Google hit with €1.5B fine from EU over advertising

You're figuring 10k domains in 300 hours, or 1.8min per domain. It's way more expensive than this, and it's an adversarial system. If you have rules about how spammy a site can be and still show your ads many sites are going to try and get as close to the boundary as possible without going over. This means it takes substantial effort to figure out which side of it they're on.

Then, the spammier sites run many different domains with multiple accounts, which means they're not that likely to show up as top domains. Spammy sites also can "cloak" so they show up one way to a reviewer at the ad network and another way to a real site visitor.

Manual inspection is definitely a valuable tool, and is something that ad networks use, but that a process like you described would catch 99% of fraud is massively optimistic.

(Disclosure: I work at Google on ad stuff, but not this sort of ad stuff. Speaking for myself and not the company.)

It's not just a matter of fraud. The website could be CNN, but if they're filling their pages with a thousand different ads, none of the individual ads is going to be worth paying for, even if the page also contains legitimate content.

And the thing that's impossible to measure is content volume. If you have one morsel on the page that drives traffic to it, you can easily add arbitrarily more to the bottom that is arguably "content" in order to make the ratio of ads to "content" be whatever you like. At that point you're trying to measure content quality, which is inherently subjective.

> The comparison you're making in the last paragraph is a common mistake in examining competition scenarios. The comparison isn't between pricing between the market leader and the incumbents following the anti-competitive behavior. It's the comparison between the prices we would have had no anti-competitive behavior existed in the first place.

That's not what I'm saying.

Suppose we do a test. If a page has one ad on it, 0.5% of page visitors buy the product. If it has two ads on it, 0.2% of page visitors buy each advertiser's product, because the extra clutter causes people to pay less attention to both of them.

So then your ad network prices that way. If the site puts your ad on their page with no others, you pay them 5 credits. If they put your ad on their page with someone else's, you pay 2 credits. If they want to use three ad networks then you pay 1 credit and it goes down from there. Just paying proportional to the value of the ad to the advertiser.

Now nobody is going to put two ad networks on the page, because they'd get 2 credits from each ad network (total of 4) instead of getting 5 credits from one. Even if it was 4 vs. 2, you might as well save yourself the transaction costs of using the second network.

The reason exclusivity is worth more isn't that there is less competition so you can charge more, it's that if you clutter up the page with more ads, their value falls off faster than their volume makes up for it.

Moreover, suppose that isn't the case. Showing more ads would produce more value, at least until some threshold number of ads is shown. Then the first ad network would just offer to display more ads on your page and pay you appropriately more for them.

You still end up with only one ad network -- whichever one will pay you the most per unit. The only way two ad networks end up on the same page is by reaching the point that the highest paying ad network knows showing more ads won't produce more advertiser value, and then scamming them by showing more anyway.

Then he should have set the late fee to as much as the amount he wanted to go home earlier. Which would still be the same amount for every parent regardless of how much money they had, because which parent is late has nothing to do with how much he values not being able to go home on time.

If an OEM sold a phone with a stock AOSP build, I think they'd be fine with calling it "Android" without permission. Google might attempt to enforce their mark anyway, but they wouldn't have much of a case.

If the phone ran a fork like LineageOS, the OEM would need to be more careful about their use of the mark, but I imagine they'd still be okay with language like "Android-based".