The Google-Facebook Duopoly Threatens Diversity of Thought

I appreciate your thoughtful, reasonable and balanced response. It also treats the opposing viewpoint, the WSJ's opinion, with a degree of intellectual integrity.

Your point about 'blind spots' though is a very gentle jab to my larger point. I don't believe this is a 'blind spot'. My point is more basic - I don't think the WSJ has any real intellectual integrity.

In all honesty I think its bad from a viewpoint diversity to have such a small number of outlets control this much of the flow of information. And so if this was a real concern of the WSJ then maybe they would take that approach to very similar and present concern - the purchase of Tribune Media by Sinclar. Tribune Media owns 40+ TV stations. Sinclair owns at least 100 stations. In some cities Sinclair owns 3 stations. Certainly if the WSJ cares about 'viewpoint diversity' they would be concerned about a single company owning that much of the media landscape.

Except they don't take issue with Sinclair the same way they have concerns of Google/Facebook. As a matter of fact the WSJ probably loves the Sinclair merger. I disagree with your point, I do not believe this is a blind spot. I think its much simpler.

WSJ doesn't like the Facebook/Google duopoly because they represent a viewpoint they don't like, a more left or liberal viewpoint. And they do at least tacitly approve of the Sinclair merger because Sinclair does have a viewpoint they agree with, a more conservative one.

There is no intellectual heft to "we don't like it when they do to us what we do to them". So the WSJ has to manufacture some phony principled argument that under normal circumstances would contradict their typical position.

I'm not here to argue the for or against the government intervention trying to prevent a narrowing of the diversity of opinion. I'm saying the WSJ does not give a crap about diversity. They have no real ideals. They only care when their side has a disadvantage.

I can't read more than the first paragraph due to the paywall. But I do think that the WSJ is being intellectually dishonest when they try to advocate against Google/Facebook narrowing the diversity of opinions when its more like "we don't like it when the other side can crowd us out'. The WSJ hates opinion diversity, unless it is their own.

One way they raise prices is artificial shortages and altering supply/demand in a way that favors them.

The only side that is really a "free market" is content advertising because they don't control all the levers of optimization... but it too will bite your ass and favor them in both marketing and publisher suffering.

On google search, they can invoke quality score, sort scoring, auction optimization and create a funnel/flow that advertisers must continually optimize against much to the favor of Google.

They also change their TOS to be beneficial to their algorithm all the time now. Take the recent 200% budget change, they can now spend 200% of your budget and they optimize this 200% spend over long(er) terms. Seems to be removing the human touch and favoring the algorithm.

They also optimize their CPA to be a black box. I recently switched to CPA because they told me to. What you learn the hard way is that their pricing is modeled in their favor and over averages/terms that benefit them. When you say you want a $1.00 CPA you're not protected against paying exponentially more than that... They even trick you by getting you to update google analytics with "smart actions" that only add bull crap as to what a CPA/conversion is - once again in their favor

All of this seems to just scare away the smaller buyers because they can't compete when industry pricing and averaging excludes them from being able to plan/budget and pay for advertising accordingly.

The only people with the pockets to play the game are the encumbered organizations that also do other trades with Google - such as large purchases of Google G! Suite, Large deals with Google cloud or their data/analytics services.

Login to google adwords, it says "hey switch to CPA" then eventually "hey, use smart campaigns" and sooner or later you can't even control the crap your buying because you can't block/filter/target anymore because the borg is doing it for you and oh btw, we spend your entire budget at 12:01 am sending you 1000 visitors a second even though its not an accelerated campaign and we doubled your budget and we told you to reach more visitors to add more to your budget. Oh, did we not tell you that we weren't running your ads until you increased your budget and now that you increased it we're going to spend 200% more?

its crazy...

It wouldn't be so bad if these giants weren't trying to kill natural search and natural engagement so fast but they realize the only way they can grow is to monetize the entire funnel and the only people that can afford to do that are the giants..

I wish i could spend more on bing but it doesn't have the traffic mostly for what appears to be obsession for google. In the USA bing is great.. i've heard it sucks elsewhere, but i wish they could compete more.

Well perhaps they support the propping up of old media because, on average, there is more integrity than in so-called new media, regardless of what you consider a left/right argument. Like perhaps bailing out the banks in 08 was more about stability than some evil leftist plan to quasi-socialize the core function of our economy.

> What might be of larger concern is the IP licensing aspect.

If that's the larger concern, then why isn't it a concern for text or images?

Lots of photographers would love Facebook-enforced DRM for the wedding photos they haven't licensed.

No, it makes more sense to assume the concern is pursuing consumer and creator lock-in through vertical integration.

"when the State becomes a computer"

I think reading that sentence is enough to be bone-chillingly horrified, and nationalizing the necessary data is the first step towards making it inevitable