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Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

nytimes.com

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

#141

Post by stasomatic »

riku_iki wrote: post #78
coliveira wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They just need to squeeze more from publishers and at the same time increase click costs. but publishers receive stable share of click cost (67%?), so they should be happy with this arrangement.

That’s assuming a click happened. Premium pubs prefer guaranteed fixed CPMs no matter the amount of real clicks. I’ve worked for a few years at one of the major native ad companies, I’m very familiar with how the sausage is made.

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

#142

Post by crowcroft »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #118
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…

The (Open)RTB system makes things more competitive and reduces costs for advertisers by making unsold inventory available to an automated marketplace while also increasing revenue for smaller publishers who otherwise wouldn't have been able to create first party relationships with advertisers. The middlemen are various identity providers and other tracking/data enrichment services, as well as third party exchanges, D…

> each middleman (usually) adds some kind of value

This is the argument that gets made, but very rarely is it true.

From Neumann et al in 2019 [1]

"When investigating gender (being male) and age (three different tiers: 18-24, 25-34 and 35-44 years) individually, we find that digital audiences for gender are on average less often correct than random guessing (accuracy of 42.3%)."

If the accuracy of targeting is worse than random guessing on average then it's value is less $0.00. Advertisers would reach more of their target audience by simply buying more media instead of spending money on 'targeting' even after you discount wastage to $0.00 in 'value'.

I agree with everything you're saying about programmatic *in theory*, but I would argue that in practice the whole system is just broken.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3203131

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

#143

Post by lanstin »

bdcravens wrote: post #63
internetter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I like the last quote. But I'm curious... Would it be preferable to have Google owning all of these services you listed—just not the ad company they depend on, or the inverse—all the companies are spun out? I see your point, but also, if Google continued to own all these other things, it would still be a terrifyingly large spread, no?

Large companies, even monopolies, aren't the problem. Unfair leverage to suppress competition is. Those products without the subsidizing revenue of ads, and ads without the information flows of those products, is the goal. Who gets what part of the company is the wrong question to ask. The org chart would get split along those business units. In all likelihood, the company called "Google" would be the software side,…

They are a problem in terms of an efficient free market; they make the information flow asymmetrically biased in their favor, and cause higher prices and implicit collusion. That is true even without any intent to harm.

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

#144

Post by Clubber »

adrr wrote: post #134
Clubber wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a monopoly is legal, it's using your monopoly status at the expense of the competition is what isn't legal.

Never said it was illegal. Hence my phrasing monopoly and not an illegal monopoly aka monopoly that abuses their position. But was defines a monopoly? 26% of market doesn't sound like a monopoly to me looking at past antitrust actions. Which why i ask my question, is this lowest percentage of the market for antitrust action?

In the global search engine market, Google maintains a dominant position. In January 2025, its market share was approximately 89.62% across all devices, and 93.89% in the mobile search market. While Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! hold a smaller share of the market, Google continues to be the leading search engine.

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

#145

Post by lanstin »

Henchman21 wrote: post #99
ndiddy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Google research paper by Brin and Page explicitly points out that a search engine financed by advertising is inherently anti-consumer: > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cell…

They were really smart guys. But smart guys don’t stand a chance in the face of all that money because it attracts people who know how to manipulate and control smart people . Smart people think they’re at the top of the totem pole. But really its those without ethics who sit at the top in our society. This is a conundrum humanity must address if we’re to survive over the long term, IMO.

A powerful argument against excessively large corporations. When the companies are competing fiercely, the amoral folks can't game the system.

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

#146

Post by riku_iki »

stasomatic wrote: post #141
riku_iki wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They just need to squeeze more from publishers and at the same time increase click costs. but publishers receive stable share of click cost (67%?), so they should be happy with this arrangement.

That’s assuming a click happened. Premium pubs prefer guaranteed fixed CPMs no matter the amount of real clicks. I’ve worked for a few years at one of the major native ad companies, I’m very familiar with how the sausage is made.

In both scenarios publishers look good:

1. CPC: google has strong incentive to generate clicks, because that's where they get revenue: advertisers are charged per click.

2. CPM: publishers get their guaranteed CPM if that's their choice.

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

#150

Post by thrance »

alex1138 wrote: post #110

I don't know whether they are a monopoly but I would like them to fix several things 1) Fix your search engine. Stop ignoring keywords, your product as it is currently sucks 2) Stop antagonizing people with user hostile actions in Chrome 3) Enough with the ideological censorship

Google doesn't need to fix anything for you, they basically own the market. Their won't be any changes unless the state does something. But I wouldn't expect the most corrupt administration to date to stand against one of the wealthiest organizations in the country.

Also, what censorship are you referring to? Them complying with the new regime in advance and removing pride month from the calendar? Or are you playing into the conservative fantasy of being supposedly censored online despite evidence of the contrary [2] ?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/google-calen...

[2] https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/publication/false-accusation-the-u...

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