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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

#201

Post by piva00 »

aurareturn wrote: post #189
piva00 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume that you use a free service from Google/Facebook/Microsoft? So you must not care about surveillance capitalism either. At least not care enough. This happens exactly because there is no competition and hence antitrust is needed. I don't want to be using services from Google/Facebook/Microsoft but there's no competition and then I end up using their services even when trying to avoid it as most as possible.…

Did you subscribe to Neeva? It was a search engine developed by an ex Google exec. It had no ads, no tracking. It required a subscription to use. Most people who used it said the search results were great. It shut down because no one wanted to pay for it.

Yes, I did. And I subscribe to Kagi right now (since Nov/2022) after Neeva, and will keep trying to find paid search solutions if Kagi ever goes belly up.

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

#202

Post by nottorp »

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…

> You can go somewhere else.

Yeah, right.

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

#203

Post by jefftk »

tristan957 wrote: post #192
nologic01 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its obviously sarcastic. some people have "forgotten" what healthy competition and competent regulation of markets means.

Any companies that aren't Apple or Microsoft that compete with Google do not have healthy competition at all. What are you talking about? Google uses www.google.com, the most popular website in the world, to push Chrome. Chrome, the most popular browser in the world, uses www.google.com as the default search engine. Google controls the largest ad marketplace and analytics tool, so they use Chrome to harm the ad lands…

> use Chrome to harm the ad landscape to stifle ad-tech competitors (third party cookies)

As in, Chrome is removing third-party cookie support to hurt their ad-tech competitors? How do you square this with Safari kicking off third-party cookie removal, Firefox following close behind, and Chrome being last?

> completely hinder the development of ad blocking software (FLoC and web bundles)

Neither FLoC nor web bundles impact ad blockers, though? Both can trivially be blocked, and don't introduce new capabilities that strengthen ad blocking circumvention relative to ad blocking. (With FLoC I'm not sure what you mean here, since this isn't an argument I've seen before. With web bundles I was the main person pushing this in Google Ads before I left a year ago, and while adblocker-circumvention is something Brave claimed it never made much sense: https://www.jefftk.com/p/webbundles-and-url-randomization).

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

#204

Post by aurareturn »

piva00 wrote: post #201
aurareturn wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you subscribe to Neeva? It was a search engine developed by an ex Google exec. It had no ads, no tracking. It required a subscription to use. Most people who used it said the search results were great. It shut down because no one wanted to pay for it.

Yes, I did. And I subscribe to Kagi right now (since Nov/2022) after Neeva, and will keep trying to find paid search solutions if Kagi ever goes belly up.

Great. So there are plenty of choices, both paid and free. Why did you say there's no competition?

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

#205

Post by bbor »

throwaway462910 wrote: post #186
thfuran wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not the claim being made.

It's the claim being pre-emptively argued against though

Not sure there’s anyone in here arguing for google. Poor little google, being bullied by all us hackers…

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

#206

Post by aurareturn »

nottorp wrote: post #202
aurareturn wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You can go somewhere else. Yeah, right.

Email marketing, content marketing, FB, Apstore, Bing, DuckDuckGo, print marketing, TV marketing, magazine marketing, viral marketing, etc.

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

#207

Post by chx »

s1k3s wrote: post #185

> The Commission preliminarily finds that, in this particular case, a behavioural remedy is likely to be ineffective to prevent the risk that Google continues such self-preferencing conducts or engages in new ones. Google is active on both sides of the market with its publisher ad server and with its ad buying tools and holds a dominant position on both ends. Furthermore, it operates the largest ad exchange. This lea…

To quote

> Ad exchanges are driven by a simple demand and supply mechanism. Publishers want to sell ad space on their website to the highest bidder and advertisers want to buy ad units that provide good visibility. This is where an ad exchange comes into the picture.

> This digital marketplace is part of the programmatic advertising ecosystem and is powered by real-time bidding (RTB) technology. It connects advertisers on a demand-side platform (DSP) with publishers on a supply-side platform (SSP).

Google purchased DoubleClick in 2008 which is the largest such. The problem here is, the SSP is also Google -- Google Search most importantly, YouTube as well.

There is more! They also run an ad server. To quote again

> an ad server is to ads what WordPress is to content

So an advertiser loads their ad into Google ad server for serving the ad then participates at a Google exchange to bid on the price of the ad. This gives Google an astounding amount of insight, fairly similar to insider trading which absolutely should not be allowed.

So, they could be forced to spin out the ad server and the ad exchange.

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

#208

Post by cageface »

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…

Google deserves a lot of recent criticism but at the same time I think they provide an important counterbalance to Apple and Microsoft. I especially don’t want to see Android go away as the only competitor to iOS.

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

#209

Post by bbor »

Gareth321 wrote: post #54
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The breaking up of monopolies used to be in the toolbox of American antitrust policies, back when America enforced antitrust legislation on its own companies. The US Justice Department sued Google in 2020 and is asking for pretty much the same disinvestment for pretty much the same reasons. The EU is trailing the US by two years here. I'm eagerly awaiting the trove of patriotic comments which will undoubtedly follo…

> The US Justice Department sued Google in 2020 and is asking for pretty much the same disinvestment for pretty much the same reasons. While true, 2.5 years later there is still no action. In that same time period, the E.U. released the largest anti-monopoly technology law in its history, the Digital Markets Act. This will take effect near the end of the year and impact all major tech companies. I think it's clear th…

They’re advancing in spurts - a few events this year. Remember when the justice department suggested that google sell its buy side advertising unit, and somehow “what if we just spun it off into its own Bet?” got proposed. Good times. Perhaps the most brazen “FU” from google lawyers in the history of the company

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

#210

Post by cool_dude85 »

pb7 wrote: post #121
gylterud wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about an automatic nationalisation in stead? Where you take companies which have grown too big out of the private ownership’s hands.

Nationalization is corporate civil asset forfeiture.

This is just a lazy attempt to tie one thing to another, unpopular thing. What is the comparison here aside from "I don't like both"? In what sense is nationalization "corporate civil asset forfeiture"?

Not all nationalization is uncompensated, even in the real world. Further, you can imagine very fair ways, long term, to nationalize companies by e.g. requiring them to pay a wealth tax in the form of equity.

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