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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

#201

Post by johnward »

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #197

Despite what Government thinks of Google, I think holding antitrust hearings is just a political theatre. At the end of the day they might slap Google with a penalty which by all accounts will be just a margin of error tax write off. If the government really wants to encourage competition, they need to enable creation of new businesses, plain and simple. Google isn't a Monopoly as much as they just have the most eyeb…

> Reddit was 5x cheaper than the next cheapest source

I applaud anyone that can monetize the reddit audience. I've dabbled in their ad platform and had no luck at all.

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

#202

Post by bagacrap »

chris_f wrote: post #81
return1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way to have competition is if FB started a search engine or if google bought instagram

FB may already be backing their way into search: https://www.engadget.com/facebook-test-adds-wikipedia-search...

backing into? They've had a search box for ages and they've consistently tried to make sure all content is on their platform (rather than hosted elsewhere).

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

#203

Post by dang »

Nasrudith wrote: post #110
speeder wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the CMO for a company. Google is the ONLY ad provider that give results, all others don't even get any clicks. How that is not a monopoly on the classic definition? Every time Google has a bug and screw with my ads, the revenue of the company I work for tanks hard, and I am yet to find any solution for it.

[flagged]

Please don't cross into personal attacks in HN comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#204

Post by theptip »

doukdouk wrote: post #181
theptip wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was mainly arguing against

> "Monopoly" is one of such words (others candidate include: freedom, democracy, justice).

-- there is a much more rigorous definition of Monopoly than the other ones you listed. You're claiming that it is some undefined concept that varies from person to person, but I think that's only true in the sense that "encryption" or "space-time" has a loose definition; most lay people don't understand technical jargon, and often misuse the jargon when they think they know what they are talking about. But that doesn't mean there _isn't_ a well-defined meaning that is agreed upon by the specialists that actually work in the domain in question.

The other words you listed do not have clear-cut legal definitions in the same way; they are not technical jargon defining criteria for enforceable regulations with tests and case-law backing them up.

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

#205

Post by fakedang »

speeder wrote: post #91
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…

I am the CMO for a company. Google is the ONLY ad provider that give results, all others don't even get any clicks. How that is not a monopoly on the classic definition? Every time Google has a bug and screw with my ads, the revenue of the company I work for tanks hard, and I am yet to find any solution for it.

I'm surprised. I thought Facebook would have been somewhat effective. Can anyone point out any use cases of when Facebook and Google work and don't work?

FWIW my dad ran a few FB ads for his SME and it was alright, although nothing stellar either. He didn't run on Google though so I can't really draw a comparison.

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

#206

Post by nodamage »

heavyset_go wrote: post #199
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…

From the government itself[1]: > Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/com…

I've seen this quoted a lot lately but saying that a literal monopoly (as in, a single company with 100% market share) is not required doesn't really say much about what is required, which depends on the specific violation being alleged.

Some violations (price fixing, bid rigging) are considered so egregious that they are illegal regardless of market share.

Other violations (tying) require some degree of market power.

Violations related to monopolization or attempted monopolization do require monopoly power (or the dangerous probability of obtaining it it).

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

#207

Post by IncRnd »

chrischen wrote: post #196
IncRnd wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our tests, we get results from Google but ads on Facebook produce trash results.

You bid on ads so if the results are poor on fb they must be working for the competitors.

You are assuming things that aren't true. There is no competition for us.

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

#208

Post by dialtone »

wbl wrote: post #50
dialtone wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I agree with the core of what you are saying, it isn't AdMob that is the issue. It's that Google controls both the marketplace, the pub-side and the buy-side, as well as the browser and the devices used to experience ads. Apple is now aiming for a similar level of control in the ad space very blatantly using their ownership of the platform to do what they want to power themselves up. This vertical integrat…

Traditionally vertical integration is fine and horizontal suspicious in antitrust law. Why are ads different?

I’m not sure how you can say that. The first examples of anti trust action have been about vertical integration and ownership of critical infrastructure by a market player not allowing entrance by others because it’s not easy to lay down more railway or more phone cables or telegraph cables. That’s the case for the web advertising situation.

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

#209

Post by wodenokoto »

boogies wrote: post #170
treis wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Translate at least seems to have some people ignorant of the alternatives convinced that they have a clearly better product — “no competitors that even come close in terms of quality” when they objectively don’t. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975001

The claimed “objectively” better translator is DeepL.

You need to read like 8 paragraphs deep to get to that and there is no real explanation as to why it is objectively better - just a link to an article where some journalists apparently thought it was better.

https://www.deepl.com/en/translator

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