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Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

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Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#41

Given that Google is critical for US intelligence supremacy and technological dominance, I am curious what the US chooses to do with it. Surely from a free market perspective and for long term growth, it needs to be broken into pieces in such a manner that would destroy its monopoly power.

But would it still be a "free market" if governments just go around splitting up companies once they get (too) big? Not defending the idea of a free market here, I'm leaning pretty far past socialist myself, but I know that the US in general cares deeply about free market philosophy.

I don’t know if it “free” but I do know that monopolies that abuse their market position makes for a less efficient market.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#43

Google should be broken up into 5 parts: Search/Adwords/Mail/Drive, Android, Chrome, Maps & GCP.

That would mean 5 monopolies. I would split them in 5 parts, each owning 20% of all current businesses.

A monopoly is fine if it doesn’t hamper competition and doesn’t use its position to impact unrelated markets.

Shimano has a near monopoly on bike parts, and it’s mostly fine. DJI dominates the pro drone market, and it’s fine. All monopolies aren’t evil.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#44

Google should be broken up into 5 parts: Search/Adwords/Mail/Drive, Android, Chrome, Maps & GCP.

Problem is only one of those things make money.

Android's Play stores makes a lot of money. So much so that it's quite comfortable reducing its fees from 30% to 15% for some developers.

Maps already charges fees for all location-based apps (cabs, deliveries, fleet tracking etc) like Uber. It may have to tweak its pricing, that's all.

GCP has a revenue model as strong as AWS. There's a reason why Google is pumping money into it.

Chrome is the only one that could be called a loss leader but given its dominance, it can figure out a model. If Adobe photoshop can survive as a paid software, so can Chrome and its Developer Tools.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#45
post #5

I've seen lots of comments recently in response to the Google & Facebook advertising issues suggesting that Google should be split into X, Y, and Z. Most of the proposed splits seem like they would do absolutely nothing to address the issue at hand, though. The problem in digital advertising seems to be that Google controls the marketplace, as well as both the buy & sell sides. Even a "breaking apart" that proposes s…

Google should be sliced horizontally, not vertically. Each resulting company would own a percentage of current business.

sure lets slice the computers, engineers and offices horizontally as well

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#46
post #37
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW Amplosion (paid iOS extension to automatically redirect AMP pages) is quite highly ranked on the app store. It clearly isn't only techies that dislike it so much that they actually pay to get rid of AMP.

Could be, I can't remote-sense feelings but never heard of a non-techie complaining about it. It might have become annoying when sharing though, I think they later made it harder to find the non-amp link(The AMP link looks weird, as if you are sharing the wrong URL). Anyway, the AMP experience was a fresh breath in the world of 10-20 seconds webpage loading times. You see the lightning icon, tap it and the content in…

I have found AMP to be an awful experience. It messes with native scrolling physics, pages are often incomplete or straight up broken. It also disables Reader mode on iOS so I'm always forced to load the full web page anyway. Luckily iOS 15 web extensions have solved that problem.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#47
post #8

249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. “Header Bidding can often increase latency of web page…

> I’d be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google employee assigned to AMP. "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood." [1] [1] https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility

This is why principles are important. Living by a well considered and thoughtful set of beliefs, secular or otherwise, has an impact on the world. Even if things look hopeless, your actions contribute to the way life unfolds for everyone else. Even if things look trivial, not engaging in minor infractions against your beliefs is withholding that single drop from the flood.

I won't ever use tiktok, and speak against it to friends and family when questioned. I support the use of Signal and promote basic digital literacy, lending my time to help people learn about encryption and protecting their personal information, even in seemingly trivial things like not playing quiz games on social media.

I don't believe in a monolithic big brother spying on individuals, but there is a collective impact of all of those systems, if which Google Amp plays a big part. It normalized the idea that centralizing the gateways to content was a good thing, regardless of Google's intentions. It usurped control of a minor piece of web functionality that gave Google a big competitive advantage.

People have been commoditized by getting them to give up private data without understanding what it is they're giving up. At a very basic level, you could look at Facebook - they have 3 billion members and make 30 billion dollars a year - someone's data is worth $10usd per year on average. Similar valuations can be applied to other companies, but Google is getting around $150 billion a year for advertising. If you could assign a weight to people, some would be worth far more than others, and even entirely boring and innocent profiles are damaging to consumers, because they're providing baselines that enable further and more nuanced manipulation.

It's such an insidious and subtle injury to society that getting people to even notice litigation like this suit is difficult. Getting them to care, when the attitude of "I've got nothing to hide" is hugely demoralizing to people who do care.

Gross anticompetitive actions are a part of the problem, but the reckless use of algorithms that influence exposure to information, its context, and its timing is a huge, hairy deal, but even amongst techies it's hard to communicate why.

We are collectively wireheading in a way the majority of humans don't have the knowledge or education to recognize as dangerous. The knock-on effects are sometimes many degrees of separation from any single company's actions or behavior, and there doesn't have to be a human in the loop for the algorithms to poison the future of a society.

The agency of individuals is stolen by systems like Amp - a drop in the digital flood that is drowning liberty and sovereignty. It creates a system that gets abused for profit or politics or ideology. It reinforces the arms race in surveillance technology, but a vast majority of people are content with the idea that they have nothing to hide, not realizing that they are choosing to grant control over the information they will be allowed to consume anywhere within the ecosystem they engaged with.

FAANG's actions subtly influence the behavior of billions of humans. Innocuous and trite misbehavior on their part gets amplified far beyond what anyone would predict, and we have almost nothing in human history to measure against. These institutions have to be held to a higher standard, and societies all over the world must work to make private information a resource entirely and absolutely controlled by the user.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#48
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were people defending AMP? Everything I've heard about it was backlash

AMP does have better experience from the users perspective. The backlash is from the techies only. I assumed that the non-amp websites were slower due to the JS bloat, I still despise what the Web pages has become, however it turns out Google wasn't a honest broker here and instead of providing a tool that helps them and the users, they provided a tool that helps them and harms the users and bullies the website owner…

Amp gives you non logged in versions of websites.

Anyone whos usually logged in somewhere is impacted negatively

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#49
post #46
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be, I can't remote-sense feelings but never heard of a non-techie complaining about it. It might have become annoying when sharing though, I think they later made it harder to find the non-amp link(The AMP link looks weird, as if you are sharing the wrong URL). Anyway, the AMP experience was a fresh breath in the world of 10-20 seconds webpage loading times. You see the lightning icon, tap it and the content in…

I have found AMP to be an awful experience. It messes with native scrolling physics, pages are often incomplete or straight up broken. It also disables Reader mode on iOS so I'm always forced to load the full web page anyway. Luckily iOS 15 web extensions have solved that problem.

> It also disables Reader mode on iOS so I'm always forced to load the full web page anyway.

I agree. It's one of the imperfections of the AMP. I like AMP for quickly skimming between the results and then load the original page if I find something lengthy ro read.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#50
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were people defending AMP? Everything I've heard about it was backlash

AMP does have better experience from the users perspective. The backlash is from the techies only. I assumed that the non-amp websites were slower due to the JS bloat, I still despise what the Web pages has become, however it turns out Google wasn't a honest broker here and instead of providing a tool that helps them and the users, they provided a tool that helps them and harms the users and bullies the website owner…

AMP had an (intentional..?) bug on Firefox for years, making it impossible to scroll in the internal page.

Luckily it wasn't a big problem, since Google also intentionally gimped the search results to an old mobile version when using Fx, so one didn't get amp links.

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