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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

#311

Post by bantunes »

golemotron wrote: post #305
bantunes wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it not? If you're providing a service (presumably for profit), shouldn't you be bound by rules other commercial service providers have to follow in that jurisdiction as well? If not, you'd be at a massive advantage.

It's not being provided in that jurisdiction. If you are hosted/domiciled in a country foreign users are entering another jurisdiction when they access the service.

If you're taking money in that jurisdiction, why is it not "being provided"?

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

#312

Post by pmoriarty »

jefftk wrote: post #197
pmoriarty wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google has publicly committed not to use them for ad targeting" 1 - Why would I trust anything Google says? 2 - What else could they use that information for apart from ad targeting that they're not telling us about?

1: Publicly saying one thing and then turning out to have been doing something different when someone blows the whistle or it comes out in a lawsuit would be far more damaging to them than just not making the commitment. (Also, I worked at Google until a little over a year ago and if we'd been using fingerprinting for ad targeting I would have seen it.) 2: Detecting fraud and abuse, which is generally interpreted as…

"Publicly saying one thing and then turning out to have been doing something different when someone blows the whistle or it comes out in a lawsuit would be far more damaging to them than just not making the commitment."

If they did it would be far from the first or even the millionth time a company has said one thing and done another... even when it's ostensibly illegal, immoral, or merely bad PR. Most of them get away with it too, or get just a slap on the wrist if they're ever caught.

The people responsible usually suffer no personal consequences, and just go on to get cushy jobs in other companies if they're ever fired, or have enough "fuck you money" to not even ever worrying about having a job for the rest of their life. That's assuming there are actual professional consequences, where there often aren't.. some even get away with getting huge bonuses while they drag their companies through the gutter and in to the ground.

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

#313

Post by Spivak »

hfkwer wrote: post #308
Spivak wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that they shouldn't but that they won't because every government is skittish to kill their own golden calves. It's easy to penalize foreign companies because it's not your country's income that's affected.

So you're simply partaking in whataboutism? What does this bring to the discussion?

That I a think this is going to eventually come to a political head and be resolved with a treaty rather than EU courts because Google's (and Facebook with the end of the data sharing agreement) redress is going to be appealing to the US.

US tech companies have a very strong narrative right now that the EU's privacy and antitrust regulations are in effect, even if not intentional, a money extraction scheme. The EU has sued Google now 7 times under this statute as well as multiple times targeting Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.

It's getting really hard to argue that they're not just going after the deepest (foreign) pockets with laws that are vague enough you could make a case against any medium sized tech company.

The EU fined Luxottica $125 million and explicitly allowed them to merge with Essilor.

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

#314

Post by garganzol »

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.

Microsoft at least sells real products that should be designed, produced and supported. Google sells, figuratively speaking, air, and redirects the profits to "own the world" by crushing the competition in other areas. Google undoubtedly has some decent products as well (Android, Google Workspace) but this is a drop in the ocean.

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

#315

Post by golemotron »

bantunes wrote: post #311
golemotron wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not being provided in that jurisdiction. If you are hosted/domiciled in a country foreign users are entering another jurisdiction when they access the service.

If you're taking money in that jurisdiction, why is it not "being provided"?

Another way to look at it is that customer is sending money to another jurisdiction.

Countries can and do pass laws about whom their citizens can trade with. It seems like that is a better route than inventing jurisdiction over foreign companies.

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

#316

Post by prox »

kdeldycke wrote: post #296
prox wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where I stand, I operate some ad accounts but the amount of control and insight taken away with each update is really noticeable. Really interesting is that I actually get zero input on how much I pay on each day. You give a budget for the day but I don’t have a lot of control over it unless I micromanage the thing. It’s crazy and I hope the EU will go hard on Google. Edit So more about payments. It used to b…

In a project I maintain on billing and payments[1], I had a link to Google Ads API. It was documenting how they had hard-limit budget, with notions like "capped actuals" and "monthly with rollover". The explanation was quite good so I keep it around to explain the concept, and why it was perfect for customers to avoid any surprises. Then the URL[2] 404'd and the API disappeared. I couldn't find any references to a "B…

Thank you, this has been insightful! Sometimes it’s hard to make a report that makes sense. For instance when having to deal with conversion lag I had to deal with this week. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9347141

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

#317

Post by pie420 »

bbor wrote: post #239
endisneigh wrote: post #99

break every company up! Each "bet" in Alphabet needs to be broken. Each business unit within Google needs to be broken. Same with Apple. Break that up to between services and hardware. Force them to open up their new silicon. Why can't other companies use the H1 or H2 chips for their headphones? why are we letting Apple have the competitive advantage? Open up the App Store and force new payment methods. Microsoft als…

I.. I know you’re joking but I love 90% of that. I need a hacker news alternative for people like me. Or perhaps just people that look at the state of the world and think maybe, just maybe , something’s rotten in the states of Delaware and Ireland…

I hope reddit dies and we get a great migration to new smaller forums all over the internet. We need to stop consolidating the internet.

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

#318

Post by shadowgovt »

hfkwer wrote: post #307
shadowgovt wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping in mind that the law wasn't that when the tech stack was built. It would certainly be a problem for Google to solve, but one should note that legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down (which in the long run would harm user privacy because the company would almost certainly be replaced by an ecosystem of companies that care far less about privacy than Go…

> legally requiring this of the company would be tantamount to legally requiring Google to shut down What a leap in logic. Care to elaborate? That assertion is insane and the rest of the comment hinges on that.

Most of the value of Google is the services it provides (search and ads, and indeed cloud, which is a separate product and not just "Google's internal fabric exposed") on its internal fabric.

Splitting out "Google Services" from ads or search creates a company with one customer (or two, if we've split out ads and search) that is basically in no market position to get more customers because Google's internal fabric is not a "cloud offering" (source: I was listening in when the company decided to offer Google Cloud and not make that "just the bare metal we run everything on;" Google's internal bare metal is too developer-hostile to the common way things are done outside Google to be a viable product).

Meanwhile, search and ads would be in a place where there was only one "cloud" company in the world they could run their product on.

For all its money, I don't believe Google could afford to re-tool their products to work on someone else's cloud, so once the "Services" company foundered for being unable to compete / having a monoculture of customers, the ads and search companies would die for lack of vendor offering the one bespoke cloud model they can run on.

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

#319

Post by pie420 »

rsynnott wrote: post #174
hfkwer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a problem for Google to solve, not the public. "We setup our business so that it's too difficult to comply with the law" isn't an excuse in any context.

In theory, yes. In practice, didn't MS use basically this as one of their arguments when the FTC tried to break them up back in the day?

"The US failed to break up a monopoly that to this day stifles competition and prevents effective capitalism by making itself to complicated to regulate, so lets keep making the same mistakes"

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

#320

Post by shadowgovt »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #302
shadowgovt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm sorry, but Google has already dealt with this issue, and they can deal with it again. Quota is a thing there, and they already have process for billing and managing access to Google resources by entities which are quasi-internal because during the "Alphabet" transition many things that were formerly internal -- such as the e.g. "Access & Energy PA", which became "Access", mostly Fiber ... which I happened to work…

Good point. I was thinking about this through the lens of how Google looks when doing an acquisition and under-valuing the fact that these spin-offs would be already-constructed Google-shaped offerings.

Still, it sets up a monoculture of service fabrics those products can run on where the division between orgs is, at best, paper-thin; at worst, search or ads dies and takes services with it (or vice-versa) because without several eng-decades neither of those sub-companies are kitted to act as an independent company.

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