401–410 of 414 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can, we just chose not to.
We chose not to because it’s a bad idea. That’s what I’m getting at here. “Killing” a company for a rules violation is also probably a bad idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the press release [1] did a good job of detailing the specific activity that was over the line: > Starting in 2006, Google included exclusivity clauses in its contracts. This meant that publishers were prohibited from placing any search adverts from competitors on their search results pages. The decision concerns publishers whose agreements with Google required such exclusivity for all their websites. Even if…
From the press release >Google has abused this market dominance by preventing rivals from competing in the online search advertising intermediation market. >Based on a broad range of evidence, the Commission found that Google's conduct harmed competition and consumers, and stifled innovation. Google's rivals were unable to grow and offer alternative online search advertising intermediation services to those of Google…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems pretty simple to audit your 10,000 largest ad-spend domains and check to see if they're actually just ad fraud. You'd need maybe 300 person-hours to do so, at an overhead-in cost of, let's high-ball it, 100$/hr, which puts you at a cost of $30,000. 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 s…
>It's way more expensive than this, and it's an adversarial system Sure, but I've overstated the hourly costs by an order of magnitude. You can get body shops to do this work very inexpensively. Making a call as to whether or not they're over the line isn't difficult; you flag the clear bullshit calls and leave the borderline ones after making the contractual terms more conservative than your in practice review would…
What apps are you thinking of? My guess is that they're apps that are being really careful to stay just inside the bounds of the store policies.
> That's not an excuse to do nothing.
I'm confused why you think ad networks are doing nothing?
> the dichotomy being pushed here is that the difficulty underlies a need for illegal anti-competitive behavior.
I wasn't trying to defend that. I just saw your "it's pretty simple to..." and as someone close to the issue wanted to explain ways it's not that simple.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is it's been blown completely out of proportion [...] Yeah, but blame that on the lawyers who wanted to cash in on this new regulation. I think only _very few_ people/business owners actually took the time to read the GDPR and think about whether all of that even applies to them. Most just became a victim of the fearmongering around all of that.
I've seen a lot of scaremongering but none of that was from lawyers. My observations was most of the negativity came from a combination of the press writing slanted articles criticising the EU (which is fairly typical for anything relating to the EU, it seems) and blogs from people who assumed the worst case and subsequently wrote a hysteria-driven knee-jerk opinion piece as a result. Those blogs, I've found, are the…
Our lawyers where rather calm, too, saying that not everything is eaten as hot as its being cooked.
"Selfmade media" on the other hand went really wild and fantasized some absurd threats for everybody with a website, you're right on that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's way more expensive than this, and it's an adversarial system Sure, but I've overstated the hourly costs by an order of magnitude. You can get body shops to do this work very inexpensively. Making a call as to whether or not they're over the line isn't difficult; you flag the clear bullshit calls and leave the borderline ones after making the contractual terms more conservative than your in practice review would…
> We have active fraudsters at the top of the iOS and Play stores. The issue isn't that you don't know how best to cast the net to grab everyone. It's that you don't cast it at all to grab anyone. What apps are you thinking of? My guess is that they're apps that are being really careful to stay just inside the bounds of the store policies. > That's not an excuse to do nothing. I'm confused why you think ad networks a…
Oh, I thought you were the original poster I was replying to. Sorry about that. Regardless, it's not actually all that complicated at all. Catching all fraud is almost impossible. Catching 90-99% is dead simple. If you don't like my quick and dirty breakdown, make another - the problem's size needs to be 4 orders of magnitude larger before the cost implications become a concern.
That said, there's a very consistent pattern at play here: Organizations and groups that refuse to take action on the basis that they can't catch everything are consistently those that intentionally look the other way in respect of fraud, and digital advertising has a bad rep in this area for a reason: most networks ignore as much fraud as they can get away with.
In any event, locking out other networks doesn't change the fact that the excuse provided for exclusivity is about how many containers are around, not how many networks can bid on that inventory. The rationale for the illegal activity doesn't address the problem at all.
This is not for AdSense on Google.com, this is for third-party sites with a search feature showing search ads to their own customers. A third-party site who wants to show ads in their own search results could partner with Google to include AdSense ads in their own results. The Google contract originally required exclusivity, and then was changed to require Google ads to be more prominent. In the context of the market…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Block the ads. You have every right to do so. There is zero obligation to watch ads. If a company like Google can afford to operate a service like YouTube, then putting it up in the first place is the cost of doing business. I happily block ads on all devices I use and am in control over, even at work. Pi-hole, uBlock Origin (even kills the adblock detectors), Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, Tracking Token Stripper, W…
Haven't found a good way to do that on my tablet (iPad), yet. I have tried adding known ad-networks to my router-blocklist, it does not seem to impact YouTube at all. I guess I really gotta look into building myself a Pi-hole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I happen to believe that the excessive "fines" that the EU has been directing at the technology industry are a brazen plan to extract money from large technology companies without violating international taxation treaties signed with the United States.
If that's the case, they need to start issuing more fines to more companies to really make a dent. These fines are big, but as a percentage of the tech industry revenue, they're still under 0.1 percent
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is an argument for indexing fines to income or net worth for people too (in addition to severity of the crime) -- if you want to stop a behavior, for example speeding, it doesn't make sense to set the fine equal for everybody unless wealth distribution in society is remarkably flat, so the marginal value of lost money is similar for everybody. If you don't index for ability to pay you just create a separate s…
"when you price something, rich people buy more of it because they have more money. If the price you've assigned to the risk is actually proportional to the cost being imposed by taking it, you really don't need to stop them. Just let them pay for the risk in money. Then use the money to pay for safety improvements or compensate victims or whatever you like..." So don't try to stop rich people from driving drunk and…
"You can't bring them back" isn't any less true for someone who kills someone driving 65MPH in a 55MPH zone -- or 55MPH in a 55MPH zone. The only difference is the probability, which is a difference in quantity rather than kind.
> No amount of money can bring them back.
Neither can it bring back the person hit by a bus because the government didn't have that money to spend fixing a bad intersection. Should we really let two families lose loved ones to that intersection when they could be saved with the money that not deterring a risk taker generates, even if that risk ultimately kills one person? What about the family who lost someone but the compensation allowed the survivors to live somewhere safer or afford better medical treatment and that saved someone else?
What you really want to be arguing is that we should never be trading money for lives. Everyone viscerally feels kind of that way. But that doesn't work. There is always a marginal safety improvement that would save additional lives in exchange for additional money. Any time you choose a smaller number of lives over a larger amount of money, what you're really doing is choosing a smaller number of lives over a larger number of lives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fine is supposed to be a price. If the only purpose was deterrence then why isn't every offense a capital one and every fine in the amount of "everything you've got"? Taxes are something else entirely. Income taxes aren't intended to put a price on working so that people won't do it unless it's worth the cost, they're intended to raise government revenue.
A fine is supposed to be a deterrent so it needs to be high enough to deter.
Suppose there are fines for both texting while driving and blocking traffic. Now someone is driving in a place where they can't stop without blocking traffic, when they think of a piece of information that they need someone else to know as an urgent matter of life and death.
If they don't send the information right away their kid is going to die. No fine is going to deter them from that. To account for the probability of getting caught, the deterrence-level penalty would have to be something like death for you and your whole family.
I assume nobody is going suggest that the penalty for blocking traffic should be that the government will snuff out your bloodline. Because that's disproportionate, because the fine is supposed to be a price -- and in that case it's one worth paying, because the alternative is worse, so that's what we should want to happen. It's not a problem that we failed to deter someone from blocking traffic for a minute in order to save their child. "Fixing" things so that we actually deter them from that (and then their child dies) is not an improvement.
And the same is true for less drastic events that are still worth more than the cost of blocking traffic for a minute. Which is why a fine is a price, proportional to the harm.