161–170 of 365 posts
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Thank you! Why DO people insist on posting essays as 1,001 tweets!? The mind boggles.
It's the only popular publishing platform that permits true hypertext features such as nonlinear text, and comments on and transclusion of individual paragraphs of a post.
Collusion? Conspiracy theories? Etc.? All are completely irrelevant. Simply because even a proven absence of them creates a false sense of security. It doesn't make us any safer. It doesn't take nefarious off the table. Entities with common means and ends don't have to collude or conspire. Their shared means and ends will force them to gravitate together. Starlings are a great example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V…
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You only have access to non-Google bids, which makes it impossible to have enough information to know if the auction is unfair. Google is the final arbiter of what ad gets shown, Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner, and you have to trust Google that it did not improperly advantage itself in the auction (which the complaint reveals that it did in fact advantage itself).
> Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner Citation needed. See https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/download... The "minimum_bid_to_win" field of the BidResponse message contains this info for all first price auctions.
The protobuf spec is related to using the Authorized Buyers RTB protocol within AdX. That's an ecosystem that lives entirely within Google itself, so there's no reason Google would want to disadvantage anyone since people using this are already essentially paying Google for the privilege.
What the lawsuit is referring to is header-bidding, where an auction occurs client-side (or server-side using an O/O server endpoint) and the result is passed to GAM for competition via Dynamic Allocation.
Google is being accused of trying to kill header bidding (because data is shared and profits are earned outside of Google's ecosystem), not their own RTB products.
> Google's response - "secretly made its own exchange win, even when another exchange submitted a higher bid," complaint alleges. Their competitors knew this was happening. It's pretty easy to see occurring when you run a system that competes in Google header bidding for a publisher you also control.
I suspect the reason it wasn’t a bigger bombshell is that ad exchanges are hard to understand beyond the surface level “it’s an exchange for ads”, and other ad exchanges were also dirty. Google wasn’t the only one doing questionable things being on both sell and buy sides of transactions:
https://www.businessinsider.com/guardian-takes-legal-action-...
One of the most astounding things I learned in my time in ad tech was just how wide the gulf is between how much the advertiser pays and how much the website owner gets. It’s one to two orders of magnitude difference, mostly made up in fees for all of the platforms and data and other value add in between.
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The Google from 12 to 16 years ago was found guilty[1] in an antitrust suit of colluding with other industry leaders to keep tech employee compensation artificially low. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Wasn't that the beginning of the end of FAANG's reputation? Having your company put billions into the bank every year because they "don't know what to do with it" while you're not even a millionaire is disheartening. I mean, if they were still paying us all handsomely like stock brokers then I bet popular opinion would be on their side.
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Yeah I don’t think people understand the extent to which public relations influences our beliefs. Google was able to maintain a polished image in well known areas while silently behaving poorly in others and we believed it for a long time. I remember about ten years ago meetings Eric Schmidt had with US military generals. That didn’t even register on mass media so most people probably never heard of it. I wonder how…
I did not go into details as to what Google misbehaviors were. But I wonder what "behaving poorly" is. There is legal and illegal stuff. Companies give jobs to people, not only Google. It is natural, yes, natural, logical, to want to pay less to people. It is also natural that people want to be paid more. A salary is never high enough for an employee. A salary is never low enough for an employer. I do not say this fr…
> Because "we can," executive said in 2016. "Smaller pubs don't have alternative revenue sources." And 90% of publishers and small websites suffer because of this. These are more damning than anything that has been said about these companies, because it affects their real business, not the antisocial apps they give for free. Is it even called a monopoly when you control so much of both the Supply and the Demand? It's…
According to the thread, they're the biggest seller, the biggest buyer and they own the biggest exchange. I can't see anything would go wrong with that.
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Yes, but you can't effectively use them unless you run them through Google Ad Manager, which gives Google special privileges/rights for their own ad inventory versus the competitor. For example, Google gets to look at the ad impression before anyone else, Google is required to win all tie-breakers, etc.
You can't use another ad exchange without Google? Why? Can you give an example?
Because Google requires it. Google is the only major ad network that requires that you use their own ad serving product (GAM) in order to have full access to their inventory.
So your options are to use GAM and have Google inventory plus those of all other companies, or use any other ad server and have access to inventory of all companies except Google. The latter is essentially financial suicide since Google controls more than 50% of publisher demand.
Best part for me: Users were led to believe they were encrypted. They were not. @MikeIsaac Google knew users were mislead. See quotes: >>
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> Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of people losing their job. This is exactly why companies should be broken up. They can currently afford doing a lot of anti-competitive stuff just because another department is profitable while the anti-competitive methods/departments won't. That people would lose their job shouldn't be a consideration…
Companies should be allowed to dabble in unprofitable things as they wish. The need for everything to be profitable is why Google got into selling Ads and also why they keep killing projects. Many things in the world worth doing don't nearly fit into a nice profitable business but in many ways, bring some positivity to the world. Android gave many people a chance at a modern smartphone and connected future. Chrome wo…
It’s just a big risk-mitigation technique so they can further cement their monopoly for search and ads.