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

401–410 of 510 posts

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

#401

Post by kaashif »

CPLX wrote: post #391
kaashif wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If breaking Google up would be good for Google shareholders, surely the shareholders would have made it happen already, right? Unless the argument is that shareholders don't know what's good for them.

The divergence between the interests of shareholders and the actions of a corporation in cases like this is a textbook example of a well established concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

Naively I would've thought that by making management huge shareholders, (most of) the agents then become principals.

So when we talk about "the shareholders" we also include the CEO.

I guess the argument here is that that actually doesn't work and the CEO would prefer being in charge of a larger company even if it personally costs him tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

That's what I'm skeptical of.

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

#402

Post by udev4096 »

aiauthoritydev wrote: post #155
crowcroft wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a media buyer puts $1.00 in on one side of the system, on average only $0.60 makes it to the publisher. In some cases less than $0.50 gets to them. Advertising is an intentionally complex system so that companies can clip the ticket at multiple stages throughout the process. Google should be broken up, but the whole ad tech system needs to go into the bin if these problems are going to ever get fixed. https://ww…

As someone who has worked in AdTech I would respectfully disagree. It is indeed complex but it is incredibly efficient. Also it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue. What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative. Some companies like Google are incredible at this. Google is not a "monopoly" in this space. In fact the world has far too many Google eq…

Your opinion is biased from the fact that you worked on "adtech". How can you justify it? You are the reason the web is bloated and lost the true idea of it a long time ago. Luckily, there are people who run pi-hole and adguard who have my utmost respect along with countless people who maintain an upto-date ad-block list

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

#403

Post by udev4096 »

adrr wrote: post #368
thfuran wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I choose option three in the false dichotomy: Render it illegal to attempt to force me to see ads.

You can always pay for service. Kagi, YouTube Premium, Reddit Premium, Spotify Premium, ProtonMail etc. Platforms needs money to run.

Ads are not only annoying but play an extremely crucial part on tracking you across the web. People defending google cannot seem to wrap their mind around the fact that it's one of the most lucrative way to carry out mass surveillance at scale. Paying for the service only partly avoids the service to stop giving you ads. What about the insane amount of telemetry they collect? It's a lost cause

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

#404

Post by MichaelZuo »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #400
MichaelZuo wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t make sense. Why would any advertiser pay the same in such a scenario? They would obviously value your attention much less on average if that was a hard limit.

I don't give a shit what advertisers want. I was merely pointing out to someone in the ad business that I don't want to see relevant ads when they made the statement that I do. This is something that people in advertising say a lot, but it's generally not true. I do not want or benefit from you having "better" ad targeting - I will find your product if I want it without the sales pitch.

Why does your individual opinion matter to Google (or advertisers or their markets) then?

It’s probably not even possible for decision makers to discern it from noise.

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

#406

Post by firecall »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #228
nixpulvis wrote: post #108

I would love to see a company compete in the ad space with the goal of making ads less intrusive . If ads didn't attack me and cause the viewport to jump and become obscured while reading, my first impression with the products would be better, and the sites the ads are on would get more viewership. Quality ads would be at a huge premium.

Web ads are bearable for me most of the time, but I'm dismayed by ads in mobile games my kids play. Unskippable 30 second videos that peddle poorly made F2P games. I manage to keep them mostly out of it by paying for worthy games and deleting the rest. However I would in fact happily welcome _some_ ads. Ones that would simply inform me of existence of masterpieces like Tiny Bubbles or Monument Valley rather than pedd…

This is where Apple Arcade is an excellent value IMHO.

People like to disparage Apple Arcade as some sort of failure for not having enough "AAA" titles, whatever they are supposed to be.

But yet, Apple constantly adds new titles to the catalogue, and you can play them all for a reasonable cost without vile ads for gambling, casino, adult and microtransaction games!

Also, in my experience the games all seem to run fine on old-ish hardware like the iPhone 11.

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

#407

Post by milesrout »

shadowgovt wrote: post #351
milesrout wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are wealthier than we have ever been so I fail to see how capitalism has made us poor. Poor compared to what? The past when we were poorer?

You can hide a lot of bad experiences behind averaging over 300+ million people. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-... ... And, to be blunt, if things are better than ever, why is the US sliding straight into fascism?

It isn't. Just like it wasn't sliding into fascism under Reagan, or Bush, or Clinton, or Bush 2, or Trump the first time, even though all the same people claimed that at the time.

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

#408

Post by [deleted] »

lolinder wrote: post #371
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #218

I'm confused how this is a monopoly, is it just the "if we define a market as Google ads, then Google has a monopoly problem"? Like defining iOS apps as a market (and somehow failed)? Even if they play games with the auctions to keep the price up, at the end of the day X company is spending $5 per thousand clicks (or whatever) because they think it's worth it. Google can charge whatever they want, they run the platfo…

> There's other ad companies, there is no other way to get an app on iOS. There is no other way to get an ad on sites that use Google Ads, just as there's no other way to get an app on iOS. These seem to be perfectly parallel to me: in either case you can pay a company to get access to their user base or you can choose to not pay that company to get access to their users. But if you make that choice, in either case y…

[deleted]

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

#409

Post by porridgeraisin »

LunaSea wrote: post #290
porridgeraisin wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the other side of the divide from you. However, mine and many other folks' position is not preferring untargeted intrusive annoying ads over targeted intrusive annoying ads. It's preferring almost zero ads with maybe the rare, non intrusive easily avoidable ad on certain appropriate websites[1]. That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo. [1] a shopping website…

> That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo. And so you're paying for the content you're reading as well?

Nope, if they are so unscrupulously willing to employ dark patterns, I can get pretty competitive :-)

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

#410

Post by fsckboy »

dragonwriter wrote: post #387
fsckboy wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

price discovery through invisible hand, competitive markets are the the opposite of communism. crony capitalist monopolies are more like fascism vs communism

“Crony capitalist monopolies” are a prominent feature of the real world system for which socialist critics coined the name “capitalism”. They do have a lot to do with “Communism” if by that you mean Leninism and its derivatives, all of which are state-capitalist systems in practice (in theory as a transitional developmental phase to socialism, but few ever transitioned out except a few like China that transitioned to…

the real world critics of crony capitalism also coined the term socialism and then set about forming sociopathic totalitarian states and started slaughtering, torturing and starving people. what's your point?

and by socialism i mean the 4th international, the 3rd international, et al, whence were spawned many socialist parties that called themselves socialists, but which are in full agreement with what casual observers would call communism and or marxism. it's all distinction without difference.

source: i used to be an active communist

Post reply on HN