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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

#221

Post by resolutebat »

Detrytus wrote: post #169
bee_rider wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, we can’t really complain. The international capitalist system owes Ireland a bit more; its predecessor, colonialism, screwed Ireland over for generations.

But the point is that Ireland does not really benefit from this money - it is only an accounting trick. Google funnels money through Ireland, but does not employ many people in Ireland, and does not pay much taxes there. In the end, the living standard of typical Irishman is closer to countries with $40-45k GDP, such as Italy or France, than to countries with $100k GDP, such as Norway or Switzerland.

This article suggests Google employed over 8,000 people in Ireland in 2018, and it's quite likely that number has grown since.

https://9to5google.com/2020/03/02/google-dublin-coronavirus/

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

#222

Post by bbor »

donatj wrote: post #28
flexie wrote: post #2

Before anyone makes the argument that the EU should have no jurisdiction over an American entity, please remember that Google sells its services in Europe. It's well within the jurisdiction of the EU to regulate how anyone does business here. Google Ireland alone had a 50B euro turnover. The breaking up of monopolies used to be in the toolbox of American antitrust policies, back when America enforced antitrust legisl…

> breaking up of monopolies What’s the monopoly here? There are tons of successful ad companies.

I recommend you look into it a bit more if you haven’t - there are buyside and sell side competitors, but google massively controls both markets, which it uses to grow both businesses.

For example, the justice department found slides from a project that favored its buyside customers when running supposedly impartial auctions on the sell side - in layman’s terms, brazenly fucking over their competitors. Allegedly.

The best part is of course that the google engineers named it “project bernanke” after the Fed chairman, since they thought of it like QE, I.e. “giving out free money” to people who used their buyside products. I’m still not sure if that was a criticism of QE or if they’re honestly that submerged in the Google Kool-Aid…

All of that is small potatoes to the main way in which google is a monopoly though: they run the only ad exchange. Trust me, it helps. Facebook spent many billions trying to stand up a competitor and ultimately gave up, which should tell you how valuable that privilege is

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

#223

Post by 0xDEF »

Garvi wrote: post #191

In my opinion the main reason the Soviet economy collapsed (apart from outside pressure), was the state owned sector wide monopolies. It is also in the webs own nature to nurture monopolies for two seemingly contradictory reasons: 1.) Switching to a competitor is just a few clicks away. Moving everyone to the one that provides the most for free (dumping laws ignored as per usual). 2.) Switching to a competitor is har…

>In my opinion the main reason the Soviet economy collapsed (apart from outside pressure), was the state owned sector wide monopolies

Interesting how China's model with multiple state owned entities competing against each other compares with the Soviet model.

However China is practically a capitalist country now. Chinese SOEs make up less of the Chinese GDP than Italian SOEs make up in the Italian GDP.

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

#224

Post by spacebanana7 »

piva00 wrote: post #152
spacebanana7 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are real questions about how much authority the EU has over an American entity. Can the EU only regulate activities in the EU or does it have global jurisdiction? On one hand, if Google simply restructured, spun off or sold its EU ad business the competitive landscape wouldn't change that much. I'm not sure whether a new European competitor could ever become a peer to Google if it could only compete in the EU m…

> Alternatively, the EU having global jurisdiction would have even bigger issue. With that precedent, could Japan or Australia regulate European businesses? That's already what the USA does to global companies operating inside the US. That's exactly how Cuba has been under a blockade from the US, for example...

Sanctions are different from antitrust.

With sanctions the US can declare that third parties must choose between doing business with the US and Cuba / ZTE. Because of it's large economy the US would be confident that most of those parties would choose to choose the US over the company / small country.

Antitrust enforcement is many ways more difficult than sanctions enforcement because third parties must be compelled in 'how' rather than 'whether' they do business with a company.

Even the US would've struggled to break up ZTE / Huawei etc into smaller companies across every jurisdiction for antitrust. Doing so in China would've obviously been impossible but even enforcing this in the Gulf States & South Korea would've stretched the limits of US power.

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

#225

Post by jefftk »

EscapeFromNY wrote: post #195
aurareturn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, being able to read smart contracts and audit transactions on the blockchain is how everyone knew FTX stealing customer funds from years ago. Oh wait. There are a huge number of ways crypto exchanges pull of scams without anyone noticing including straight up transferring customer funds to their own accounts, wash trading, trading against their own customers, having timely "maintenance" that lead to automatic liq…

> Yes, being able to read smart contracts and audit transactions on the blockchain is how everyone knew FTX stealing customer funds from years ago. Yes in fact! Anyone who looked into it knew. Maybe Wall Street and VCs were duped, but the crypto industry itself saw the train wreck coming from a mile away and distanced themselves from the start. That's why when the inevitable happened, the mainstream were pumping out…

>> Yes, being able to read smart contracts and audit transactions on the blockchain is how everyone knew FTX stealing customer funds from years ago.

> Yes in fact!

Your first link is someone saying "I told you so", but there's no mention of reading smart contracts or auditing blockchain transactions. Instead it's something like, SBF seemed very fishy to him. Ex, "if you actually listened to him speak, it was obvious that he was a bumbling idiot who didn’t really grasp the industry he was supposed to be a domain expert in." Your second link is an example of someone doing something similar, again without using anything on-chain.

> the crypto industry itself saw the train wreck coming from a mile away and distanced themselves from the start

This is a pretty hard claim to support, and two people who said "this looks suspicious" isn't much evidence in that direction. When I talked to crypto people pre-2022-11 they were generally positive on FTX (but crypto is large and diverse and this is also saying very little).

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

#228

Post by EscapeFromNY »

resolutebat wrote: post #216
EscapeFromNY wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want to send your money to the Bahamas, you have the choice as a consumer to use a regulated US-based exchange instead. You don't have to be ultra-savvy to read wikipedia and learn about a company before doing business with them. With Google, you're spending money in a completely opaque marketplace with 0 visibility or transparency, and no choice as a consumer to mitigate that.

A regulated US-based exchange like, say, FTX US or Binance US?

If you do a minimal amount of research (reading wikipedia), you'll learn that neither FTX nor Binance are US-based

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

#229

Post by staunton »

cageface wrote: post #208
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.

Nobody suggested killing Android (and they couldn't do it in the first place even if they wanted to). It's about adds. I hope this is a step towards seeing adds for what most of them are: lies, propaganda, manipulation, and a pointless arms race that distracts efforts from improving products.

In general, I expect this to go nowhere, of course. However, the fact that the EU can dare suggest such things fills me with hope. Sure, it's due to Europe having pretty much no stake in these technologies and waging a small trade war with the US, but that still means that apparently the cost of lobbying the process is high for the likes of Google.

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

#230

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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