Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

storage.courtlistener.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 270 posts

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#81

Post by lotsofpulp »

bawolff wrote: post #72
triska wrote: post #25

What a read. Almost every single paragraph in the document leaves me speechless. For example, quoting from the document: "Google likes to claim that it will “never sell your personal information to anyone,” with Google CEO Sundar Pichai deceptively claiming that such a policy is “unequivocal.” But Google leverages intimate user data and personal information to broker billions of daily online ad impressions between pu…

I don't think the first one is a bombshell. It was always clear google was using personal data to target ads.

The first one helps to discredit the litigation.

The paragraph’s first sentence is supposed to insinuate that Google is lying about not selling people’s data, and the rest of the paragraph says that Google is not selling data. And then the last sentence makes a completely false claim using popular buzzwords.

What was the point of the paragraph, other than to invoke unnecessary emotions for no reason?

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#82

Post by throwaway4good »

paulluuk wrote: post #27
throwaway4good wrote: post #18

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.

It is about making sure that the free market is actually working not so much about freedom as in freedom of expression - any course about economics will have section about monopolies and its societal cost - showing charts like this:

https://college.cengage.com/economics/0538797274_mceachern/s...

The cost is real but so is the national security advantage.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#83

Post by xg15 »

underwater wrote: post #15

This tweet highlights Project NERA, which seems consistent with their actions to date. > Google had a plan called "Project NERA" to turn the web into a walled garden they called "Not Owned But Operated". A core component of this was the forced logins to the chrome browser you've probably experienced (surprise!) [1] This is classic 90s Microsoft playbook. Detangling the web from Google is getting harder and harder ove…

> Google wanted to be able to control and close off independent websites like The Dallas Morning News just as Google can control and close off its own sites like YouTube.

Worth noting that they have this ability today through HTTPS certificate management. The web increasingly moves to HTTPS (pushed by Google among others) and Google is also operating one of a small number of cert transparency logs - in addition to the Chrome browser.

If they don't like a site, they can blacklist the certificate in Chrome - to cut it off from Chrome users immediately - and block acceptance of new certificates from the CT log, which will cut off the site from other browsers once the current certificate expires.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#84

Post by forgotmypw17 »

mrtksn wrote: post #37
selsta wrote: 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…

>never heard of a non-techie complaining about it.

I think most non-techies have no idea what AMP is to begin with.

It's just, once again, "my phone is doing some annoying and unexpected shit I didn't ask for".

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#85

Post by tazjin »

jiggawatts wrote: post #54
mrtksn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everything about AMP is strictly worse in my experience. In Australia, AMP pages load slower, not faster. AMP breaks the iPhone Safari user interface, by not actually scrolling the whole page. The URLs don't represent the actual site to which the user will navigate. Logins break. App-integrated links don't work properly. And on and on. AMP is a cancer on the web enforced by a monopoly for their own shady purposes.

On Android, Google Translate in Safari doesn't work on AMP pages which I find somewhat ironic.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#87

Post by cletus »

I've had a few people call me a shill for Google on these threads since I'm a Xoogler/Ex-Facebooker (it's literally in my profile) so I'm going to quote myself here [1] from 7 months ago:

> Giving advantageous ranking (including, but not limited to, showing AMP content in Top Stories) is the very definition of using your market power in one area (search) to force publishers to adopt something else you created.

> For a company that is (or should be) very careful about attracting antitrust attention from the US/EU, this seems completely reckless.

I've always hated AMP. Publishers are forced into it by the ranking advantages. Users have no opt out. It breaks the mobile UI (eg pinch to zoom). It's horrible.

There was a time when the idea wasn't terrible because a lot of websites were terrible and slow on mobile, somewhat ironically in no small part due to all the ad libraries they loaded.

But it was clear who benefitted the most here was actually Google. Now I always suspected that this was the result of some org trying to increase their impact.

If it turns out as the suit alleges:

> To respond to the threat of header bidding, Google created Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a framework for developing mobile web pages, and made AMP essentially incompatible with JavaScript and header bidding. Google then used its power in the search market to effectively force publishers into using AMP.

Boy oh boy is that a problem. And again I'm going to say I called it.

The other damning part:

> 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.”

Wow. Just... wow.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26561769

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#88

Post by KaiserPro »

cupcake-unicorn wrote: post #17
mrtksn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I feel naive now for defending AMP providing better user experience. As it turns out, Google is evil and I simply did not want to believe it.

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

for me, amp loaded quicker and had way less shit on it that took ages to load (like videos, tracking and stupid animations)

Webdevs moaned because it restricted what they could do, which is partially why I liked it. They had to build a page that was fast, rather than fancy.

However I do see the downsides, as google owns the stack, limits your choice.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#89

Post by ehnto »

mrtksn wrote: post #20
cupcake-unicorn wrote: post #17

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…

I think you may even be overselling the user experience. I feel it was objectively confusing, because it changed the default behavior of the web. A regular user would have had no idea what was going on, just that their content was in front of them, so that's nice, but what next? Are they on Google or the website? When I click a new link why does the whole website change design, is this a different website now? What is going on.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#90

Post by oezi »

djrockstar1 wrote: post #26

159-169, about Google being able to decrypt end-to-end encrypted WA (WhatsApp) communications is terrifying. The fact that Google has known this for over 5 years and made no effort to notify the public is what really got me. What's fucked up is that Google Drive backups are the only ones WA offers, and naturally everyone wants their messages backed up so they turn it on, not knowing the implications.

And what are the implications?

Is Google analyzing uploads to Google Drive to serve you targeted ads? That would be a big breach in trust.

Post reply on HN