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Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

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Re: Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

#181

Post by doukdouk »

theptip wrote: post #153
doukdouk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words get abused a lot, and for some of them, they do not have a clear-cut, universally agreed upon meaning. "Monopoly" is one of such words (others candidate include: freedom, democracy, justice). When random person X complains about, say, Google having a monopoly, there are two possibilities: - Person X means something along "Google has a dominant market position and abuses its power", slightly abusing the meaning…

The problem with this analysis is that “monopoly” is only one part of antitrust law, and there are plenty of other abuses of dominant market positions that don’t require a monopoly to be present. Furthermore, in the legal context the meaning is more clear-cut than you make out, though there is significant room for debate. I would not put it anywhere near “freedom” in terms of loose definitions. There are rigorous tes…

If your point is that "monopoly" has a different meaning in a colloquial/political context and in a legal context, that it relies on non-obvious definitions of what the relevant market, what dominant is, and that it varies by country, I do not think it strongly supports the assertion that it does not have a loose definition.

Re: Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

#183

Post by switch11 »

throwaway_kufu wrote: post #66

What so many people fail to realize about these issues vis-a-vis Google, it’s not so much the issues of Google having a monopoly or not on the ad market...in either case google is a dominant market incumbent that uses its position (in this case web traffic, data and online ad platform) to unfairly compete and stifle competition. Google has often used data acquired through their market position to start subsidiaries t…

Excellent Comment

Let's consider a few more examples of abuse of market dominance

1) Retail Me Not

Google through Google Venture secretly invested in them and didn't disclose that

Then for next 3 years, Retail Me Not was #1 for EVERY SINGLE deal and coupon search term on Google

Is that an abuse of market dominance? Pretty Sure

Is it illegal? According to US Anti Trust Law - not sure. A lawyer can step in

2) A market we are in

The largest 2 players (us and another company) are #40 and #41 when people search for the biggest key word

Not #2, Not #10

At #40 and #41

Who is in the Top 10?

companies that advertise A LOT on Google, even though they are distant 4th and 6th in the market

Not only that, they do it in blatant ways

Last year, they pumped up organic traffic to one of our competitors THIRTY TIMES over night

So, the top two companies (another company and us) saw ZERO CHANGE

However, a company that is a distant 4th in the market suddenly got its organic search engine traffic increased 30 times

Pretty sure in 3 or 4 years it will be revealed that Google invested in them or did some tie up

*

Google is basically using Search as a weapon

Re: Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

#184

Post by warkdarrior »

deepstack wrote: post #53
adrianN wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any system in which network effects and winner-takes-all exist result in centralization and monopoly. I don't think you could design the Internet differently to avoid this.

One thing off top of the head is For example: If the DNS was initially designed as such as https://handshake.org could be a better place to lay the foundation of Internet.

How would decentralized DNS and other decentralized protocols help with search, social, and recommendations? Those are fundamentally centralized systems.

Re: Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

#185

Post by acituan »

dwild wrote: post #142
nova22033 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is the ONLY ad provider that give results, all others don't even get any clicks. Being effective doesn't make you a monopoly.

They do have exclusive access and control over the source of data that bring you that effectiveness though. I'm not saying anyone else should have access to Google data, but the fact that this is what make it effective and that essentially no one else can reproduce it, that kind of make it a monopoly. At a point when the cost of entry is too high and it's not humanly possible to beat it, isn't it essentially impossib…

> They do have exclusive access and control over the source of data that bring you that effectiveness though

And what data would that be? All search engines crawl the same web.

Re: Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

#186

Post by Supermancho »

treis wrote: post #164
throwaway_kufu wrote: post #66

What so many people fail to realize about these issues vis-a-vis Google, it’s not so much the issues of Google having a monopoly or not on the ad market...in either case google is a dominant market incumbent that uses its position (in this case web traffic, data and online ad platform) to unfairly compete and stifle competition. Google has often used data acquired through their market position to start subsidiaries t…

>n either case google is a dominant market incumbent that uses its position (in this case web traffic, data and online ad platform) to unfairly compete and stifle competition. It's not that clear how much that helps. The places where Google won (Maps, Gmail, Chrome) they had a pretty clearly better product. Other places where they didn't (Duo/Hangouts, Plus, Gsuite, Chromebook, GCloud) they don't dominate the market.

> It's not that clear how much that helps.

It's clear that it helps enough to subsidize the entire rest of the Google operation (enough to run a more computationally and sophisticated business like search). AdTech is all about targeting by extracting context and minimally about tracking events.

Leveraging search to power ad targeting is the most efficient means. I'm not sure how this is a topic of debate other than to split hairs on what measuring stick to use.

Re: Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

#187

Post by Supermancho »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #152
throwaway_kufu wrote: post #66

What so many people fail to realize about these issues vis-a-vis Google, it’s not so much the issues of Google having a monopoly or not on the ad market...in either case google is a dominant market incumbent that uses its position (in this case web traffic, data and online ad platform) to unfairly compete and stifle competition. Google has often used data acquired through their market position to start subsidiaries t…

Let me make it really simple: The problem with the tech industry is vertical monopoly, but many people want to just think about horizontal monopoly.

Especially where tech has the best margins, we end up with horizontal monopolies over time. eg In idiocracy, "Welcome to Google-Costco, we love you."

Re: Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

#188

Post by stale2002 »

Spivak wrote: post #125
doukdouk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, mindless arguing what exact word fit or does not fit the situation detracts from the real issues.

If the only thing the word "monopoly" does is spark a discussion about the word then why use it? Why is it so important that Google be a monopoly for their behavior to be bad? Do we really have no other words to describe business practices that we don't like?

> or we really have no other words

There are other words, but it is a bit of a mouthful.

Because of these exact issues, the way that I describe the situation is usually as follows "Company X has significant market power, and is engaging in anti-competitive actions".

I have yet to have someone object to that definition.

Re: Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

#189

Post by kaczordon »

theptip wrote: post #153
doukdouk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words get abused a lot, and for some of them, they do not have a clear-cut, universally agreed upon meaning. "Monopoly" is one of such words (others candidate include: freedom, democracy, justice). When random person X complains about, say, Google having a monopoly, there are two possibilities: - Person X means something along "Google has a dominant market position and abuses its power", slightly abusing the meaning…

The problem with this analysis is that “monopoly” is only one part of antitrust law, and there are plenty of other abuses of dominant market positions that don’t require a monopoly to be present. Furthermore, in the legal context the meaning is more clear-cut than you make out, though there is significant room for debate. I would not put it anywhere near “freedom” in terms of loose definitions. There are rigorous tes…

This doesn't clear anything up though. Who gets to define the boundary/scope of the market being measured? It's pretty easy to manipulate this to make it seem like a company has a "dominant" share even if that's not the case from the consumers point of view.

Take the anti-trust case against Microsoft, for example, the market was defined as that for computer operating systems for stand-alone personal computers using microchips of the kind manufactured by Intel. This left out not only operating systems running on Apple computers but also other operating systems such as those produced by Sun Microsystems for multiple computers or the Linux system for stand-alone computers. In its narrowly defined market, Microsoft clearly had a “dominant” share.

Also lots of people use Amazon to search for products so it's not clear to me how there is a market failure here.

Re: Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it

#190

Post by blhack »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #180
blhack wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's look at the possible interpretations of the officially recorded question and see if we can figure out what the congressman meant. Question: "how does this show up on a 7 year olds iPhone". Interpretation 1: >"How does this show up on a 7 year olds iPhone" Senator, the iphone has a component on the front of it called an LED screen. LED stands for "light emitting diode", and the screen itself, which is similar in…

> possible interpretations of the officially recorded question and see if we can figure out what the congressman meant. This is not how things work legally. If they want better answers they need better questions. It's not about interpreting what they meant but never actually said. Especially when what they said it accusatory of Google and very likely false. He asked a terrible question, and you're bending over backwa…

I do make a habit of trying to understand what somebody meant instead of trying to twist their words into something inflammatory.

It’s worked out really well for me so far.

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