Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 510 posts

Re: Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

#41

Post by whoknowsidont »

alabastervlog wrote: post #13
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems harder to split up than Bell to me. Bell was split regionally which makes sense since each region has it's own wires and can make money separately. Google has the problem that all their products other than adds lose money (or make money through integration with Google adds)

This is exactly why it's important to bust them up: all those other products are effectively "dumping" on whatever sector they compete in. This even discourages time-investment (to develop) and learning-to-use investment (for users) for free alternatives, not just commercial ones.

All of their products helped the sector they are in. They didn't "dump" into it. Google continually improved areas where other companies previously refused to, even if they were charging for their services.

Mail. Internet browsers? Does it really need to be stated? Open source. Kubernetes. Open source. Tensor architecture. Freely released.

I don't see the argument for breaking Google up other than people are holding some vendetta against Google for being successful AND a pretty good citizen in the overall landscape so to speak.

If anyone needs to be broken up it's Microsoft. Microsoft actively harms every other competitor by bundling all their services together to the point where businesses won't even look at other software (teams? Azure is basically sold on nepotism).

Re: Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

#42

Post by coliveira »

megaman821 wrote: post #38

I don't think this article explains it well. Google sells ad space on behalf of the publishers and also sells the ads on behalf of the advertisers. It also runs the auction that places the ads into the ad space. See this graphic https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7 . Parts of this can definately be broken up without destroying Google.

Google can extract as much money as they want from this equation, up to the limit of available capital for advertising. They just need to squeeze more from publishers and at the same time increase click costs. They have been doing both of these for several years.

Re: Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

#43

Post by chii »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #27
yoshicoder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it wouldn't make sense for it to be more profitable for google if there were no search deals, since otherwise they would just cancel the deal themselves. Clearly they see long term value in blocking out competition even at that high of a price

Google can't cancel it right now because then otherwise Bing would bid for it. Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this. A historical parallel is when tobacco advertising was banned, and cigarette companies because more profitable. Advertising greatly affected which cigarettes people smoked but had a smaller (though still real) impact on whether they smoked. So the companies k…

> Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this.

why would anti-trust rules prevent _anyone_ from bidding? Apple can sell their browser search, just like mozilla can sell firefox search. And anyone with a browser could do the same. Unless the anti-trust rules somehow become so overarching that the selling of space for advertising becomes illegal?

Re: Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

#44

Post by whatever1 »

megaman821 wrote: post #38

I don't think this article explains it well. Google sells ad space on behalf of the publishers and also sells the ads on behalf of the advertisers. It also runs the auction that places the ads into the ad space. See this graphic https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7 . Parts of this can definately be broken up without destroying Google.

At the very least the exchange has to be audited. Currently we have no idea whether the prices are a result of natural supply-demand dynamics or whether the exchange keeps artificially pumping the prices with lackluster demand

Re: Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

#45

Post by abirch »

blasphemers wrote: post #31
yoshicoder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it wouldn't make sense for it to be more profitable for google if there were no search deals, since otherwise they would just cancel the deal themselves. Clearly they see long term value in blocking out competition even at that high of a price

It depends on the what the browsers end up doing. If they just surface a select your search engine dialog during set up, most people will just select google and nothing will have changed besides the cost. If they set a non-google search engine by default, they will lose ad revenue because of people not bothering to change the default.

Depends on the default search engine. Many people went of their way to download a web browser that wasn't Internet Explorer for many years even though IE was the default.

If the default search were randomly assigned and Google investors were nefarious the investors (not Alphabet) could simply help launch 30 different subpar search engines. Then if a user landed on one of those as a default search engine: the user would switch to Google.

Re: Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

#47

Post by bdcravens »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #10
xhkkffbf wrote: post #8

Google really should start floating some plans for splitting itself up. Things worked out pretty well when Ma Bell was split up. Some people thought it would all fail, but the companies have done a good job competing and cooperating at the right times. If Google comes up with the plans, it's better than some antagonist.

Google seems harder to split up than Bell to me. Bell was split regionally which makes sense since each region has it's own wires and can make money separately. Google has the problem that all their products other than adds lose money (or make money through integration with Google adds)

That's a business model problem then.

Any other business burying money into various endeavors would have to cut losses at some point, which underscores the point of an unfair monopoly.

Google isn't operating at a loss in all products. About 12% of revenue is cloud; about 12% is everything else. Their business apps is estimated to be a billion-dollar business on its own. Cloud is profitable, and earns probably 1.5-3 billion dollars a year in profit.

Re: Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

#49

Post by _mlbt »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #39
nativeit wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google isn’t a monopoly in the Standard Oil sense of the term. Aren’t they? It doesn’t sound like those two interpretations are mutually exclusive.

In the sense of the Sherman Act and similar legislation, monopolies exist in the sense of having exclusive control over some supply and raising prices against consumers. This isn't what Google does, they generally lower prices for consumers and the competition is only a click away.

What realistic alternatives are there in the mobile app ads space that aren’t geared towards games?

I’m genuinely curious because some apps can be hard to monetize in any other way.

Re: Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

#50

Post by DrillShopper »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #40
lupka wrote: post #9

Happy to see this and hopefully there are some changes. Right now I'm dealing with a crazy Adsense issue and there is no recourse, no customer support and no alternative.

If you think antitrust has anything to do with why it isn't profitable for a company at Google scale to pay a human being for every one of the hundreds of millions of people who use AdSense to have customer support...

Are there hundreds of millions of AdSense customers though?
Post reply on HN