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U.S. accuses Google of abusing monopoly in ad technology

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. accuses Google of abusing monopoly in ad technology

#101

Post by basch »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #80
basch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a point where changing the rules now appears to benefit incumbents, despite them being the targets here. Nobody new will be able to grow this way to compete with existing large players. If they cant acquire small things, they will just be forced to clone them, yet the smaller tier players wont be able to "just clone things." Instagram falls into the same category. When Mark acquired it, it was tiny. He is wh…

I don't think your analogy holds here; Instagram was already an active and popular social network before Facebook acquired it, not a "camera app." Did it grow? Certainly. While we don't know what would have happened to it had FB not bought it, it's quite possible FB bought it precisely because it was growing and becoming 'cool.'

Instagram was what, 19 month old when FB bought it? It has 13 employees. It had 0 revenue. It had 30 million people on it. (Facebook hit a billion people in 2012.)

It was tiny. It was the hip up-and-coming app. It had the limelight, and importantly to FB it was mobile first.

I think our memories like to kind of project back its success after acquisition onto what it was before, and get distorted by its billion dollar price. He paid a lot for a not a lot, because he was buying a fad while it was still hot, before Twitter or Google could. He then dumped gasoline on a matchstick. Would ANYBODY else have poured that much money into Instagram that quickly? I think we can all picture what would have happened to it if it had found its way into the Twitter portfolio. (I would surmise it may no longer even exist and have been folded into Twitter having a picture posting feature.)

In hindsight it was absolutely anti-competitive in some way, but I don't know how the law could act to block buying shiny things with potential.

Re: U.S. accuses Google of abusing monopoly in ad technology

#103

Post by crazygringo »

scarface74 wrote: post #77
shadowgovt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for an antitrust lawsuit. The remedy for antitrust is divestiture; if found guilty and the judge assigns that penalty, Google can't just pay their way out of it; they'd have to shut down / slice off into an independent company (probably) DoubleClick and some other acquisitions. Think less "EU fair practices violations" and more "Ma Bell breakup." The difference is that the EU lacks criminal authority (or jurisdic…

What does a divestiture of Google’s ad business when their entire business is selling ads?

Google would still make $$$ because of all of their ad space on Search, YouTube etc.

But they would farm that ad space to multiple exchanges that would be competing for both advertisers and space, and so profits from running the ad exchanges would go down and those ad exchange profits would not be flowing to Google.

I'm neither arguing for nor against this, but that's conceptually how it would work.

Re: U.S. accuses Google of abusing monopoly in ad technology

#105

Post by CobrastanJorji »

debacle wrote: post #91
xxpor wrote: post #78

One of the conservative's legal project over the past 50 years main goals has been to maintain a Borkian consumer harm standard for anti-trust. With the current SCOTUS, I don't see much of a realistic path for this.

This isn't a liberal/conservative issue. This is a corporatism issue.

Right, and the current court is unusually pro-corporate: https://www.axios.com/2022/08/04/supreme-court-john-roberts-....

And although it's not necessarily a liberal vs. conservative issue, it would be deceptive not to point out that this is entirely because of the Republican justices.

Re: U.S. accuses Google of abusing monopoly in ad technology

#106

Post by booleandilemma »

emodendroket wrote: post #97

I'm kind of sour on antitrust as much of a solution for today's issues. If we had five smaller Googles doing the same thing what would that make better?

They wouldn't be smaller Googles, they'd be different companies altogether, with their own practices and work cultures.

They'd have less bureaucracy, which might help them to innovate and move faster, and in different directions from each other.

Re: U.S. accuses Google of abusing monopoly in ad technology

#107

Post by basch »

xvector wrote: post #98
jessaustin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal opinions vary. Certainly Robert Bork would agree with you. He would also probably agree with your vicious libel of Chair Khan. Those who really care about the development of particular technologies typically don't welcome consolidation in related industries. It wouldn't have been good news for electric cars, if Tesla had been acquired by GM in say 2008. Why the unhinged invective against Khan?

It's neither libel or unhinged. I'm not the only one out there that finds the case around Within a stretch at best. Plenty of mergers and acquisitions have driven technological progress, and so long as they aren't anticompetitive it's not problematic. See Meta and Oculus, for instance, or Apple's merger with Next. Acquisitions and mergers fundamentally reduce duplication of work and allow you to combine building bloc…

Regulatory cases like this get launched to test the waters. I see the Within thing as tipping at toe in, to see what the judicial branch will allow them to get away with. They are probably reaching for an extreme on purpose to find the boundary.

Re: U.S. accuses Google of abusing monopoly in ad technology

#108

Post by Spivak »

debacle wrote: post #91
xxpor wrote: post #78

One of the conservative's legal project over the past 50 years main goals has been to maintain a Borkian consumer harm standard for anti-trust. With the current SCOTUS, I don't see much of a realistic path for this.

This isn't a liberal/conservative issue. This is a corporatism issue.

I think polarization on social issues has made people forget that the conservative position / the liberal position isn't always a world ending flamewar.

Taking the position that market intervention isn't needed until consumer harm can be sufficiently demonstrated vs. market intervention is needed when any firm wields monopolistic power is a discussion about the role of government and what produces the best outcomes, not "look this side bad."

Re: U.S. accuses Google of abusing monopoly in ad technology

#109

Post by jessaustin »

xvector wrote: post #92
stonogo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this hatred work? Does she keep a leaderboard? Does big tech include foreign companies? I don't know much about this person other than the usual media bio sketches. Where can I read more?

It works through frivolous lawsuits attempting to block everything Big Tech does regardless of reason, eg the acquisition of Within, which has no justifiable antitrust case whatsoever.

Within is an app developer whose apps compete with apps owned by Meta, run on hardware owned by Meta, and are sold in an app store owned by Meta. Why does this confuse you?

Re: U.S. accuses Google of abusing monopoly in ad technology

#110

Post by shadowgovt »

scarface74 wrote: post #77
shadowgovt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for an antitrust lawsuit. The remedy for antitrust is divestiture; if found guilty and the judge assigns that penalty, Google can't just pay their way out of it; they'd have to shut down / slice off into an independent company (probably) DoubleClick and some other acquisitions. Think less "EU fair practices violations" and more "Ma Bell breakup." The difference is that the EU lacks criminal authority (or jurisdic…

What does a divestiture of Google’s ad business when their entire business is selling ads?

Google has several separable ad verticals.

To name only two: AdWords / AdSense is the "auction model" that made Google famous as an online ad brand and is the one they developed (mostly) in-house: advertisers bid on ad impressions, publishers get paid for offering slots on their pages to do the impressions. It's a very hands-off model in that advertisers don't need to control what sites their ads run on and site owners don't need to control what ads get run; Google handles all that handshaking (and brokers all that money).

That model doesn't work at all for a lot of companies that need way more control over the content shown on their pages (either because they have serious concerns about brand-image that they're unwilling to hand to a third party or they're just wedded to the traditional "steak dinner and fancy suits" advertising model and aren't comfortable working with their advertisers at arm's length). So Google also sells a suite of data-management products for companies that broker their advertising clients directly but are vending ad space on digital services. This is the DoubleClick model: it's (for example) the New York Times's pages and the New York Times's ad clients but Google's infrastructure physically vending the ads, tracking conversion data, tracking completion of advertising contracts, running predictive models to see how valuable ad slots can be, etc.

To the layperson, this is just all "ads," but a not-very-sharp knife can be driven clean through these two business units (from the outside. From the inside, they are no doubt built atop the same Google special-sauce NIH fabric, so it'd in practice be a colossal pain in the ass to divest either of them; either one will have to be rewritten to work as a mundane cloud service or the company carved off will be taking a copy of Google's infrastructure special-sauce with it, running Borg and the logging infrastructure, using stubby and dapper, resolving global resource contention with chubby, etc... All stuff Google really doesn't want to compete with in the holistic way it's woven together inside their house).

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