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Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

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Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#111

Post by brendoelfrendo »

beckman466 wrote: post #106
arlcode wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the allegations are true, they knew exactly what was happening and even took steps to make it seem like Google was not in full control of AMP. Whether front line engineers knew isn't that important. AMP Leadership definitely did.

> AMP Leadership definitely did. did they though? couldn't this be a small (artificial delay) library injected server side by some higher ups at Google?

I guess that depends: do we believe that AMP developers and leadership did this, possibly misguided by a promise from on high of “don’t worry, this is normal,” or do we believe that higher-ups were doing secret development work that went unnoticed by everyone else?

I think it’s easier to believe that the AMP team was simply naive, or willfully blind to the implications, or they didn’t care (probably all 3; teams are big enough that there’s room for all).

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#112

Post by tyingq »

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

AMP was a historical irritant for me, and I do recall the tide turning over time. It was initially hard to criticize it here without your comments being downvoted pretty hard. There were a set of defenders that believed it was solely about page loading time, and that any "trojan horse" accusations were from conspiracy theorists.

I think part of it was that the AMP team members were active here, and seemed genuine and competent. I'm somewhat curious how much they knew. This delay thing wasn't the only terrible part of AMP. The initial banner with the [x] button that sent you back to Google was terrible. As is the still-present hijacking of swipes and back button behavior on other people's content.

I did an Algolia comment search and can see my AMP rants getting more traction over a 4 year period.

Edit: I think it also had defenders because it forced sites like news organizations to re-think their 20MB+ ad and tracker laden story pages. So it wasn't all bad.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#113

Post by eternalban »

beckman466 wrote: post #104
robin_reala wrote: post #7

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…

> 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 i love when Silicon Valley literally throws away people's time. imagine the cumulative total time being wasted by this artificial delay...

our time -> their money. our identity -> their money. our whereabouts -> their money.

our society ?->?

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#114

Post by therealmarv »

dschuetz wrote: post #110

Welp, it's time to de-google my networks then. Facebook traffic is already blocked, now I wonder how much Web content I will lose when I block all google traffic.

That's a complicated topic. Because man things stop working if you block whole Google from your network. Just imagine webfonts or embedded Google maps like in apps Uber or Yelp.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#115

Post by dschuetz »

therealmarv wrote: post #114
dschuetz wrote: post #110

Welp, it's time to de-google my networks then. Facebook traffic is already blocked, now I wonder how much Web content I will lose when I block all google traffic.

That's a complicated topic. Because man things stop working if you block whole Google from your network. Just imagine webfonts or embedded Google maps like in apps Uber or Yelp.

Yes, exactly. Many websites already don't work if they use any of google-based frameworks or services, while my ad blocker blocks non-1st party domains by default. If a website or app doesn't work then, well then c'est la vie.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#116

Post by tyingq »

mrtksn wrote: post #51
8note wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amp gives you non logged in versions of websites. Anyone whos usually logged in somewhere is impacted negatively

Fair. So far there are three issues pointed out here that I'm not happy with too. To re-cap: 1) Sharing AMP links is weird, feels wrong and Non-AMP links are hard to get 2) Breaks Safari's reader mode 3) Gives sub-par experience for websites that provide better experience when logged in since the AMP version is always the non-logged-in version. None of those are deal-breaker for me because AMP pages come as a search…

The worst of AMP prior to this story, for me, was the carousel behavior. When AMP rolled out, any story you clicked from the carousel:

- Left and right swipe events were hijacked, and sent the user to somebody else's website with a related story!

- The back button would go to Google, even if you had right or left swiped as described above...that is, non-google pages were not in the history.

Then, not just carousel pages, these applied to all AMP pages:

- A very tall banner at the top pushed your content down. It had an [x] button that would send you back to the google search rather than the expected behavior of removing the banner.

- Finding the real url was 2 clicks deep

And then just the overall weird smugness about calling it an open standard. Even though the "open standard" required including a google-owned javascript file via a tag, and the validator would fail you if you didn't. You weren't allowed to host it yourself.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#117

Post by greenyoda »

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…

A big discussion of that tweet can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28974798

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#118

Post by magicalist »

robin_reala wrote: post #7

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…

People are being awfully credulous of two sentence fragments quoted in an editorial paragraph. Much of this could certainly be true but my bullshit meter is going off on the level of narrative they're reconstructing in all the non-quoted portions.

I dislike AMP because the UX is bad and Google strong armed it in the news carousel anyways instead of focusing on performance for all sites, but this would be a lot more convincing with the source emails entered into the record.

edit: and this is just talking about ad content, right? Unless somehow a publisher made their entire page blocked until the page's ads load, throttling the load of ads would just make the ads load slower. And from what cletus quotes in another comment:

> 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.

Is the claim that ads in AMP pages don't run javascript or do header bidding and so are "fast", but javascript and header bidding isn't inherently slow so Google could have made them faster (and/or not intentionally throttled)? I've never worked much with ads so maybe someone with knowledge of header bidding can comment.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#119

Post by mavhc »

eska wrote: post #98
KaiserPro wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How centralised is AMP in theory and in practise?

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#120

Post by mrkramer »

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.

>Given that Google is critical for US intelligence supremacy and technological dominance, I am curious what the US chooses to do with it.

Peter Thiel says Google is anti-American because it chooses to work with China but not with US. I wouldn't quite agree with Thiel but I would say that Google's neoliberal culture and neoliberal agenda is starting to become destructive and counter- productive in the long term.

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