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EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

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Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#141

Post by YetAnotherNick »

Gareth321 wrote: post #82
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #22

Google will rather split up the internet by pulling out of Europe than follow this. And isn't ads the only profitable business Google has? If they sell it, there Google search, Gmail etc couldn't exist.

EMEA is Google's second largest market, and it's not even close for competition. There is no way Google would be willing to cut revenue by $90 billion annually. It would be corporate suicide. The single greatest loss event of investor capital in history. They'll comply, just like Apple will comply with the DMA. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Unlike the U.S., E.U lawmakers can't be bought.

You are including an entire continent and countries like UK, UAE, Saudi for coming up with this revenue number for EU. Also my guess would be that profit margin will be much lower than US due to all the regulations like GDPR.

Google's overall ad revenue is 4x greater than EU total revenue. It will definitely loose EU business than it will loose ads business. But yeah there are always legal loophole in things like this and likely it could keep both.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#142

Post by aurareturn »

Mistletoe wrote: post #136
samwillis wrote: post #120

Google operates an exchange for a digital asset, is a major vendor/trader of said asset on that exchange and operates an algorithmic trading platform to enable people to buy and sell on that exchange. On top of that the algorithmic trades are a "black box" with no audit trail, and no public insight into how it operates. If that sounds familiar, think illegal crypto exchanges... Obviously "ads" are not "securities", b…

Crypto is much more transparent than Google Ads due to the fact that most of them at least have a public blockchain. Is there any way to know if Google Ads purchasing isn’t a giant Ponzi of ads? Is there any way to verify they aren’t bidding up the auctions and that any of it is based on reality and competition at all? Crypto also has price discovery through shorting and selling. How would one short a Google Ad or se…

Holy cow. People are comparing Google to crypto exchanges now.

Blockchains are public, yes. But the entities behind them are completely and utterly cryptic and centralized. Most of them operate out of Cayman Islands/Bahamas, etc.

Comparing Google to crypto exchanges is insane.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#143

Post by jefftk »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #22

Google will rather split up the internet by pulling out of Europe than follow this. And isn't ads the only profitable business Google has? If they sell it, there Google search, Gmail etc couldn't exist.

This is about ads on non-Google websites. That business could be spun off without making Search/Gmail/YouTube/etc non-viable.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#144

Post by thfuran »

madeofpalk wrote: post #95
panragon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google Ireland alone had a 50B euro turnover. Not to discredit the rest of what you're saying, because it is true the EU has jurisdiction and that anti-trust is a lost art in many places in the world. Still, saying Google Ireland 'alone' is a bit funny when Google (like all multinationals) is known to take advantage of Ireland's tax laws to funnel as much of their EU business through. Whatever money Google is making…

You can't have it both ways though. You don't get to take advantage of Irish law to reduce your tax/costs, but then also say that Ireland (and the EU) has no jurisdiction over you.

But that's not the claim being made.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#145

Post by shadowgovt »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #113
seydor wrote: post #20

it would be better if they broke the ad exchange from the rest. a google without the ad revenue doesnt make sense

The split Google "Services" part can still contract other ad networks for revenue, including AdSense if competitive. They just won't be able to bundle.

I think people underestimate how deeply intertwined Google's services and apps are.

I don't think a split off "Google Services" could survive. Google's fabric is designed to run Google's apps and vice versa. You can't just cram some other company's software into Google's core fabric and you can't just run AdSense on someone else's cloud. ETA: this is partially because of historical accretion and path dependence, but also because offering services at Google scale and reliability is a legitimately hard, abstraction-breaking problem; most fabrics aren't architected for the fault-tolerance and scaling that Google's fabric is (did you really isolate concerns? Are you sure your backing-store is eventually-consistent lock-free?), and most software isn't designed to run on a fault-tolerant, high-reliability fabric (what does your UI do if half the database is missing for ten minutes? Did you break your storage down into a NoSQL database with massive data denormalization because space is almost free, or are you using a relational database with heavy cross-lookup constraints that require high availability? Are your RPCs doctored with enough data to make for useful full-service traces, or do your microservices just spit JSON at each other?).

(Source: was there; I saw enough acquisitions go sideways to know how actually hard it is to reshape software from the outside world to fit Google's way of doing computing).

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#146

Post by nologic01 »

gumballindie wrote: post #77

And microsoft is walking scot free. They can happily control operating systems, office tools, a slice of search, ides, ads within their os, are allowed to buy large game makers and soon ai. As a bare minimum they should be forced greater compatibility with running their software on linux and ideally be banned from doing ads, ai and gamedev.

well at least they are selling their office products instead of offering them for "free" out of their infinite benevolence.

ideally you want clean separation of business models and competition with each of the business models.

overbearing conglomerates are not the way forward for the tech industry.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#147

Post by jefftk »

olau wrote: post #76
nisegami wrote: post #39

As expected, the comments here seem generally in support of such a move. But, it is really unclear to me how such a move would improve my life or the lives of most typical users. Genuinely open to having it explained to me.

Online store sells great products. But nobody knows about them. Online store buys ads on Google to tell people about their products. People click the ads, and buy the products so the store can scale up and lower their per unit cost. Everyone are happy. Now fast forward a decade. Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices. Online store now pays 10 times as much for their ads and have to raise prices to…

The EU regulators are addressing Google's display advertising and exchange business, but your comment is about their search ads.

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#148

Post by tremon »

donatj wrote: post #139
tremon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's very little need to imagine anything. Does e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36300410 sound like a positive consequence to you?

The government is already listening to all your phone calls and reading all your text messages. There's likely very little in there they don't already have.

You didn't answer the question. Does the government (any government, for that matter) having access to all that information sound like a positive consequence to you?

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#149

Post by aurareturn »

pb7 wrote: post #90
piaste wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How quickly would public opinion change if Google decided to just shut off their service in the EU for a day? Very quickly - against Google. The fact that European citizens have critical business ties to Google (from GSuite to YT partners) is a sword that cuts both ways. It means the EU can't simply shut Google down on a whim; but it also means that Google can't just throw a tantrum and put up a black page saying "…

How does Google disallow competition? China managed to overtake the top spot for social media so it's not impossible. Europe just can't build, period.

Would Europe still try to regulate Google if one of their companies invented GPT4 and is threatening Google search?

Re: EU suggests breaking up Google's ad business in preliminary antitrust ruling

#150

Post by jfk13 »

aurareturn wrote: post #92
olau wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online store sells great products. But nobody knows about them. Online store buys ads on Google to tell people about their products. People click the ads, and buy the products so the store can scale up and lower their per unit cost. Everyone are happy. Now fast forward a decade. Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices. Online store now pays 10 times as much for their ads and have to raise prices to…

> Now fast forward a decade. Google drop their "do no evil" motto and jack up ad prices. Online store now pays 10 times as much for their ads and have to raise prices to cover the costs. This is just not true and not how Google's ads work. Google has a bidding system. You don't have to pay their prices if your ads aren't profitable. You can pull out. You can go somewhere else. You can try other forms of marketing. Yo…

> If other companies are willing to pay more for the ads, then your product/business/marketing isn't as good as theirs

Or maybe you just don't have as much venture capital to burn.

Do we really want to live in a world that overwhelmingly rewards whoever is prepared to spend the most on publicity?

(How's Citizens United been working out?)

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