Live data from Hacker News

Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

storage.courtlistener.com

91–100 of 270 posts

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#91
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Incredibly powerful summary of a dismal state of affairs. How did it come to that?

I feel we are massivelly overrating the level of governance, competence and ability to manage our overall "success" as modern societies

This was already quite evident with the financial crisis and came down as a hammer with the pandemic crisis and the ultimate dead-end of the climate crisis.

The denerate, dystopic, digital universe we have evolved into is not perceived as a systemic crisis. Massive data breaches are normalized. The obvious manipulation and influence of political processess the world over are shrugged off. The feudalization of economic life is portrayed as desirable "disruption". But it is really a slow moving car crash and there is no indication we have mechanisms to steer away from the deterministic outcome.

Ironically, it is almost certain that better governance would have to be based on suitable digital tools and networks. There is an alternate Philip K. Dick universe out there but we need some magic quantum tunnel to get to it.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#92
post #79
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be taken in by the idea that balance for the sake of balance is some kind of absolute good. If I say that the earth is flat, and you say that the earth is round, the newspaper headline probably shouldn't be that nobody can agree on what shape the earth is. One tribe, as it happens, says rather a lot more daft and dangerous things than the other. It's not possible to _hope and good cheer_ someone into doing some…

Except both tribes put out slightly difference flavors of the one major falsehood: that US foreign policy helps anyone, anywhere, for any reason, ever.

As long as the tribes think voting makes a difference, let em vote.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#93

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…

In case anyone reading is unaware Google already inserts artificial delay into page loading times, to allow for header bidding. Online advertising proponents would argue this delay is below human perception. But the perceptibility of the wait should be for users, not Google, to decide; it is artifical and undisclosed delay, for the benefit of advertising. If users were told about it and could avoid it, no doubt they…

> it is artifical and undisclosed delay, for the benefit of advertising

So ad blocking makes everything faster!

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#94
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…

> Internal documents confirm that Google knows its users are deceived by its misrepresentations

Yeah. These silly terms of service mean nothing to anyone. Even Google knows this! Almost nobody reads them. Those who do, won't understand them. Who can really consent to all this surveillance under these circumstances? This is NOT a deal between equal parties, the user is severely disadvantaged. People click the checkbox because it won't let them create an account otherwise. They don't have a choice.

Courts should just invalidate the contracts and start treating Google as if nobody consented to its exploitation. Apply heavy fines for every single user wronged.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#95
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…

Just ban advertising straight up. This will kill Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the other companies ruining the web. Not one tear will be shed at this point.

Also, make it a huge liability to store any kind of personal information. Apply heavy taxes on every single bit stored. These companies should be trying really hard to forget all about us the second they send our HTTP responses, not hoarding our personal information like a bunch of stalkers. Make it exceedingly expensive for them to do it and they'll stop.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#96
post #78
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have to wonder what impact this will have on the employment prospects of Google engineers in the unlikely event that it all blows up for Google. Having a toxic company on your resume is never a good thing.

Not nearly as bad as Facebook.

Is FB on an engineering resume actually bad?

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#97
post #83

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 th…

No need for that, Google Safe Browsing exists if they want to.

However, I don’t think that Google is _that_ evil/willing to do so at this point.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you want something more restricted then just use RSS. It’s not centralized like AMP.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#99
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…

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.

At this point I always assume that it’s out of malice instead of incompetence. These kinds of smaller bugs for things that work by default are just too common for Google.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#100

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.

That's not a problem, that's an opportunity.

Don't we all love "disrupting" things?

Post reply on HN