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Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

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Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#161

Post by ethbr0 »

tyingq wrote: post #152
magicalist wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A second employee captured Google’s ultimate aim of destroying header bidding altogether, noting in response that [redacted] So from a probably naive view, getting rid of header bidding seems like it would be faster, not slower. Is the assertion being made that it isn't faster and it just so happens to also enrich the ad network?

Yes, you're right. It's faster not to have it, but that puts publishers at a disadvantage...Google reaps more revenue and gives less in return if it doesn't exist. Header bidding is often estimated to improve revenue by 10% or so for publishers. The sequence was first employee probably said something like "make it slower if they aren't on AMP", and the second employee made some kind of suggestion to kill it altogethe…

If you need to keep revenue graphs going up and to the right, because that's the primary KPI your unit is judged on, at some point it's technically easier to handicap competition than improve your own offering.

I think this gives us a timestamp on when Google got there.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#163

Post by perlgeek »

jfoster wrote: 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…

> Even a "breaking apart" that proposes splitting "search" from "advertising" would do nothing to address the issues that are getting raised at present.

Alone it wouldn't help, but what if you split search from advertising, and forced the "search" part to up advertising to the highest bidder, not just from google ads?

If Google Search really was its own company and with its own shareholders, getting the most money for a bid would be more profitable than colluding with the rest of former Google.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#164

Post by tmcw »

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?

See page 90:

> Google ad server employees met with AMP employees to strategize about using AMP to impede header bidding, addressing in particular how much pressure publishers and advertisers would tolerate.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#165

Post by tyingq »

ethbr0 wrote: post #161
tyingq wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you're right. It's faster not to have it, but that puts publishers at a disadvantage...Google reaps more revenue and gives less in return if it doesn't exist. Header bidding is often estimated to improve revenue by 10% or so for publishers. The sequence was first employee probably said something like "make it slower if they aren't on AMP", and the second employee made some kind of suggestion to kill it altogethe…

If you need to keep revenue graphs going up and to the right, because that's the primary KPI your unit is judged on, at some point it's technically easier to handicap competition than improve your own offering. I think this gives us a timestamp on when Google got there.

It does seem like the GOOGL shareholder expectation of compounded perpetual YoY revenue gains of > 25% leads to bad places. The YoY growth of end users is much smaller. Something like 5%. So at some point, the inflated expectations have to mean a dirty playbook.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#166

Post by amelius »

username190 wrote: post #149
amelius wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.” That's it. Webmasters should give all visitors with a Chrome user agent a loading penalty of 1 second and a popup saying that the website runs faster on Firefox. I said it before on HN, but the idea was condemned, and I partially agreed, but now it seems (at least to me)…

IMO Action should be taken against Google here, not the average user (about 70% of whom use Chrome). Throttling based on user agent (Firefox, WebKit Safari, etc) would be a bad thing if you ran YouTube and wanted to encourage people to use Chrome - it would likewise be bad if you ran a website like HN. Users have power when they have control - Google is taking that away, and that's why antitrust legislation makes sen…

Then consider the 1 second delay as an advertisement for consumer power. Google/YouTube annoys users with similar or even longer delays all the time. So I don't think you can see this as an "action against the user", unless you consider all non-user-tracking advertisements as an action against the user.

Also, the campaign can stop when Chrome and Firefox reach an equal user-base. So "the user losing freedom of choice of browser" is also not a strong argument.

Yes, it's sad that this seems necessary, but you can't fight corporate evilness with just goodwill. In a sense, this is somewhat similar to the paradox of tolerance [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#168

Post by ricketycricket »

magicalist wrote: post #118
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 c…

> 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.

This is not an editorial document, it’s a legal complaint by the Attorneys General of 17 U.S. states and commonwealths demanding a jury trial (among other things). The allegations are unproven at this point. The demanded trial process (discovery, examination, etc.) is what will provide the evidence.

One way or another though, we’re going to see if all of these claims are true. It just will take some time.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#169

Post by ralston3 »

robbedpeter wrote: post #47
jsiepkes wrote: 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…

This is a longer way of saying “A man has to live by a code”. Sadly that’s very rare these days :(
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