people into confusing ads with search results, and they're more effective at tracking people than any of those ad networks were. So there's nothing left to say anything positive about. The single arguably-good version of this entire field of Web ads is long gone.
It is not about ads being positive, but as a necessary evil. And we could at least discuss about the tech behind it, the performance of it without being shut down and downvoted so the whole thing disappeared.
>but it has not been for at least a decade.
Actually yes since around 2013 - 2014. HN has plenty of decent Ad discussions on both buy and sell side pre 2013 / 2014.
You're absolutely right, publishers are picking Google with cause, but if Google prevented competition, that's not a real choice is it?
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.
Your opinion is biased from the fact that you worked on "adtech". How can you justify it? You are the reason the web is bloated and lost the true idea of it a long time ago. Luckily, there are people who run pi-hole and adguard who have my utmost respect along with countless people who maintain an upto-date ad-block list
Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do they do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both because what's good for one group is bad for another. Fortunately with healthy competition we solve this problem since alternatives could be used.
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.
> Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do they do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both because what's good for one group is bad for another.
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.
It’s a two-sided market and it doesn’t have to be either/or. Google has a wide range of advertisers so it can find one that converts on your site and it has a wide range of sites so it can find ones that work for a given advertisers. Also Google has a large database and user inventory for personalization so it can find ads that convert on your site even if your site wouldn’t attract ads otherwise. the personalization economy has all sorts of ads and might be brand destroying in the case of retargeting but you see that crap everywhere whereas many Google alternatives run brand-destroying ads and pay you $0.00 after rounding.
Isn't this decision about Google abusing their marketplace (as all marketplace owners will inevitably do), by pushing their own stuff?
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.
The argument here being that the fee is too high? I don't think prices being too high is a strong argument of the existence of a monopoly, but it might be of the exploitation of one.
There's been a few instances where internal communications have leaked showing Google intentionally rigging auction mechanics to inflate CPCs. It's not just the fees being high.
The (Open)RTB system makes things more competitive and reduces costs for advertisers by making unsold inventory available to an automated marketplace while also increasing revenue for smaller publishers who otherwise wouldn't have been able to create first party relationships with advertisers. The middlemen are various identity providers and other tracking/data enrichment services, as well as third party exchanges, DSPs and SSPs. Believe it or not this system makes it a lot cheaper than just having someone buy ad space directly on a website
> 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.
> each middleman (usually) adds some kind of value
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.
I have tried to sell ads and never been able to fill all my inventory and often the rates are poor and the ads brand destroying. If you are The New York Times it is different but a site that makes $1000 /mo in ads can’t afford an ads salesperson and in the big scheme of things that is royalty.
Have you tried prebid? It lets you send your bid requests to as many exchanges as you want so you can advertise your inventory to as many DSPs as possible
When I talk about "sell" I mean sell directly with a human touch. Like the way a newspaper or a network of radio stations has actual salespeople that sell ads.
It sounds like a service some company should step up to provide! Make the job of those salespeople easier.
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. :-)
> * 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
That's horrible! In a better world such practices would be made illegal and those involved would be hung, drawn, and quartered.
Geotargeting of ads is essential for local businesses. Banning it would make advertising only practical for national brands. It would be bad for the world if only national brands could advertise.
I live in a unique town name in the US, pretend it’s “Foo.”
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.
None of that seems at all user-hostile to me, it's literally all aimed at making sure what the user is shown is more likely to actually be useful to them.
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.
Ad-supported does not mean "tacking your every movement and collecting all your private data across the entirety of the internet throughout your entire adult life, and selling that data to the highest bidder"
Usual the news publishers don't sell user data because they have so little of it.
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.
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.
> I could provide a long answer but the gist of it is that the study is flawed.
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
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)
> 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.
> 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?
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
Well, I don't think most people really understand the way ad-tech supports these services. I wager if you asked a few lay men they wouldn't even know google is an ad company(apart from YouTube ads)
A few years ago, a large publisher (Persgroep) in the Netherlands made a study comparing user preferences between two advertisement solutions, one would be a traditional personal data-based targeting solution and one privacy preserving solution (SOLID).
User ended up preferring the classic version, even when they were informed of its inner workings.
Well I seem to be the only bringing proof and understanding into this debate.
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?
Again, if you let the unethical ones exist, they will win.
> 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.
> Before you start talking about how this enabled google's innovations
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
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> They are tricked into giving this consent because that's the only way ad industry can obtain consent to livelong invasive tracking.
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.
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.
>> Regardless of if I pay or not I'm gonna get upsells and ads.
I'll say it again for your ad-tech addled brain only rivalling vomit-inducing people like prabhakar raghavan:
If there was an option to have zero, zero, even minutely intrusive ads/tracking, then I will be willing to pay a price for it. If this is not an option, then I have zero remorse for your wasted efforts/loss of revenue.
Tell me _one_ news website today offering this feature? I will pay for it.
> Advertising remains a critical part of our business model of supporting independent journalism, as such, we do not offer ad-free subscriptions.
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.
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).
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.
Off-topic, but I can't help snort at:
> independent journalism
Finally, if your company ever does something like using Wi-fi SSIDs as an alternative when I intentionally disable location services in my phone, then it goes in the bin. No recourse, sorry.
> If there was an option to have zero, zero, even minutely intrusive ads/tracking, then I will be willing to pay a price for it. If this is not an option, then I have zero remorse for your wasted efforts/loss of revenue.
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.
I just gave an example of the NYTs stance on the position. Can you find me a newspaper that doesn't say that?
> Pre-filtered segments
Which party has the information is not of relevance. That any one has it at all is already a problem. I don't care if it's advertiser sending the newspaper ["football shoes"] and the newspaper matching it with the fact that I'm interested in ["football"]. If I pay, I want none of that at all. Not even one side of the process should take place.
> Only mobile apps
Yes yes.. it was an example. Again, stop being obtuse and missing the point. You and I both know the extent to which browser fingerprinting and other techniques are used. Not to mention the larger along the news websites also have mobile apps where they employ similar techniques.
Yeah I’m listening to a legal analyst on Bloomberg radio and there’s a lot of detail that’s getting lost under the headline. It’s not yet even clear yet that Google would need to divest from anything in order to address this.
Google can extract as much money as they want from this equation, up to the limit of available capital for advertising. They just need to squeeze more from publishers and at the same time increase click costs. They have been doing both of these for several years.
That’s assuming a click happened. Premium pubs prefer guaranteed fixed CPMs no matter the amount of real clicks. I’ve worked for a few years at one of the major native ad companies, I’m very familiar with how the sausage is made.
At the very least the exchange has to be audited. Currently we have no idea whether the prices are a result of natural supply-demand dynamics or whether the exchange keeps artificially pumping the prices with lackluster demand
Or design errors in the algorithms doing the bidding!
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.
> 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.
Key point is that it's a system that you shouldn't trust, not any individual algorithm designer or implementer. Bugs that cost Google money will be found and fixed really quickly; bugs that make Google money will linger and go unnoticed.
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.
Isn't the point that some bidders will not know which it is when they make the bid?
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.
They do know if the bid is part of a PMP. They can still place an Open Market bid if allowed but they should reduce their expectation of winning that auction, even if they're the highest bidder not because of skullduggery but because the publisher has a prior arrangement with a DSP or advertiser.
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.
It's a lot more complex than that. Google has been caught putting their finger on the scale in the auction process. Not not entirely sure how they did it but I believe they were outbidding third party bidders by a cent because they're downstream in the chain.
Decoupling the advertising marketplace from the platform would be a huge win for consumers. It would also help Google focus on products again instead of constantly bowing to the almighty ad dollar.
Breaking those parts away from google absolutely wouldn’t destroy them, over the years I’ve been so surprised from googlers at most levels explaining how much money they make from all their different services. While advertising is absolutely a big one, it’s by no means the only one, and if i understand the situation correctly, the more advertising options that are actually viable for companies will not even kill their advertising business. But big business real doesn’t like competition.
Everyone related to the company, from shareholders down to the lowest on the totem pole are incentivized in some way to show quarterly growth, so they will do so at all costs.
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?
Yep. On top of that, it also controls the algorithm. Recently it has been tweaking the algorithm to sell non-relevant keywords to advertisers by making 'exact match' not 'exact' anymore. People have been burning their ad budgets for worthless traffic as a result, and PPC professionals are livid over it with every other post in communities talking about it:
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.
In fairness to Google on this (and I cannot believe I just wrote that) it's common practice to be on both sides like this, and even to have some external exchange in the middle that you have a deal with just so you can claim it's obviously fair.
That entire industry is a horrifying shitshow of sociopathy, at the expense of absolutely everyone else, both viewers (supply side) and advertisers (demand side).
On the plus side, it would be nice to make an example of Google and deal a blow to ad tech in general. At this point even putting to sleep the entire google(or any other ad tech company of your choosing) Board is acceptable if it means ad tech shuts down.
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
This is necessary now, but it should have been done years back.
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.
Monopolies die after a bit unless governments save them. Monopolies tend to stagnate, become too bureaucratic, and lose the pressure to perform. They then lose to more dynamic competitors. Sears is an example of loss, the banking cartel is example of government interference.
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.
| This should be impossible, because there are laws against it.
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.
The first Trump admin started the Google search antitrust suit 3 years before the Biden admin filed this one. Attacking Big Tech is a bipartisan affair these days.
> If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is communism!
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.)
> 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.
The 'cruel' adjective. If capitalism is not cruel, then such a criticism cannot be made against socialism, communism etc.
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.
price discovery through invisible hand, competitive markets are the the opposite of communism. crony capitalist monopolies are more like fascism vs communism
“Crony capitalist monopolies” are a prominent feature of the real world system for which socialist critics coined the name “capitalism”.
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.)
the real world critics of crony capitalism also coined the term socialism and then set about forming sociopathic totalitarian states and started slaughtering, torturing and starving people. what's your point?
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.
> the real world critics of crony capitalism also coined the term socialism and then set about forming sociopathic totalitarian stat
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.
It isn't. Just like it wasn't sliding into fascism under Reagan, or Bush, or Clinton, or Bush 2, or Trump the first time, even though all the same people claimed that at the time.
Oh, good. I must have misunderstood the whole "disappeared to an El Salvadoran prison without due process" story.
... 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.
You did misunderstand it. Applying the law of the land as it has stood and been applied for hundreds of years isn't fascist. If anyone thought the Alien Enemies Act were fascist they could have repealed it at any time since the 18th century.
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.
They snatched somebody off the street. Put them on a plane to El Salvador. Without any due process . Then definitively said they made a mistake. And he's not back.
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.
I'm confused how this is a monopoly, is it just the "if we define a market as Google ads, then Google has a monopoly problem"? Like defining iOS apps as a market (and somehow failed)?
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.
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's other ad companies, there is no other way to get an app on iOS.
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.
Okay, by that logic you can get apps on iPhones by just individually inviting each user to download the developer tools and install the app on their phone from source.
Um, no, the market is obviously not defined as “google ads.” You could bother to do one single search (maybe even with google!) before spewing nonsense.
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.
>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.
I would love to see a company compete in the ad space with the goal of making ads less intrusive. If ads didn't attack me and cause the viewport to jump and become obscured while reading, my first impression with the products would be better, and the sites the ads are on would get more viewership.
Web ads are bearable for me most of the time, but I'm dismayed by ads in mobile games my kids play. Unskippable 30 second videos that peddle poorly made F2P games.
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.
Turning that on its head, maybe you want something like a 90s shareware lost, curated by someone. Then the games you'd play for free are now ad free (the game is its own ad to get more levels). And you get that curated list. But yeah less money than dialing up ads to 11 while trying to find the whale who'll spend 1000 a week.
This is where Apple Arcade is an excellent value IMHO.
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.
If we must have ads, the best quality ads I see online are dumb ads. Just an image as a link. The most effective ads I see are ones on blogs where the blogger sells ad space (side columns) and they're just images that directly link to the product. The ads are relevant to the blog and readers. 99% of other online ads I see are visual garbage and irrelevant. The "targeting" is abysmal.
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.
The exact company you're asking for existed already, almost two decades ago. It was called Project Wonderful, and initially focused on independent blogs and webcomics.
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)
Can you share some names? Would be interesting to check them out.
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 think at the beginning Google was the good one keeping display ads high quality, so that even some ad blocking lists didn't remove them straight away. But yeah, today it is impossible to browse some sites or use apps without being tricked into endless maze of close button. And when I see Temu ads I throw up.
I think the deed is done. We are never going back to "good" ads anymore. The market's greatest revenue makers are those who are dumb ad clickers. We need more intrusive ads to get them on board now. The smart ones can still use adblock.
I've always been somewhat opposed to this, because there's already like 10 different search alternatives, and now AI is taking over, which will further weaken their grip.
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.
Then what is the definition of a monopoly? It doesn’t appear to be the same definition as “the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.” Do they exclusively control all ad inventory? Do they control all devices receiving ads? GP states that they don’t have exclusive control broadly, just within their own ecosystem. That’s not the definition of a monopoly though, so it seems like a motte and bailey calling google a monopoly.
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.
You're mixing up antitrust cases. The 2020 case [0], decided in August and going into remedies in a week or so, was about search. This one is about advertising [1], a separate market that the DOJ has argued Google has also been acting anticompetitively in.
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?
Well they certainly gained dominance by being the best and I would say they still are the best. But maybe there was some competitor that could have usurped them by being even better if not for their anticompetitive tactics. I wouldn't put money against that...
There's really only one alternative, Bing. Virtually all the other western search engines are using the Bing api, and just slightly modify the results.
Search "chili recipes" on bing. Now search kagi or any other alternative search engine. They all show the exact same recipes because they're using the bing API.
Really? Even non-technical people are waking up and seeing the 3 in web3 stands for India, OnlyFans and AI content.
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.
Kinda surprised. Google's core business is advertising. Some vertically integrated aux services (like chrome) feel ripe for antitrust, but I wasn't expecting ads themselves. What is Google without ads?
Being a monopoly, in itself, isn’t illegal. The question is whether the company maintains its monopoly through illegal tactics or leverages that monopoly in illegal manners.
(NYT really ought to add “illegal” to their title.)
Google is playing all sides of the dice. They used adsense to enlist publishers. They used adwords to get marketers. They used an ad buying and selling platform to corner the entire ad line.
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.
Their business model was search advertising. And they created many product products from that revenue. They tried to monetize the other products which is why they got into ad tech .
You’ve nailed the first two stages of enshittification in your story there. Stage 1: bring in users with a genuinely good product they like! Stage 2: once users are locked in, prioritize your business customers (in this case, advertisers) and make things continually worse for your users.
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.
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")
Thanks, I like the last quote. But I'm curious... Would it be preferable to have Google owning all of these services you listed—just not the ad company they depend on, or the inverse—all the companies are spun out?
I see your point, but also, if Google continued to own all these other things, it would still be a terrifyingly large spread, no?
Large companies, even monopolies, aren't the problem. Unfair leverage to suppress competition is. Those products without the subsidizing revenue of ads, and ads without the information flows of those products, is the goal.
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.
They are a problem in terms of an efficient free market; they make the information flow asymmetrically biased in their favor, and cause higher prices and implicit collusion. That is true even without any intent to harm.
Sure, but generally speaking that's an orthogonal to the issue of antitrust. The same could be same of many of the typical "big tech" players, or even some of the YC "winners".
Google can afford to lose money on many of those things because of the ad monopoly. (How much is Android worth in that it keeps Apple out of antitrust trouble with iOS? What quid pro quo does that enable?)
The original Google research paper by Brin and Page explicitly points out that a search engine financed by advertising is inherently anti-consumer:
> 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.
They were really smart guys. But smart guys don’t stand a chance in the face of all that money because it attracts people who know how to manipulate and control smart people. Smart people think they’re at the top of the totem pole. But really its those without ethics who sit at the top in our society.
This is a conundrum humanity must address if we’re to survive over the long term, IMO.
You're implying that smart people are somehow inherently ethical, but were manipulated by unethical (and less smart?) people. Whereas some of the least ethical people in history were also very smart. Intelligence is practically a requirement for truly abhorrent behavior.
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.
Well, I can see where you get that from what I wrote. I didn’t mean it quite like that, so allow me to clarify:
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.
> 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
Each and every one of us has the ability to choose to be better. That so many just “go along with whatever” is why I personally think we’re unlikely to survive over the long term, unless a more enlightened species leads us by the hand.
Right, I don't. It's an interesting conundrum because on an evolutionary scale the civilized era is so short it probably hasn't had an effect yet, which means that getting to a Star Trek style utopia would require a conscious struggle against our nature.
Problem with that logic is, humans don't just evolve genetically, we evolve culturally, and that cultural evolution ends up affecting our biology as well. So it doesn't really matter how slow genetic evolution is. Cultural evolution is what defines the human species. It's much more rapid because it includes planning and foresight, unlike the blind watchmaker of biological evolution. It is also lamarckian in that it incorporates the experiences of the previous generation into the cultural phenotype of the next one.
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.
That’s an awesome point, and honestly I hope lawmakers start to dig into advertising as an industry in general. Hate being exposed to ads and the only alternative is to pay to avoid them. Should be considered predatory and limited in scope somehow. Big Tech can just focus on good products, please. It’s not just preference, it’s and outcome of the final analysis of incentives in society, so S and B could foresee it so many years ago
First, let me say I'm glad the FTC is going after monopolies. True capitalism requires competition, not massive corporations.
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.
I don't really see how that's possible. They are prevented by law from charging more than 25% on top of what they pay out to medical providers. The problem is the providers who are represented by the AMA.
This relies entirely on market concentration and doesn't even bother to address the legal cap on premiums enacted in the ACA. I expected it to be trash because it is written by people who have every incentive to try to blame insurance companies and I was correct.
They should dig into admob while they're at it. They love screwing devs over and have purposely left their email option broken for years now. They'll cut you off even when it's their fault and you'll have no means of recourse. It's a joke, but they have the best ecpm around unfortunately.
Curious to see how Google search holds up over the next few years.
I find myself not using it at all unless I am looking for something very specific such as the website for a company or local restaurants, etc.
And the president is doing a lot of illegal things, and senators are doing a lot of illegal things, why do Google has to pay for it's crimes if not even politicians have to pay for their crimes?
Google really should start floating some plans for splitting itself up. Things worked out pretty well when Ma Bell was split up. Some people thought it would all fail, but the companies have done a good job competing and cooperating at the right times.
If Google comes up with the plans, it's better than some antagonist.
Google seems harder to split up than Bell to me. Bell was split regionally which makes sense since each region has it's own wires and can make money separately. Google has the problem that all their products other than adds lose money (or make money through integration with Google adds)
Yeah. The problem with splitting up Google is that Google products, taken in isolation, are themselves keys to preventing other monopolies.
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.
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.)
Only Google-integrated Android devices are profitable. You really think Graphene/Lineage/etc... devices have a chance in the market vs. Apple Computer? Splitting off the integration means those devices have to pay for it or go without. Even Amazon failed in this space.
Which is to say, the parts of Android that are "profitable" are the parts tied to the broader corporate product suite.
Only Google-integrated Android devices are profitable.
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?
If the only way to sell a profitable product is to buy its core value-add (Google integration) from someone else, then your product isn't profitable by definition. Split off Android and Pixels become just another Fire Phone, and will compete just about as well (or worse, since the spun-off Android division wouldn't even have free Amazon integration).
Again, there are Google-free Android phones in the market today. They do very poorly.
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.
While at first glance this may disprove the idea that they don't cut losses, it actually furthers the argument that advertising revenue creates perverted incentives, since they blew massive amounts of money on projects with no financial value. Moreover, while those products are dead, the data gained likely made its way into the advertising information flow. If you were a competitor to one of those dead products, or an advertising company that has to carefully evaluate the cost effectiveness of an auxiliary product, Google has an "unfair" advantage over you.
This is exactly why it's important to bust them up: all those other products are effectively "dumping" on whatever sector they compete in. This even discourages time-investment (to develop) and learning-to-use investment (for users) for free alternatives, not just commercial ones.
All of their products helped the sector they are in. They didn't "dump" into it. Google continually improved areas where other companies previously refused to, even if they were charging for their services.
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).
I think you misunderstand what 'dumping' means in this market context. Sure, free software like Linux is great. But if you didn't have that preconceived notion, a competitor dumping free software on the market to make others' initiatives unprofitable would look like an anti-trust violation, rather than a charitable act of community.
Their business apps division is probably a billion dollar business.
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.
Revenue is not really a consideration when talking about _illegal_ monopolies. That is an incorrect way to view this. It's about anti-competitive practices. That's what the laws are about (and the reason for their existence).
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.
Considering the cases were prosecuted in collaboration across both the Biden and Trump administrations, and decided by longstanding federal judges, then, no, these are not accurately characterized as politically motivated except insofar as all government actions have a nexus to politics by definition.
I would highly recommend reading the decision. The two markets defined were publisher ad servers (i.e. Google's DoubleClick for Publishers) and ad exchanges (i.e. Google's AdX). Google behaved anticompetitively in both of these markets.
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).
> 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.
Can you use Gmail, Google Drive, Chrome sync etc and opt out of allowing Google to use any of your data for advertising services?
I can in fact, go to a different mail provider, use a different file hosting and sharing service, and use different browsers with different sync technologies.
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.
Even worse, when the local exchange carriers were renting their infrastructure and trying to compete on the thinnest of margins, it allowed the baby bells to see who could survive and who couldn't. Those who didn't survive went under. The successful smaller CLEC's, were then bought by the baby bells for their customers.
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.
> Things worked out pretty well when Ma Bell was split up
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 worse than that, they reconsolidated but BellLabs was shut down in the process. So, they got the same control they previously had except they weren't spending on research. IMO, they should have been prevented from reconsolidating.
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.
Xfinity is Comcast which I don't think has much connection to the Baby Bells or their reconsolidation. Unfortunately the the cost of running cable to the broad US suburbs is a pretty big natural barrier to competition.
The market is being unfairly defined based on how things worked decades ago instead of looking at the modern landscape. Tech evolved rapidly and the way things worked decades ago may not be optimal for the end user as things change.
You're right, but probably not in the way you think.
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.
The existence of competition doesn't always make things better. For example forcing middlemen to exist so that there is competition can lead to a worse situation than without middlemen. Direct to consumer is unfair leverage to middlemen, but it can be better for consumers.
If the Meta case goes this way too, the ripple effects could be huge. Might affect the bay area, startup scene and a lot of others in ways we can't even grasp yet. All we can do is wait and see..
Happy to see this and hopefully there are some changes. Right now I'm dealing with a crazy Adsense issue and there is no recourse, no customer support and no alternative.
No but it would stop a single company from accumulating so much power.
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.
Yes there is no right to access an advertising market for Google, luckily the government agrees they are an illegal monopoly. Hopefully the ramifications are massive and company breaking.
That’s fine. As long as Google is broken up. I doubt your scenario will happen either, we all saw the hundreds of billions in investor value that occurred when AT&T was broken up.
I've seen countless examples, e.g. a business that depends on online advertising gets its account suspended for incorrect reasons and there is literally no-one to reach at Google to get unsuspended.
If you made your business become completely dependent on a third party, you were already a failure and shouldn't have a business. Being a successful businessman is not a right. It's competition.
I love it when my counterparty's breach of contract is my fault because I foolishly trusted that they would do what they said they would in exchange for my money.
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.
If you aren't prepared for the contingency where your counterparty bails, then yes, strategically you are failing to commoditize your product for the specific market. I think that's the basis of competition and free market economics.
lol in what world is breaking paid user contracts and flagrantly getting away with it democratic? What does free market even mean in this context? That the big trillion dollar corporation can bury you in legal fees or remove your means of making money with no way to question the decision to prove it was done in error?
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.
Wow, all those fortune 500 companies whose infra entirely relies on 3rd party cloud infrastructure really must be in for a rude awakening. You should update them with your cunning analysis and inform them they are failures.
The tone here isn't great but parent is more correct than not. This is why large companies don't use freebie services. They vet companies and partners, sign enterprise deals with support, SLAs, penalties, insurance, even bonds in some cases. It costs more, and it's hardly fun for most people, but it's all part of mitigating those risks. And it's not just tech, you see the same thing in non-tech industries like manufacturing.
It really isn't. Most businesses export core business functions to a third party in some way. This is just a snotty navel gazing post without much content that was responded to in kind.
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.
No, but if he makes himself for example completely dependent on Monsanto, he shouldn't have a business, because he's in practice an employee with all the financial responsibilities of a business and none of the benefits of having a business. And none of the benefits of being an employee either.
If your business model is to make yourself completely dependent on a single third party, then you shouldn't have a business.
The only way it would be possible for him to become completely dependent on Monsanto is if that company is allowed to monopolize the product categories it sells.
Trillions of dollars are spent on advertising outside of Google. You can advertise in print, billboards, radio and television ads, Netflix, or on social media behemoths.
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.
I’m sorry, this perspective is absurd. I’m talking about a web site that shows ads. You’re suggesting they pivot to running off billboards? To creating TV shows?
> 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 1: You want to advertise your product or service. There are endless options outside of Google, including some options where the audience is counted in the hundreds of millions.
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.
> I dislike Google more than most and would never buy nor sell ads with them, but they have no monopoly on advertising
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.
Monopoly is a real word with a real meaning. It doesn't matter what any kind of judge "decides", he does not have the authority to change the meanings of words according to his humors. Google might be doing anti-competitive or fraudulent actions, but let's use the proper terms in the proper places.
Just like there is a difference between theft, burglary and robbery.
Monopoly, and the degree to which Google obtained a monopoly in the defined market examined in this case, is a legal question. So indeed it does matter what a judge decides after a trial where the evidence was examined and a conclusion reached.
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.
Your argument is simply appeal to authority. The truth is still the truth no matter what men do or decide. If the judge calls Google a monopoly in advertising, he is obviously wrong, and nobody has any duty to pretend that he is right. Both you and I can think for ourselves.
Yes my argument is an appeal to authority. That’s the right approach to answering a legal question.
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?
Who are the persons who has to respect the judge (the authority) when he is flagrantly wrong in his decision? The justice system has to respect that decision. Google and the other involved parties have to respect that decision.
You and me however, are not involved in any way, and do not have to respect anything this ignorant judge says or decides.
This is happening to me right now. I have run a site for 14 years that gets most of its traffic during the current two week stretch (it's related to NBA playoffs).
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.
The key factor is the timing. During the primary week where this product generates income, Google completely screwed me over with no warning and no answers about what's going on. I am of course looking into alternatives, but that takes time, and 3 days from now it'll be too late.
You have no contract with Google though. You're literally siphoning on what is a really low-barrier, dare I say free service.
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.
Not parent, but there are many examples of this; they’re often (but not always) unsympathetic cases due to the business model of the business which has been destroyed.
Do you have a recommendation of an alternative that I can switch to easily and on short notice? The site I'm having trouble with gets 95% of its traffic for the year this week so I'm scrambling.
Make it so you either sell ad space or offer a marketplace for ad space sellers and advertisers. Don't allow a company to do both and you conveniently catch most social media players too...
Do you have a recommendation of an alternative that I can switch to easily and on short notice? The site I'm having trouble with gets 95% of its traffic for the year this week so I'm scrambling.
If you think antitrust has anything to do with why it isn't profitable for a company at Google scale to pay a human being for every one of the hundreds of millions of people who use AdSense to have customer support...
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.
I feel like there's a scale in between "dedicated employee for every customer" and "normal call center agents with some tiers of support above them to help with issues" yeah?
They have one of the best LLM's in the world. I got 5000 images rejected. Now I can read about the requirements and not figure out why. It gets truly hilarious where the images are rejected by means of AI. It means they can produce 100% accurate reasons right on the rejection page. Ill even pay for it. I would also pay if it can correct the images. They have plenty of good but complex services that LLMs could deliver wonderful support for. Their LLM could also sell me services I currently cant be bothered to look at. Eventually, over the years the LLM can slowly be allowed to negotiate and make decisions too.
A smaller ad company can afford to have customer support. If there are tens or hundreds then each one can lose customers, better than one massive company that doesn't care or can't afford and would rather keep the money than pay for support.
Google isn't a monopoly in the Standard Oil sense of the term. Its ad revenue is big because it occupies so much user attention. I actually think many suggested remedies would actually make Google more profitable.
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.
In the sense of the Sherman Act and similar legislation, monopolies exist in the sense of having exclusive control over some supply and raising prices against consumers.
This isn't what Google does, they generally lower prices for consumers and the competition is only a click away.
The consumer harm standard is an outgrowth of the work of Robert Bork, who was Solicitor General for Nixon and Ford, respectively.
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.
I judge this Chicago-school-pushed shift in antitrust enforcement so bad that I usually mark it out as the first noteworthy step on our current thrust toward authoritarianism.
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.
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.
The consumer of the ad platform is the advertiser, not the person clicking the ad. Major advertisers either play ball with Google or their ads don't get seen in search. Doesn't seem very different to Standard Oil controlling who got access to refineries.
Market share and market dominance are very sensitive to how you define the market.
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.
A simple test is if you got rid of a product, what would customers use as a direct replacement? Those competitor products, the product you got rid of plus the customers of those products, are a market.
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.
I mean it wouldn't make sense for it to be more profitable for google if there were no search deals, since otherwise they would just cancel the deal themselves. Clearly they see long term value in blocking out competition even at that high of a price
Google can't cancel it right now because then otherwise Bing would bid for it. Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this.
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.
> Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this.
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?
You highlight some genuine points of difficulty for antitrust enforcers.
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.
I think it would be a good move to prevent browser deals. There is no reality in which the winner is Firefox, Kagi or DDG - it will always be Google or Bing. That's clearly anticompetitive - it locks the other browsers out of a major share of the market.
That's belied by the fact that Chromium exists, and I speculate they spun up Chromium in case they were ordered to break up.
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.
Sure, but I'm arguing Apple shouldn't be allowed to sell "default browser" status on iOS. Show the customer a randomized list and let them choose. Google will probably still dominate, but it won't be because they paid to.
The real reason that tobacco advertising ended on television is the fairness doctrine.
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.
It depends on the what the browsers end up doing. If they just surface a select your search engine dialog during set up, most people will just select google and nothing will have changed besides the cost. If they set a non-google search engine by default, they will lose ad revenue because of people not bothering to change the default.
Depends on the default search engine. Many people went of their way to download a web browser that wasn't Internet Explorer for many years even though IE was the default.
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.
Google becoming irrelevant is the most naive take in technology. It's more if wishful thinking. Google is equally, if not more relevant today. Their AI models are currently one of the best in the world. They still have a commanding search market share. YouTube and Android rule in most countries in terms of number of users. Chrome is the leading browser. Google maps is omnipresent. Gmail is the biggest email service online. Their revenues are steady.
They are not doing well with certain areas like social, GCP, messaging, enterprise etc. But it's not an existential threat.
Pretty crazy how this case gets the full support of thr DOJ, along with actions against Harvard, Colombia ect. I dont mind Google being broken up, but how am i supposed to respect the law when the same DOJ lets out ponzi schemers and bond villians because they donated 500k to a Trump friendly super pac.
If im Google or anoother tech company im going to be Divesting from the United States as much as possible.
Part of the problem is the Capitalist system. Google shares are traded on the market. They have an obligation to grow every year. Sure when your a small hungry startup you can grow fast, but when you are the size of Google and try the same thing you inevitably get into these types of problems where you try to dominate, but you are also the biggest player because of pressure from your shareholders.
Pretty high. Antitrust against Google started during the first Trump administration and continued during Biden. Dealing with Big Tech is a bipartisan issue, though each side has partisan reasons for it: Republicans argue tech companies have a liberal bent, Democrats argue tech companies allowed misinformation to get Trump elected. At the end of the day, we can all agree it's time for Google to go.
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.
> So happy to see big tech's "kiss Trump's ass and hope all the legal troubles go away" strategy failing spectacularly.
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)
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.
Google doesn't need to fix anything for you, they basically own the market. Their won't be any changes unless the state does something. But I wouldn't expect the most corrupt administration to date to stand against one of the wealthiest organizations in the country.
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] ?
(disclaimer that I was the TL of Google News a very long time ago, so feel free to ignore what I say as biased)
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.
Media companies destroyed journalism by making news into entertainment instead of information. For example by finding the one extremest in a group of people and running stories about his minority - but exciting - viewpoint, instead of the boring viewpoint of most of the group.
the FTC is like Jim Cramer. Once they judge a business to be a monopoly, the business falls apart and the monopoly is irrelevant. Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial. the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.
> Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial
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.
The divergence between the interests of shareholders and the actions of a corporation in cases like this is a textbook example of a well established concept:
Naively I would've thought that by making management huge shareholders, (most of) the agents then become principals.
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.
Being CEO of the larger company would make him more money. His money comes from constant grants of new stock and options and incentives not the simple appreciation of stock granted the day he was hired.
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.
> Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial.
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.
An appellate court overturned & greatly limited the Microsoft decision and found that the judge had engaged in misconduct. An appellate court has nothing to do with the administration in charge at the time
>>An appellate court has nothing to do with the administration in charge at the time
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.
9/11 also happened during that time. Punishing the people that declared war upon the United States and destroyed the Twin Towers was the larger priority than breaking up one company.
AT&T was broken up in 1982. Our manufacturing peaked around 1990 and what really pushed it downward was China joining the WTO. We also halted a lot of fab construction domestically after the GFC of '08.
This is an interesting theory, but US manufacturing output actually peaked ~2022-2024.
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.
To the contrary AT&T proved itself incapable of delivering end-to-end innovation. Sure it lowered the cost of intercity links for long-distance calls dramatically but couldn’t pass savings on to the consumer. Picturephone was a technical tour de force but demonstrated AT&T couldn’t deliver new services other than little things like call waiting and caller id.
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.
> the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades
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?
> Once they judge a business to be a monopoly, the business falls apart and the monopoly is irrelevant
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.
Can you provide some sources that support these claims? This comment is so far removed from any viewpoint I've seen before on this topic that I'm worried I might have a massive blindspot.
Especially this:
> the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.
Tech companies have set back technology by decades already.
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.
Blame money. Tech can and has been used to improve our lives. But money talks and the focus is too much on never ending hockey stick growth for its own sake.
It seems the judge went with reasoning resembling an orange monkey logic. "I know online advertising better than anyone else on the planet, and Google is a monopoly".
Weird calling them a monopoly when they only control 26% of the market for digital marketing. For comparison when Microsoft was found guilty, they had 90% of the desktop market. Att was at 100% when they were broken up. Standard oil was at 90%.
Is this lowest percentage of market for a company being found monolopy?
Never said it was illegal. Hence my phrasing monopoly and not an illegal monopoly aka monopoly that abuses their position. But was defines a monopoly? 26% of market doesn't sound like a monopoly to me looking at past antitrust actions. Which why i ask my question, is this lowest percentage of the market for antitrust action?
In the global search engine market, Google maintains a dominant position. In January 2025, its market share was approximately 89.62% across all devices, and 93.89% in the mobile search market. While Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! hold a smaller share of the market, Google continues to be the leading search engine.
> You can read decision here. No mention of search.
I count 13 mentions of "Google Search" and 44 mentions of "search" in the linked document.
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.
So it's quite clear the court thought Google was a monopoly in "publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising". Not "market for digital marketing" as you alluded to.
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".
People are illegally thinking of nothing but 'google.com' when they are about to search for something, rules judge.
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.
Decision here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...
http://archive.md/20250417144711/https://www.nytimes.com/202...
I don't think this article explains it well. Google sells ad space on behalf of the publishers and also sells the ads on behalf of the advertisers. It also runs the auction that places the ads into the ad space. See this graphic https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7. Parts of this can definately be broken up without destroying Google.
And crucially, there are leaked emails, other evidence that demonstrate (at the very least historical and occasional) corruption of this dual- (multi?) agency arrangement. Among the allegations:
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-...
I'm willing to believe there's an issue with Google's ad sales, but this comment doesn't have the specifics I'm interested in - in spite of all of the citations.
> 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...
Thank you very much for your comment. It used to be my favorite saying was "lie with statistics". I think it needs to be updated to "lie with citations".
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.
You could just read the lawsuit. It has everything you're looking for, sourced from internal Google communications, and is written in plain language. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1563...
Wasn’t part of the Double Click acquisition some sort of guarantee this exact situation wouldn’t happen?
> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory.
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 was argued that this approach allows Google to charge higher prices to advertisers while sending less revenue to publishers such as news websites.
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...
You could limit to one mark and a bunch of planted bidders in an attempt to control competition. If you win with your plants, you get to pay yourself anyway.
I think they meant that Google managed to limit the number of bidders for ad placement - they shut out other advertising groups -, so they could then charge what they want to those who need to advertise their business or perish, and take what they want from websites that publish ads as well (take a larger cut from the 'ad inventory' understood either as ad space or ads to be published). In this sense the linked article states:
"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...
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.
Im not sure but I think what they mean is that if you chose adsense the TOS says you may not display ads from other providers.
If we're to compare Google's situation to that of finance companies on other markets, even a small part of what Google did would result in a significant part of their execs and maybe a few tech staff wearing orange jumpsuits for these companies. Given the nature of Google's transgression and the way they've been robbing their own customers, they'd deserve it.
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.
When a media buyer puts $1.00 in on one side of the system, on average only $0.60 makes it to the publisher. In some cases less than $0.50 gets to them.
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...
As someone who has worked in AdTech I would respectfully disagree. It is indeed complex but it is incredibly efficient. Also it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue. What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
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.
In theory, I agree. In practice the whole system is rotten.
* 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.
I was most impressed by a Google Ad that showed up if you searched for the Dutch tax office. It would only show the name "Tax office" with a free to call phone number under it. Only the hyperlink pointed at a paid number 90 cent per minute.
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?
Jesus. What a story! Is that even legal in Netherlands?
They didn't act alone, the paid number had to be approved by someone and the phone provider also had to accept the bill. I don't have numbers but since I know multiple people who got the strange phone bill my guess would be at least hundreds of thousands of succesful click thoughts. Some called the tax office regularly around the busiest time of the year before they got the bill and found out.
There are probably people with large phone bills who didn't notice and ones who thought the tax office was just expensive to call.
Google let similar things run in Germany that were impersonating government offices (which is illegal in multiple ways), and they never lifted a finger when the malicious ads were reported, because they still made money in the end.
> Also it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue. What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
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
> the world has far too many Google equivalents
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.
I worked at Google on Adtech. I can tell you everybody knew it was an unfair game and illegal.
Lots of unrecorded meetings and “no notes taken” sessions
It was 10 years ago when I was serious about it but I found every monetization venue other than Google was a joke. If you had the right kind of site you could make money with Adult Friend Finder but everything else paid somewhere between 0-10% what Google did and it wasn’t worth the brand destruction that usually resulted.
> it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue
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.
> On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"?
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.
30% is a long way away from 70% and Steam are providing substantially more of a service for that cut.
> One where the market maker is taking up the cost of providing a market
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?
Unfortunately a lot of economic activity in general today is just money-on-money financialism. It is all just gambling and rent seeking and dishonesty. These practices are whitewashed and given various names. The one for rent-seeking is "market making".
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.
Competing ad/fill markets fix the problem.
Which is why market makers like Google quietly work very hard to discourage, prevent, interfere or buy their competition.
Are you saying that serving ads costs more than running a news site?
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.
> Are you saying that serving ads costs more than running a news site?
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
Assuming the content is $0
> Are you saying that serving ads costs more than running a news site?
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.
It is 'incredibly efficient' because it is incredibly good at predicting clicks, conversions, or even conversion values. Which in turn makes it efficient. Sure, there is something called "auction" there, but Sothesby's or Tattersalls generally don't have buyers bidding based on what some machine-learning prediction AI computed in a jiffy (or maybe they do these days, who knows).
There are three parties. Media Buyers, publishers and users. As a publisher, you can go with “dumb” platforms that don’t deliver quality users to media buyers because of relevancy, you’ll make less money m. Apple ad platform is 40/60 split but for media buyers, it’s not efficient so we spend less money on it. Assume publishers make less money with it as well.
We seen dumb platforms with linear tv. Go watch any TV with an antenna.
Thankfully HN is finally at a stage people can come out and talk about Ad tech without being harassed or attacked.
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?
I am on the purchasing side. Google is very efficient when delivering traffic especially their Max Performance product. Probably the cheapest of all platforms. So they are serving relevant ads to users who engage with the ads. This is win for me and I assume also a win for publishers who get revenue due to higher engagement.
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?
No, I personally want to see ads that are as irrelevant as possible. I hate getting a sales pitch forced on me, and would rather see something funny or entertaining showing off an irrelevant product in a clever way than whatever your customers want to shove in front of my eyes.
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.
This doesn’t make sense.
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.
I don't give a shit what advertisers want. I was merely pointing out to someone in the ad business that I don't want to see relevant ads when they made the statement that I do.
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.
Why does your individual opinion matter to Google (or advertisers or their markets) then?
It’s probably not even possible for decision makers to discern it from noise.
The advertisers are the ones trying to claim that it's a win-win situation because people like relevant ads.
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.
I’ll be charitable, what is your actual argument?
In case you didn’t see, the user has already claimed to believe the entire comment chain is irrelevant, so your a bit late.
They specifically said their original point still stands, and I agree with them.
> 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.
How does that follow? And why is your agreement relevant either?
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.
My individual opinion is (presumably) not unique. They also absolutely can tell who is a decision maker: around 2015, people used to serve facebook ads specifically to VCs to get investment in their startups. I'm sure targeting has only improved.
This doesn’t make sense as a reply, it’s not relevant how many others share your opinion, because it’s not aggregations of people replying to each other on HN, but specific users.
Each user’s comment has to stand up under its own weight so to speak
Cool, yours is as irrelevant as mine. The original point stands, though: not everyone benefits from better ad targeting.
> Cool, yours is as irrelevant as mine.
So then why did you reply if you already knew your comment and the rest of the comment chain was irrelevant?
It doesn't make sense financially. But money is not the only thing that matters.
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")
This still doesn’t make sense.
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?
I like the idea.
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.
"The only way to understand emotions correctly is through money" What a take.
We need a market for emotions. Want a good laugh with your friends? That'll be $10. A moment of peace with your so? That'll be $100.
Rewards of up to $.50 for people willing to be scared to death (or, you know, moderate social media content).
I don't think relevant ads are healthy for the many people who do not have enough self-control to resist temptation. Ads are essentially playing mindgames triggering fear/jealousy on these people to steal their money. For the people who do have self-control, they don't need other people trying to tell them what to buy.
That's a good argument against bad and exploitative ads.
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
> have you ever seen an ad for an event in your town?
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.
Especially as the random page will be organized in a way to steer me towards the ad rather than the thing I want to do.
Every ad on Reddit is currently from "hims" and has the message that your hair will fall out and your dick will stop working if you don't take their pills.
How about you and the people who want "relevant ads" opt in, and everyone else gets a sane default of not beong tracked and having dossiers compiled about them. You could even implement it with an HTTP header, maybe "Allow-Track"?
This. $1 spent on ads at Google gets a better return for advertisers than that same $1 spent almost anywhere else. For publishers, no one generates more revenue per ad space than Google (without reputation destroying ads).
I choose option three in the false dichotomy: Render it illegal to attempt to force me to see ads.
You can always pay for service. Kagi, YouTube Premium, Reddit Premium, Spotify Premium, ProtonMail etc. Platforms needs money to run.
Ads are not only annoying but play an extremely crucial part on tracking you across the web. People defending google cannot seem to wrap their mind around the fact that it's one of the most lucrative way to carry out mass surveillance at scale. Paying for the service only partly avoids the service to stop giving you ads. What about the insane amount of telemetry they collect? It's a lost cause
Thank You for saying this out now. Again we are finally back to may be Pre 2014 HN where we can talk a little about business and money.
Yes, platforms need money. So why should a platform not charging its users be permitted? It's dumping. It's anti-competitive behavior unfairly disadvantaging any other business that wants to enter the market the ad platform is pretending to be in. It also creates a ton of perverse incentives.
You phrase it like it would be a good thing to manipulate people into buying stuff they don’t need, to generate an artificial demand by exploiting others.
> If you’re forced to see ads, wouldn’t you want ads that are relevant
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!
To me that reads like endless drug ads for the disease your loved one died from 10 years ago.
>Thankfully HN is finally at a stage people can come out and talk about Ad tech without being harassed or attacked.
Is this comment some sort of performance art? When was the last time any post about ads wasn't filled with people posting about how advertising is evil, all advertising should be banned, ads on the internet are "stealing personal information" and other things like that?
There may have been a point where the way ads are delivered on the internet was positively received on HN but it has not been for at least a decade.
They weren't positively received in any computer nerd spaces, at any time that I can ever recall—with the sole exception of the "non-evil", well-marked, text-only Google ads that they used to run. There was a lot of "everything except these is bad".
Now google's as bad as any of the old pop-up flash advertisers, plus they intentionally trick people into confusing ads with search results, and they're more effective at tracking people than any of those ad networks were. So there's nothing left to say anything positive about. The single arguably-good version of this entire field of Web ads is long gone.
It is not about ads being positive, but as a necessary evil. And we could at least discuss about the tech behind it, the performance of it without being shut down and downvoted so the whole thing disappeared.
>but it has not been for at least a decade.
Actually yes since around 2013 - 2014. HN has plenty of decent Ad discussions on both buy and sell side pre 2013 / 2014.
You're absolutely right, publishers are picking Google with cause, but if Google prevented competition, that's not a real choice is it?
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.
Your opinion is biased from the fact that you worked on "adtech". How can you justify it? You are the reason the web is bloated and lost the true idea of it a long time ago. Luckily, there are people who run pi-hole and adguard who have my utmost respect along with countless people who maintain an upto-date ad-block list
Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do they do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both because what's good for one group is bad for another. Fortunately with healthy competition we solve this problem since alternatives could be used.
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.
> Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do they do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both because what's good for one group is bad for another.
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.
It’s a two-sided market and it doesn’t have to be either/or. Google has a wide range of advertisers so it can find one that converts on your site and it has a wide range of sites so it can find ones that work for a given advertisers. Also Google has a large database and user inventory for personalization so it can find ads that convert on your site even if your site wouldn’t attract ads otherwise. the personalization economy has all sorts of ads and might be brand destroying in the case of retargeting but you see that crap everywhere whereas many Google alternatives run brand-destroying ads and pay you $0.00 after rounding.
> Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both
but that is the value of a marketplace, aligning buyers and sellers via the price mechanism
Isn't this decision about Google abusing their marketplace (as all marketplace owners will inevitably do), by pushing their own stuff?
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.
It matters when monopoly forces increase the cost to publishers and thus harms them.
It can be great compared to next best and they are still harmed by illegal practices that make it worse off.
"Efficient" in the pursuit of what purpose?
The argument here being that the fee is too high? I don't think prices being too high is a strong argument of the existence of a monopoly, but it might be of the exploitation of one.
There's been a few instances where internal communications have leaked showing Google intentionally rigging auction mechanics to inflate CPCs. It's not just the fees being high.
https://upriseup.co.uk/blog/something-doesnt-ad-up-google-ad...
The (Open)RTB system makes things more competitive and reduces costs for advertisers by making unsold inventory available to an automated marketplace while also increasing revenue for smaller publishers who otherwise wouldn't have been able to create first party relationships with advertisers. The middlemen are various identity providers and other tracking/data enrichment services, as well as third party exchanges, DSPs and SSPs. Believe it or not this system makes it a lot cheaper than just having someone buy ad space directly on a website
> 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.
> each middleman (usually) adds some kind of value
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
I have tried to sell ads and never been able to fill all my inventory and often the rates are poor and the ads brand destroying. If you are The New York Times it is different but a site that makes $1000 /mo in ads can’t afford an ads salesperson and in the big scheme of things that is royalty.
Have you tried prebid? It lets you send your bid requests to as many exchanges as you want so you can advertise your inventory to as many DSPs as possible
When I talk about "sell" I mean sell directly with a human touch. Like the way a newspaper or a network of radio stations has actual salespeople that sell ads.
It sounds like a service some company should step up to provide! Make the job of those salespeople easier.
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. :-)
> 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
How do you know that the waste is higher with the banner ad?
Because the banner ad generates less revenue than $5,000 worth of advertising spent on something else.
And you know this how, if you're not running banner ads to test? How do you attribute the revenue?
> * 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
That's horrible! In a better world such practices would be made illegal and those involved would be hung, drawn, and quartered.
Geotargeting of ads is essential for local businesses. Banning it would make advertising only practical for national brands. It would be bad for the world if only national brands could advertise.
I live in a unique town name in the US, pretend it’s “Foo.”
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.
None of that seems at all user-hostile to me, it's literally all aimed at making sure what the user is shown is more likely to actually be useful to them.
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...
I'm on the other side of the divide from you.
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.
> That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo.
And so you're paying for the content you're reading as well?
Ad-supported does not mean "tacking your every movement and collecting all your private data across the entirety of the internet throughout your entire adult life, and selling that data to the highest bidder"
Usual the news publishers don't sell user data because they have so little of it.
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.
1. Those extraordinary claims need some extraordinary evidence
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.
> In a comment elsewhere in the discussion: accuracy of targeting is worse than random sampling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719816
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.
> I could provide a long answer but the gist of it is that the study is flawed.
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)
> 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.
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?
> 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
> If a service cannot be offered at a certain scale without such practices, it should not be offered at that scale.
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.
Well, I don't think most people really understand the way ad-tech supports these services. I wager if you asked a few lay men they wouldn't even know google is an ad company(apart from YouTube ads)
A few years ago, a large publisher (Persgroep) in the Netherlands made a study comparing user preferences between two advertisement solutions, one would be a traditional personal data-based targeting solution and one privacy preserving solution (SOLID).
User ended up preferring the classic version, even when they were informed of its inner workings.
"publishing" They are an ad company.
"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?
Well I seem to be the only bringing proof and understanding into this debate.
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?
> Maybe there is a good reason for this?
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.
I would say that it is the most popular path among readers that is the winning one in the end.
Again, if you let the unethical ones exist, they will win.
> 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.
> May I remind you once more that the possibility to create this magical Internet world you guys live in
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.
Oh, it is unlimited capitalism that prevents people from paying for their online newspaper subscriptions?
> Before you start talking about how this enabled google's innovations
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
> The users do give consent and this is handled by Consent Management Platforms
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
> No. The users are tricked into giving "consent" through a plethora of dark patterns.
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.
> 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.
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.
> They are tricked into giving this consent because that's the only way ad industry can obtain consent to livelong invasive tracking.
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.
Nope, if they are so unscrupulously willing to employ dark patterns, I can get pretty competitive :-)
Ah, so a hypocrite I see.
???
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.
> But ads on your news/shopping website?
"What, paying for MY news? How dare they"
Stop being insanely obtuse. I stated clearly:
>> Regardless of if I pay or not I'm gonna get upsells and ads.
I'll say it again for your ad-tech addled brain only rivalling vomit-inducing people like prabhakar raghavan:
If there was an option to have zero, zero, even minutely intrusive ads/tracking, then I will be willing to pay a price for it. If this is not an option, then I have zero remorse for your wasted efforts/loss of revenue.
Tell me _one_ news website today offering this feature? I will pay for it.
https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001712553-Ads-...
> Advertising remains a critical part of our business model of supporting independent journalism, as such, we do not offer ad-free subscriptions.
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.
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).
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.
Off-topic, but I can't help snort at:
> independent journalism
Finally, if your company ever does something like using Wi-fi SSIDs as an alternative when I intentionally disable location services in my phone, then it goes in the bin. No recourse, sorry.
> If there was an option to have zero, zero, even minutely intrusive ads/tracking, then I will be willing to pay a price for it. If this is not an option, then I have zero remorse for your wasted efforts/loss of revenue.
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.
> This is already the case for most newspapers.
I just gave an example of the NYTs stance on the position. Can you find me a newspaper that doesn't say that?
> Pre-filtered segments
Which party has the information is not of relevance. That any one has it at all is already a problem. I don't care if it's advertiser sending the newspaper ["football shoes"] and the newspaper matching it with the fact that I'm interested in ["football"]. If I pay, I want none of that at all. Not even one side of the process should take place.
> Only mobile apps
Yes yes.. it was an example. Again, stop being obtuse and missing the point. You and I both know the extent to which browser fingerprinting and other techniques are used. Not to mention the larger along the news websites also have mobile apps where they employ similar techniques.
I think that is a false dichotomy. Targeting does not necessarily lead to fewer ads.
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!
"useful to them" - do I really need to know how much one day dental implants cost in 2025?
They do them in one day now?
According to all these ads I keep seeing, yes.
Running a DSP is quite expensive if you have all the features advertisers want.
Digital Signal Processor?
demand-side platform, i assume
Yeah I’m listening to a legal analyst on Bloomberg radio and there’s a lot of detail that’s getting lost under the headline. It’s not yet even clear yet that Google would need to divest from anything in order to address this.
Bloomberg Radio April 17 2025: https://www.youtube.com/live/iEpJwprxDdk?si=9WaFIJENUwyIJvpk
Google can extract as much money as they want from this equation, up to the limit of available capital for advertising. They just need to squeeze more from publishers and at the same time increase click costs. They have been doing both of these for several years.
> They just need to squeeze more from publishers and at the same time increase click costs.
but publishers receive stable share of click cost (67%?), so they should be happy with this arrangement.
That’s assuming a click happened. Premium pubs prefer guaranteed fixed CPMs no matter the amount of real clicks. I’ve worked for a few years at one of the major native ad companies, I’m very familiar with how the sausage is made.
In both scenarios publishers look good:
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 a lot of unknowns at this point, but here's an industry piece for a more informed perspective on it.
https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/google-is-found-guilty...
At the very least the exchange has to be audited. Currently we have no idea whether the prices are a result of natural supply-demand dynamics or whether the exchange keeps artificially pumping the prices with lackluster demand
Or design errors in the algorithms doing the bidding!
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.
> 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.
Key point is that it's a system that you shouldn't trust, not any individual algorithm designer or implementer. Bugs that cost Google money will be found and fixed really quickly; bugs that make Google money will linger and go unnoticed.
Exactly.
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.
Well yes, a higher winning bid will win the auction, unless it's a Private Marketplace auction.
Isn't the point that some bidders will not know which it is when they make the bid?
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.
They do know if the bid is part of a PMP. They can still place an Open Market bid if allowed but they should reduce their expectation of winning that auction, even if they're the highest bidder not because of skullduggery but because the publisher has a prior arrangement with a DSP or advertiser.
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.
> Parts of this can definately be broken up without destroying Google.
its about Display Ads business, which is 10% of Google revenue as per article. So, everything there can be broken up without destroying Google.
It's a lot more complex than that. Google has been caught putting their finger on the scale in the auction process. Not not entirely sure how they did it but I believe they were outbidding third party bidders by a cent because they're downstream in the chain.
Doesn't that depend on how finely you want to break up the "parts"? Or on what dimension?
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.
use the actual link please
https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2023/01/6371209cd0cce428b526...
Decoupling the advertising marketplace from the platform would be a huge win for consumers. It would also help Google focus on products again instead of constantly bowing to the almighty ad dollar.
Breaking those parts away from google absolutely wouldn’t destroy them, over the years I’ve been so surprised from googlers at most levels explaining how much money they make from all their different services. While advertising is absolutely a big one, it’s by no means the only one, and if i understand the situation correctly, the more advertising options that are actually viable for companies will not even kill their advertising business. But big business real doesn’t like competition.
Everyone related to the company, from shareholders down to the lowest on the totem pole are incentivized in some way to show quarterly growth, so they will do so at all costs.
> See this graphic https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7.
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?
And sometimes they're the publisher as well!
The question is more "would you expect google to reoffend given the chance again?"
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.
Yep. On top of that, it also controls the algorithm. Recently it has been tweaking the algorithm to sell non-relevant keywords to advertisers by making 'exact match' not 'exact' anymore. People have been burning their ad budgets for worthless traffic as a result, and PPC professionals are livid over it with every other post in communities talking about it:
https://reddit.com/r/ppc
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.
In fairness to Google on this (and I cannot believe I just wrote that) it's common practice to be on both sides like this, and even to have some external exchange in the middle that you have a deal with just so you can claim it's obviously fair.
That entire industry is a horrifying shitshow of sociopathy, at the expense of absolutely everyone else, both viewers (supply side) and advertisers (demand side).
On the plus side, it would be nice to make an example of Google and deal a blow to ad tech in general. At this point even putting to sleep the entire google(or any other ad tech company of your choosing) Board is acceptable if it means ad tech shuts down.
There's some irony in having to click past a Google tracking wall to see the graphic you shared in this thread, especially when that graphic isn't actually Google's. It's from Gizmodo: https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2023/01/6371209cd0cce428b526... (contained in this article: https://gizmodo.com/google-lawsuit-justice-department-ads-an...)
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
This is necessary now, but it should have been done years back.
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.
Monopolies die after a bit unless governments save them. Monopolies tend to stagnate, become too bureaucratic, and lose the pressure to perform. They then lose to more dynamic competitors. Sears is an example of loss, the banking cartel is example of government interference.
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.
If you look at the actual decision, Google court cases are quoted there many times (Search, Play etc.) as the precedent of e.g. what monopoly is.
| This should be impossible, because there are laws against it.
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.
The first Trump admin started the Google search antitrust suit 3 years before the Biden admin filed this one. Attacking Big Tech is a bipartisan affair these days.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/20/tech...
If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is communism! Would have probably slept much better at night.
> If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is communism!
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.)
> 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.
It can be argued those systems 'delivered' in spite of their cruel, indifferent, and centralized nature. Not solely because of them.
> cruel
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.
I'm not trying to defend capitalism here, so not sure where you think you see doublespeak
The 'cruel' adjective. If capitalism is not cruel, then such a criticism cannot be made against socialism, communism etc.
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.
Genuinely confused... How is anything in this scenario at all related to communism?
Not to be overly pedantic but what he described isn't communism, monopolistic private corporation is pretty much the exact opposite of communism.
price discovery through invisible hand, competitive markets are the the opposite of communism. crony capitalist monopolies are more like fascism vs communism
“Crony capitalist monopolies” are a prominent feature of the real world system for which socialist critics coined the name “capitalism”.
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.)
the real world critics of crony capitalism also coined the term socialism and then set about forming sociopathic totalitarian states and started slaughtering, torturing and starving people. what's your point?
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
> the real world critics of crony capitalism also coined the term socialism and then set about forming sociopathic totalitarian stat
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.
no Leninist would every acknowledge the 4th international.
i won't argue the rest of the flaws in your response because you are clearly a bitter-ender
So you're acknowledging that the best way to make a population powerless and then rob them blind is Communism?
No, because we aren't even doing that the best way. Can't even fail successfully.
So real "capitalism devolved into communism" has never been tried before?
We've watched communism devolve into capitalism. That's modern Russia.
What are they up to these days?
I don't know, capitalism seems to be doing a pretty good job of it right now. I'd have to see some hard numbers on efficacy.
Has anyone done a normalized any% speedrun to breadlines on these two fierce contenders? Can monarchy get in on this?
We are wealthier than we have ever been so I fail to see how capitalism has made us poor.
Poor compared to what? The past when we were poorer?
You can hide a lot of bad experiences behind averaging over 300+ million people.
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?
Mostly because of covid trauma causing people to forget who was president in 2020.
It isn't. Just like it wasn't sliding into fascism under Reagan, or Bush, or Clinton, or Bush 2, or Trump the first time, even though all the same people claimed that at the time.
Oh, good. I must have misunderstood the whole "disappeared to an El Salvadoran prison without due process" story.
... 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.
You did misunderstand it. Applying the law of the land as it has stood and been applied for hundreds of years isn't fascist. If anyone thought the Alien Enemies Act were fascist they could have repealed it at any time since the 18th century.
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.
They snatched somebody off the street. Put them on a plane to El Salvador. Without any due process . Then definitively said they made a mistake. And he's not back.
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.
I'm confused how this is a monopoly, is it just the "if we define a market as Google ads, then Google has a monopoly problem"? Like defining iOS apps as a market (and somehow failed)?
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.
> I'm confused how this is a monopoly
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's other ad companies, there is no other way to get an app on iOS.
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.
Yes there is. You can literally just pay them to put up a banner.
Please clarify your statement
Okay, by that logic you can get apps on iPhones by just individually inviting each user to download the developer tools and install the app on their phone from source.
Um, no, the market is obviously not defined as “google ads.” You could bother to do one single search (maybe even with google!) before spewing nonsense.
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...
Unnecessarily rude but okay.
>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.
I would love to see a company compete in the ad space with the goal of making ads less intrusive. If ads didn't attack me and cause the viewport to jump and become obscured while reading, my first impression with the products would be better, and the sites the ads are on would get more viewership.
Quality ads would be at a huge premium.
Web ads are bearable for me most of the time, but I'm dismayed by ads in mobile games my kids play. Unskippable 30 second videos that peddle poorly made F2P games.
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.
Turning that on its head, maybe you want something like a 90s shareware lost, curated by someone. Then the games you'd play for free are now ad free (the game is its own ad to get more levels). And you get that curated list. But yeah less money than dialing up ads to 11 while trying to find the whale who'll spend 1000 a week.
This is where Apple Arcade is an excellent value IMHO.
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.
The fact that mobile gaming is so plagued with scams and bullshit ads is a serious problem. Makes me bot want to engage at all.
If we must have ads, the best quality ads I see online are dumb ads. Just an image as a link. The most effective ads I see are ones on blogs where the blogger sells ad space (side columns) and they're just images that directly link to the product. The ads are relevant to the blog and readers. 99% of other online ads I see are visual garbage and irrelevant. The "targeting" is abysmal.
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.
Exactly.
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.
Check out this Geiko ad: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
Buffett is a rare gem
The exact company you're asking for existed already, almost two decades ago. It was called Project Wonderful, and initially focused on independent blogs and webcomics.
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)
Can you share some names? Would be interesting to check them out.
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.
You might be interested in The Trade Desk and their Sellers and Publishers 500. It focuses on only quality content and quality ads. https://www.thetradedesk.com/resources/what-is-sellers-publi...
I think at the beginning Google was the good one keeping display ads high quality, so that even some ad blocking lists didn't remove them straight away. But yeah, today it is impossible to browse some sites or use apps without being tricked into endless maze of close button. And when I see Temu ads I throw up.
I think the deed is done. We are never going back to "good" ads anymore. The market's greatest revenue makers are those who are dumb ad clickers. We need more intrusive ads to get them on board now. The smart ones can still use adblock.
I'd use the web more without an adblocker if this were the case.
I've always been somewhat opposed to this, because there's already like 10 different search alternatives, and now AI is taking over, which will further weaken their grip.
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.
This is not that case. This case is about how Google only serves certain ad inventory to people who use their products.
Then what is the definition of a monopoly? It doesn’t appear to be the same definition as “the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.” Do they exclusively control all ad inventory? Do they control all devices receiving ads? GP states that they don’t have exclusive control broadly, just within their own ecosystem. That’s not the definition of a monopoly though, so it seems like a motte and bailey calling google a monopoly.
The courts don't use "monopoly", they use the term "monopoly power": https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui... Like this says, it doesn't strictly require a monopoly.
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.
I guess my argument is you can use one of the other dozen ad platforms
Online advertising isn't limited to ads in search results. They can include ads everywhere and work as a platform for others as well.
You're mixing up antitrust cases. The 2020 case [0], decided in August and going into remedies in a week or so, was about search. This one is about advertising [1], a separate market that the DOJ has argued Google has also been acting anticompetitively in.
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_...
> Google is on top because they do the best job
You think a court hasn't considered that angle?
Well they certainly gained dominance by being the best and I would say they still are the best. But maybe there was some competitor that could have usurped them by being even better if not for their anticompetitive tactics. I wouldn't put money against that...
> Google is on top because they do the best job
Companies become monopolies often through doing their job the best. Companies stay the best because they're monopolies.
There's really only one alternative, Bing. Virtually all the other western search engines are using the Bing api, and just slightly modify the results.
Technically Yandex has it’s own index, although there’s debate on whether Eastern Europe counts as western in this context
I use Kagi ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Which uses Bing as its primary index
Source? I don't see any mention of that here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Search "chili recipes" on bing. Now search kagi or any other alternative search engine. They all show the exact same recipes because they're using the bing API.
Really? Even non-technical people are waking up and seeing the 3 in web3 stands for India, OnlyFans and AI content.
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.
Kinda surprised. Google's core business is advertising. Some vertically integrated aux services (like chrome) feel ripe for antitrust, but I wasn't expecting ads themselves. What is Google without ads?
Being a monopoly, in itself, isn’t illegal. The question is whether the company maintains its monopoly through illegal tactics or leverages that monopoly in illegal manners.
(NYT really ought to add “illegal” to their title.)
The HTML doc title has that wording, so we've swapped out the article title for that. Thanks!
Google is playing all sides of the dice. They used adsense to enlist publishers. They used adwords to get marketers. They used an ad buying and selling platform to corner the entire ad line.
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.
IIRC, before Google got into ad-tech, they didn't have a business model. Not sure whether "core market: users" make sense in this context.
Their business model was search advertising. And they created many product products from that revenue. They tried to monetize the other products which is why they got into ad tech .
You’ve nailed the first two stages of enshittification in your story there. Stage 1: bring in users with a genuinely good product they like! Stage 2: once users are locked in, prioritize your business customers (in this case, advertisers) and make things continually worse for your users.
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.
("Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist")
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")
Thanks, I like the last quote. But I'm curious... Would it be preferable to have Google owning all of these services you listed—just not the ad company they depend on, or the inverse—all the companies are spun out?
I see your point, but also, if Google continued to own all these other things, it would still be a terrifyingly large spread, no?
Large companies, even monopolies, aren't the problem. Unfair leverage to suppress competition is. Those products without the subsidizing revenue of ads, and ads without the information flows of those products, is the goal.
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.
They are a problem in terms of an efficient free market; they make the information flow asymmetrically biased in their favor, and cause higher prices and implicit collusion. That is true even without any intent to harm.
Sure, but generally speaking that's an orthogonal to the issue of antitrust. The same could be same of many of the typical "big tech" players, or even some of the YC "winners".
Google can afford to lose money on many of those things because of the ad monopoly. (How much is Android worth in that it keeps Apple out of antitrust trouble with iOS? What quid pro quo does that enable?)
The original Google research paper by Brin and Page explicitly points out that a search engine financed by advertising is inherently anti-consumer:
> 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.
They were really smart guys. But smart guys don’t stand a chance in the face of all that money because it attracts people who know how to manipulate and control smart people. Smart people think they’re at the top of the totem pole. But really its those without ethics who sit at the top in our society.
This is a conundrum humanity must address if we’re to survive over the long term, IMO.
A powerful argument against excessively large corporations. When the companies are competing fiercely, the amoral folks can't game the system.
They get the amoral politicians to rig the system.
This is seriously one of the best things I've ever read here. Extremely well said.
Not only that, username checks out!
Your kind words are appreciated, thank you.
You're implying that smart people are somehow inherently ethical, but were manipulated by unethical (and less smart?) people. Whereas some of the least ethical people in history were also very smart. Intelligence is practically a requirement for truly abhorrent behavior.
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.
Well, I can see where you get that from what I wrote. I didn’t mean it quite like that, so allow me to clarify:
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?
> 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
Each and every one of us has the ability to choose to be better. That so many just “go along with whatever” is why I personally think we’re unlikely to survive over the long term, unless a more enlightened species leads us by the hand.
Can we get to human or better intelligence through evolution without tribal behaviours?
Even if you're correct, is that the world you want? (And to be clear, I'm not saying it's the world you want.)
DNA isn't destiny.
Right, I don't. It's an interesting conundrum because on an evolutionary scale the civilized era is so short it probably hasn't had an effect yet, which means that getting to a Star Trek style utopia would require a conscious struggle against our nature.
Problem with that logic is, humans don't just evolve genetically, we evolve culturally, and that cultural evolution ends up affecting our biology as well. So it doesn't really matter how slow genetic evolution is. Cultural evolution is what defines the human species. It's much more rapid because it includes planning and foresight, unlike the blind watchmaker of biological evolution. It is also lamarckian in that it incorporates the experiences of the previous generation into the cultural phenotype of the next one.
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.
Psychopathopoly.
If there isn't a Voight-Kampff test for this there needs to be.
That’s an awesome point, and honestly I hope lawmakers start to dig into advertising as an industry in general. Hate being exposed to ads and the only alternative is to pay to avoid them. Should be considered predatory and limited in scope somehow. Big Tech can just focus on good products, please. It’s not just preference, it’s and outcome of the final analysis of incentives in society, so S and B could foresee it so many years ago
First, let me say I'm glad the FTC is going after monopolies. True capitalism requires competition, not massive corporations.
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.
The FTC had started many cases on the healthcare front. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/...
If you want to see more, get Lina Khan to be chair again!
I don't really see how that's possible. They are prevented by law from charging more than 25% on top of what they pay out to medical providers. The problem is the providers who are represented by the AMA.
https://acdis.org/articles/news-ama-report-details-health-in...
This relies entirely on market concentration and doesn't even bother to address the legal cap on premiums enacted in the ACA. I expected it to be trash because it is written by people who have every incentive to try to blame insurance companies and I was correct.
Or Visa and MasterCard...
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/16/is-the-eu-bann...
(But talk is cheap.)
health insurance is a legally-sanctioned cartel that should be eliminated entirely
There have been similar such statements in the past but nothing happened, What will be different this time ?
They should dig into admob while they're at it. They love screwing devs over and have purposely left their email option broken for years now. They'll cut you off even when it's their fault and you'll have no means of recourse. It's a joke, but they have the best ecpm around unfortunately.
The Court's Opinion: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...
Court Listener has the opinion here:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...
Curious to see how Google search holds up over the next few years. I find myself not using it at all unless I am looking for something very specific such as the website for a company or local restaurants, etc.
Anything informational now I use ai.
And the president is doing a lot of illegal things, and senators are doing a lot of illegal things, why do Google has to pay for it's crimes if not even politicians have to pay for their crimes?
Google really should start floating some plans for splitting itself up. Things worked out pretty well when Ma Bell was split up. Some people thought it would all fail, but the companies have done a good job competing and cooperating at the right times.
If Google comes up with the plans, it's better than some antagonist.
Google seems harder to split up than Bell to me. Bell was split regionally which makes sense since each region has it's own wires and can make money separately. Google has the problem that all their products other than adds lose money (or make money through integration with Google adds)
Yeah. The problem with splitting up Google is that Google products, taken in isolation, are themselves keys to preventing other monopolies.
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.
This is like looking at a farm overrun by weeds but doing nothing using the pretext that just removing one of them isn't going to fix the problem.
No, it's like refusing to use Agent Orange to kill the weeds for fear of poisoning the neighboring farms.
You walked right into that one, sorry.
I guess we might have a mismatch in values.
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.)
Split off Android to swim on its own and we get an iPhone monopoly.
Why? Android appears to be profitable.
Only Google-integrated Android devices are profitable. You really think Graphene/Lineage/etc... devices have a chance in the market vs. Apple Computer? Splitting off the integration means those devices have to pay for it or go without. Even Amazon failed in this space.
Which is to say, the parts of Android that are "profitable" are the parts tied to the broader corporate product suite.
Only Google-integrated Android devices are profitable.
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?
If the only way to sell a profitable product is to buy its core value-add (Google integration) from someone else, then your product isn't profitable by definition. Split off Android and Pixels become just another Fire Phone, and will compete just about as well (or worse, since the spun-off Android division wouldn't even have free Amazon integration).
Again, there are Google-free Android phones in the market today. They do very poorly.
That's a business model problem then.
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.
> Any other business burying money into various endeavors would have to cut losses at some point
Google has a massive graveyard full of killed projects, they are cutting their losses, few companies cut as much as they do:
https://killedbygoogle.com/
While at first glance this may disprove the idea that they don't cut losses, it actually furthers the argument that advertising revenue creates perverted incentives, since they blew massive amounts of money on projects with no financial value. Moreover, while those products are dead, the data gained likely made its way into the advertising information flow. If you were a competitor to one of those dead products, or an advertising company that has to carefully evaluate the cost effectiveness of an auxiliary product, Google has an "unfair" advantage over you.
This is exactly why it's important to bust them up: all those other products are effectively "dumping" on whatever sector they compete in. This even discourages time-investment (to develop) and learning-to-use investment (for users) for free alternatives, not just commercial ones.
All of their products helped the sector they are in. They didn't "dump" into it. Google continually improved areas where other companies previously refused to, even if they were charging for their services.
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).
I think you misunderstand what 'dumping' means in this market context. Sure, free software like Linux is great. But if you didn't have that preconceived notion, a competitor dumping free software on the market to make others' initiatives unprofitable would look like an anti-trust violation, rather than a charitable act of community.
I understand perfectly fine. I think your statement however is quite ignorant about the state of things at the time these actions were taken.
Do yourself a favor and research a little bit.
Their business apps division is probably a billion dollar business.
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.
Revenue is not really a consideration when talking about _illegal_ monopolies. That is an incorrect way to view this. It's about anti-competitive practices. That's what the laws are about (and the reason for their existence).
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.
> Google is not anti-competitive.
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.
You mean the three trials which are definitely not politically motivated, right?
Considering the cases were prosecuted in collaboration across both the Biden and Trump administrations, and decided by longstanding federal judges, then, no, these are not accurately characterized as politically motivated except insofar as all government actions have a nexus to politics by definition.
I would highly recommend reading the decision. The two markets defined were publisher ad servers (i.e. Google's DoubleClick for Publishers) and ad exchanges (i.e. Google's AdX). Google behaved anticompetitively in both of these markets.
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).
> 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.
Can you use Gmail, Google Drive, Chrome sync etc and opt out of allowing Google to use any of your data for advertising services?
I can in fact, go to a different mail provider, use a different file hosting and sharing service, and use different browsers with different sync technologies.
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.
The baby bells just bought each other up, and nothing really changed
Then there's no harm in splitting Google and letting them buy up those companies in 30 years.
Even worse, when the local exchange carriers were renting their infrastructure and trying to compete on the thinnest of margins, it allowed the baby bells to see who could survive and who couldn't. Those who didn't survive went under. The successful smaller CLEC's, were then bought by the baby bells for their customers.
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.
> Things worked out pretty well when Ma Bell was split up
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 worse than that, they reconsolidated but BellLabs was shut down in the process. So, they got the same control they previously had except they weren't spending on research. IMO, they should have been prevented from reconsolidating.
> In what way?
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.
Xfinity is Comcast which I don't think has much connection to the Baby Bells or their reconsolidation. Unfortunately the the cost of running cable to the broad US suburbs is a pretty big natural barrier to competition.
https://i.redd.it/7v0zi94tms181.jpg
Too bad we can't treat laying cable as a public utility, then multiple companies could use the same infrastructure to compete.
Instead we ended up paying for dark fiber with companies having no incentive to use it.
There are some towns trying to do that but it's being viciously fought by the cable companies who love their little seminatural monopolies.
The market is being unfairly defined based on how things worked decades ago instead of looking at the modern landscape. Tech evolved rapidly and the way things worked decades ago may not be optimal for the end user as things change.
You're right, but probably not in the way you think.
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 things worked decades ago
you mean, before monopolies?
Everything is a monopoly if you limit the market enough.
Monopolies in and of themselves aren't a problem, and aren't illegal. Unfair leverage to prevent competition is.
This is not correct and a common misconception, on both sides of the argument.
Both monopolies and monopolistic actions are illegal, each alone is enough to be in violation of the law.
The existence of competition doesn't always make things better. For example forcing middlemen to exist so that there is competition can lead to a worse situation than without middlemen. Direct to consumer is unfair leverage to middlemen, but it can be better for consumers.
That's a really weird way to define "competition" ?
If the Meta case goes this way too, the ripple effects could be huge. Might affect the bay area, startup scene and a lot of others in ways we can't even grasp yet. All we can do is wait and see..
If Google and Meta are split in 3 parts each, all laid off people will be hired back fast.
Happy to see this and hopefully there are some changes. Right now I'm dealing with a crazy Adsense issue and there is no recourse, no customer support and no alternative.
There is no shortage of other ad platforms. Breaking up Google isn't going to solve your specific issue lol
No but it would stop a single company from accumulating so much power.
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.
Of course it's not democratic, but what business ever is? There is no recognized right to access the advertising market on terms that you like.
Yes there is no right to access an advertising market for Google, luckily the government agrees they are an illegal monopoly. Hopefully the ramifications are massive and company breaking.
If that happens this will do nothing for you. You will go through some other company where you can't talk to a human.
That’s fine. As long as Google is broken up. I doubt your scenario will happen either, we all saw the hundreds of billions in investor value that occurred when AT&T was broken up.
Breaking up Google will help everyone everywhere.
How can Google ruin your business?
I've seen countless examples, e.g. a business that depends on online advertising gets its account suspended for incorrect reasons and there is literally no-one to reach at Google to get unsuspended.
If you made your business become completely dependent on a third party, you were already a failure and shouldn't have a business. Being a successful businessman is not a right. It's competition.
I love it when my counterparty's breach of contract is my fault because I foolishly trusted that they would do what they said they would in exchange for my money.
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.
If you aren't prepared for the contingency where your counterparty bails, then yes, strategically you are failing to commoditize your product for the specific market. I think that's the basis of competition and free market economics.
lol in what world is breaking paid user contracts and flagrantly getting away with it democratic? What does free market even mean in this context? That the big trillion dollar corporation can bury you in legal fees or remove your means of making money with no way to question the decision to prove it was done in error?
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.
Show me the contract where Google promises to bring web traffic to your business.
Wow, all those fortune 500 companies whose infra entirely relies on 3rd party cloud infrastructure really must be in for a rude awakening. You should update them with your cunning analysis and inform them they are failures.
The tone here isn't great but parent is more correct than not. This is why large companies don't use freebie services. They vet companies and partners, sign enterprise deals with support, SLAs, penalties, insurance, even bonds in some cases. It costs more, and it's hardly fun for most people, but it's all part of mitigating those risks. And it's not just tech, you see the same thing in non-tech industries like manufacturing.
It really isn't. Most businesses export core business functions to a third party in some way. This is just a snotty navel gazing post without much content that was responded to in kind.
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.
The reason monopolies are illegal is precisely because they force people to be completely dependent on a third party.
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?
No, but if he makes himself for example completely dependent on Monsanto, he shouldn't have a business, because he's in practice an employee with all the financial responsibilities of a business and none of the benefits of having a business. And none of the benefits of being an employee either.
If your business model is to make yourself completely dependent on a single third party, then you shouldn't have a business.
The only way it would be possible for him to become completely dependent on Monsanto is if that company is allowed to monopolize the product categories it sells.
Isn't one of the specific complaints about monopolies that it leaves you with no choice but to be dependent on the third party?
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?
Trillions of dollars are spent on advertising outside of Google. You can advertise in print, billboards, radio and television ads, Netflix, or on social media behemoths.
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.
I’m sorry, this perspective is absurd. I’m talking about a web site that shows ads. You’re suggesting they pivot to running off billboards? To creating TV shows?
> 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 1: You want to advertise your product or service. There are endless options outside of Google, including some options where the audience is counted in the hundreds of millions.
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.
> I dislike Google more than most and would never buy nor sell ads with them, but they have no monopoly on advertising
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.
Monopoly is a real word with a real meaning. It doesn't matter what any kind of judge "decides", he does not have the authority to change the meanings of words according to his humors. Google might be doing anti-competitive or fraudulent actions, but let's use the proper terms in the proper places.
Just like there is a difference between theft, burglary and robbery.
Monopoly, and the degree to which Google obtained a monopoly in the defined market examined in this case, is a legal question. So indeed it does matter what a judge decides after a trial where the evidence was examined and a conclusion reached.
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.
Your argument is simply appeal to authority. The truth is still the truth no matter what men do or decide. If the judge calls Google a monopoly in advertising, he is obviously wrong, and nobody has any duty to pretend that he is right. Both you and I can think for ourselves.
Yes my argument is an appeal to authority. That’s the right approach to answering a legal question.
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?
Who are the persons who has to respect the judge (the authority) when he is flagrantly wrong in his decision? The justice system has to respect that decision. Google and the other involved parties have to respect that decision.
You and me however, are not involved in any way, and do not have to respect anything this ignorant judge says or decides.
Do you have a documented example of this?
This is happening to me right now. I have run a site for 14 years that gets most of its traffic during the current two week stretch (it's related to NBA playoffs).
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.
You could just go to a different ad network? At that amount of money you're not on the ad exchange.
I don't see how this is ruining your business. A vendor is not playing well with you, just go to another one?
The key factor is the timing. During the primary week where this product generates income, Google completely screwed me over with no warning and no answers about what's going on. I am of course looking into alternatives, but that takes time, and 3 days from now it'll be too late.
You have no contract with Google though. You're literally siphoning on what is a really low-barrier, dare I say free service.
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.
Your contention is that someone can't screw you over unless you're paying them?
Not parent, but there are many examples of this; they’re often (but not always) unsympathetic cases due to the business model of the business which has been destroyed.
By refusing to send you traffic that you rely upon for revenue? For reasons that likely wouldn’t even come to light in a lawsuit?
Do you have a recommendation of an alternative that I can switch to easily and on short notice? The site I'm having trouble with gets 95% of its traffic for the year this week so I'm scrambling.
Make it so you either sell ad space or offer a marketplace for ad space sellers and advertisers. Don't allow a company to do both and you conveniently catch most social media players too...
What other ad platforms do you recommend for monetizing mobile apps?
Any that you’ve had good luck with? My research on this has come up with no good options for non-game apps.
You could try AppLovin MAX, even if it's best for games.
Thanks! That looks like exactly what I’m looking for.
Just switch away from Adsense.
Do you have a recommendation of an alternative that I can switch to easily and on short notice? The site I'm having trouble with gets 95% of its traffic for the year this week so I'm scrambling.
Sorry I don't - I was purely prompting the idea that there should be no anti-trust related issue that would stop you switching.
A drop-in replacement for Adsense is a very good idea though. I wonder if someone knows of one here.
maybe a monopoly prevented its viability. Maybe.
tried carbon ads?
If you think antitrust has anything to do with why it isn't profitable for a company at Google scale to pay a human being for every one of the hundreds of millions of people who use AdSense to have customer support...
Of course it has everything to do with antitrust.
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.
I feel like there's a scale in between "dedicated employee for every customer" and "normal call center agents with some tiers of support above them to help with issues" yeah?
They have one of the best LLM's in the world. I got 5000 images rejected. Now I can read about the requirements and not figure out why. It gets truly hilarious where the images are rejected by means of AI. It means they can produce 100% accurate reasons right on the rejection page. Ill even pay for it. I would also pay if it can correct the images. They have plenty of good but complex services that LLMs could deliver wonderful support for. Their LLM could also sell me services I currently cant be bothered to look at. Eventually, over the years the LLM can slowly be allowed to negotiate and make decisions too.
Are there hundreds of millions of AdSense customers though?
A smaller ad company can afford to have customer support. If there are tens or hundreds then each one can lose customers, better than one massive company that doesn't care or can't afford and would rather keep the money than pay for support.
Google isn't a monopoly in the Standard Oil sense of the term. Its ad revenue is big because it occupies so much user attention. I actually think many suggested remedies would actually make Google more profitable.
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.
> Google isn’t a monopoly in the Standard Oil sense of the term.
Aren’t they? It doesn’t sound like those two interpretations are mutually exclusive.
In the sense of the Sherman Act and similar legislation, monopolies exist in the sense of having exclusive control over some supply and raising prices against consumers.
This isn't what Google does, they generally lower prices for consumers and the competition is only a click away.
The consumer harm standard is an outgrowth of the work of Robert Bork, who was Solicitor General for Nixon and Ford, respectively.
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.
I judge this Chicago-school-pushed shift in antitrust enforcement so bad that I usually mark it out as the first noteworthy step on our current thrust toward authoritarianism.
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.
> In the sense of the Sherman Act [...]
> 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.
The consumer of the ad platform is the advertiser, not the person clicking the ad. Major advertisers either play ball with Google or their ads don't get seen in search. Doesn't seem very different to Standard Oil controlling who got access to refineries.
What realistic alternatives are there in the mobile app ads space that aren’t geared towards games?
I’m genuinely curious because some apps can be hard to monetize in any other way.
87% of Googles revenue in 2023 was advertising. $265 billion. They hold more than 80% market dominance in all markets they compete in.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
Market share and market dominance are very sensitive to how you define the market.
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...
A simple test is if you got rid of a product, what would customers use as a direct replacement? Those competitor products, the product you got rid of plus the customers of those products, are a market.
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.
I mean it wouldn't make sense for it to be more profitable for google if there were no search deals, since otherwise they would just cancel the deal themselves. Clearly they see long term value in blocking out competition even at that high of a price
Google can't cancel it right now because then otherwise Bing would bid for it. Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this.
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.
> Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this.
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?
You highlight some genuine points of difficulty for antitrust enforcers.
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.
I think it would be a good move to prevent browser deals. There is no reality in which the winner is Firefox, Kagi or DDG - it will always be Google or Bing. That's clearly anticompetitive - it locks the other browsers out of a major share of the market.
If you're arguing we should split Chrome development from Google then I'm 100% with you there.
Google could argue (correctly?) that if split, Chrome couldn't exist without browser deals?
That's belied by the fact that Chromium exists, and I speculate they spun up Chromium in case they were ordered to break up.
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.
Sure, but I'm arguing Apple shouldn't be allowed to sell "default browser" status on iOS. Show the customer a randomized list and let them choose. Google will probably still dominate, but it won't be because they paid to.
Why shouldn't Apple be allowed to do that? They're not a monopolist adjudicated to have been using their market power to cause harm to others.
Context is important.
The real reason that tobacco advertising ended on television is the fairness doctrine.
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.
It depends on the what the browsers end up doing. If they just surface a select your search engine dialog during set up, most people will just select google and nothing will have changed besides the cost. If they set a non-google search engine by default, they will lose ad revenue because of people not bothering to change the default.
Depends on the default search engine. Many people went of their way to download a web browser that wasn't Internet Explorer for many years even though IE was the default.
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.
It would be great to separate the search index/engine from the ads and allow other search portals to pay for the index and choose how to monetize.
If google actually went about organizing the worlds information, that would be wonderful.
It would make sense if Apple decided to still have Google be their default, even without the payment. Not sure how likely that is though.
I think this decision would have been impactful 10 years ago. Why did the government wait until Google started becoming irrelevant?
Google becoming irrelevant is the most naive take in technology. It's more if wishful thinking. Google is equally, if not more relevant today. Their AI models are currently one of the best in the world. They still have a commanding search market share. YouTube and Android rule in most countries in terms of number of users. Chrome is the leading browser. Google maps is omnipresent. Gmail is the biggest email service online. Their revenues are steady.
They are not doing well with certain areas like social, GCP, messaging, enterprise etc. But it's not an existential threat.
Not to say Google is in the right but Google seems to be pitted against the entire industry constantly.
Well, yeah; according to the judge, they're engaged on monopolistic behavior. That's tautologically "against the entire industry."
It's because Google is the face of big bad evil tech companies to normies that don't understand the first thing about technology.
Compared to Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon, is Google really bigger, badder and eviler?
The average person sees them all as big bad and evil, and they all must be taken down, because what have they done for humanity!?
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.
The big question now is whether this will have any noticeable consequences.
Pretty crazy how this case gets the full support of thr DOJ, along with actions against Harvard, Colombia ect. I dont mind Google being broken up, but how am i supposed to respect the law when the same DOJ lets out ponzi schemers and bond villians because they donated 500k to a Trump friendly super pac.
If im Google or anoother tech company im going to be Divesting from the United States as much as possible.
Who are these people that are let out (of jail? prison?) because they donated to a super PAC? Not arguing, just curious
You can start with the Mayor of NYC
What happened with Mayor Eric Adams?
Tom Homan went on national news and said they they were dropping charges against Eric Adams in exchange for his cooperation with ICE.
This is fantastic news. Break up the Google monopoly.
Talk to the ruling directly: https://radpod.ai/share/court-ruling-google-violated-the-she...
Sundar booking flights to Mar A Lago
Part of the problem is the Capitalist system. Google shares are traded on the market. They have an obligation to grow every year. Sure when your a small hungry startup you can grow fast, but when you are the size of Google and try the same thing you inevitably get into these types of problems where you try to dominate, but you are also the biggest player because of pressure from your shareholders.
A decade too late for Appnexus
Go figure that it's taken so long to do this that it was possibly almost mooted by Google enshittifying itself out of existence.
There's a long way to go before YouTube and Android become niche options...
Could this be used as a shakedown by Trump (give me 1 billion and I'll get the case withdrawn)
What are the odds this case will continue to be pursued honestly under the Trump administration?
Pretty high. Antitrust against Google started during the first Trump administration and continued during Biden. Dealing with Big Tech is a bipartisan issue, though each side has partisan reasons for it: Republicans argue tech companies have a liberal bent, Democrats argue tech companies allowed misinformation to get Trump elected. At the end of the day, we can all agree it's time for Google to go.
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.
No shit
Wait until you see AI
So happy to see big tech's "kiss Trump's ass and hope all the legal troubles go away" strategy failing spectacularly.
> So happy to see big tech's "kiss Trump's ass and hope all the legal troubles go away" strategy failing spectacularly.
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)
I wouldn't say it failed yet, nothing dramatic has actually happened as a result of the ruling yet.
The most surprising thing about big tech is that most of them seem to be less useful than ever and yet they are making more money than ever.
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.
> most of them seem to be less useful than ever and yet they are making more money than ever
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.
Java is an Oracle product
"Java was designed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. It was released in May 1995 as a core component of Sun's Java platform."
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.
To state the obvious, OpenJDK is also an Oracle product.
> Something doesn't add up
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.
I don't know whether they are a monopoly but I would like them to fix several things
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
> 3) Enough with the ideological censorship
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).
Google doesn't need to fix anything for you, they basically own the market. Their won't be any changes unless the state does something. But I wouldn't expect the most corrupt administration to date to stand against one of the wealthiest organizations in the country.
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...
All the ads i see on youtube are nothing but scams. Google has become evil.
Google also destroyed journalism as we know it. Who knows how the industry would look like, if it wasn't suffocated by its monopoly
(disclaimer that I was the TL of Google News a very long time ago, so feel free to ignore what I say as biased)
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.
Journalism destroyed itself
facebook destroyed journalism
"this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers"
From the money perspective it was Google. But I agree on Facebook's contribution, as they've pretty much created an advertising cartel together
Media companies destroyed journalism by making news into entertainment instead of information. For example by finding the one extremest in a group of people and running stories about his minority - but exciting - viewpoint, instead of the boring viewpoint of most of the group.
the FTC is like Jim Cramer. Once they judge a business to be a monopoly, the business falls apart and the monopoly is irrelevant. Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial. the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.
> Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial
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.
If breaking Google up would be good for Google shareholders, surely the shareholders would have made it happen already, right?
Unless the argument is that shareholders don't know what's good for them.
The divergence between the interests of shareholders and the actions of a corporation in cases like this is a textbook example of a well established concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
Naively I would've thought that by making management huge shareholders, (most of) the agents then become principals.
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.
Being CEO of the larger company would make him more money. His money comes from constant grants of new stock and options and incentives not the simple appreciation of stock granted the day he was hired.
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.
> Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial.
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.
An appellate court overturned & greatly limited the Microsoft decision and found that the judge had engaged in misconduct. An appellate court has nothing to do with the administration in charge at the time
>>An appellate court has nothing to do with the administration in charge at the time
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.
9/11 also happened during that time. Punishing the people that declared war upon the United States and destroyed the Twin Towers was the larger priority than breaking up one company.
AT&T was broken up in 1982. Our manufacturing peaked around 1990 and what really pushed it downward was China joining the WTO. We also halted a lot of fab construction domestically after the GFC of '08.
This is an interesting theory, but US manufacturing output actually peaked ~2022-2024.
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 *case started in 1973 and was threatened for almost a decade beforehand. That put the entire industry on edge.
To the contrary AT&T proved itself incapable of delivering end-to-end innovation. Sure it lowered the cost of intercity links for long-distance calls dramatically but couldn’t pass savings on to the consumer. Picturephone was a technical tour de force but demonstrated AT&T couldn’t deliver new services other than little things like call waiting and caller id.
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.
Bell Labs?
> the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades
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?
> Once they judge a business to be a monopoly, the business falls apart and the monopoly is irrelevant
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.
the AT&T break up ... killed our domestic chip production
That's an interesting take that I've never heard before. Do you have any source that goes into detail?
Can you provide some sources that support these claims? This comment is so far removed from any viewpoint I've seen before on this topic that I'm worried I might have a massive blindspot.
Especially this:
> the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.
Tech companies have set back technology by decades already.
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.
Blame money. Tech can and has been used to improve our lives. But money talks and the focus is too much on never ending hockey stick growth for its own sake.
> the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.
Are we gonna pretend W<Intel> never happened?
It seems the judge went with reasoning resembling an orange monkey logic. "I know online advertising better than anyone else on the planet, and Google is a monopoly".
US&A has already turned into idiocracy.
Advertisement seems to be a hot topic for endless discussion these days.
Throw in some "that thing sells ads" and endless tarpit discussion ensues with no clear conclusion.
We should be better than this.
Weird calling them a monopoly when they only control 26% of the market for digital marketing. For comparison when Microsoft was found guilty, they had 90% of the desktop market. Att was at 100% when they were broken up. Standard oil was at 90%.
Is this lowest percentage of market for a company being found monolopy?
Being a monopoly is legal, it's using your monopoly status at the expense of the competition is what isn't legal.
Never said it was illegal. Hence my phrasing monopoly and not an illegal monopoly aka monopoly that abuses their position. But was defines a monopoly? 26% of market doesn't sound like a monopoly to me looking at past antitrust actions. Which why i ask my question, is this lowest percentage of the market for antitrust action?
In the global search engine market, Google maintains a dominant position. In January 2025, its market share was approximately 89.62% across all devices, and 93.89% in the mobile search market. While Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! hold a smaller share of the market, Google continues to be the leading search engine.
What does search have to do with this? This is on their display ads.
You can read decision here. No mention of search.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...
> You can read decision here. No mention of search. I count 13 mentions of "Google Search" and 44 mentions of "search" in the linked document.
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:
So it's quite clear the court thought Google was a monopoly in "publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising". Not "market for digital marketing" as you alluded to.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".
People are illegally thinking of nothing but 'google.com' when they are about to search for something, rules judge.
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.