Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

crowcroft wrote: post #142

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have tried to sell ads and never been able to fill all my inventory and often the rates are poor and the ads brand destroying. If you are The New York Times it is different but a site that makes $1000 /mo in ads can’t afford an ads salesperson and in the big scheme of things that is royalty.

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

#172

Post by FuriouslyAdrift » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

spacebanana7 wrote: post #17

Google isn't a monopoly in the Standard Oil sense of the term. Its ad revenue is big because it occupies so much user attention. I actually think many suggested remedies would actually make Google more profitable. For example, prohibiting Apple-Style search deals would mean that Google gets a smaller amount of traffic, but that traffic would come with zero cost. That could end up being more profitable. A similar argu…

87% of Googles revenue in 2023 was advertising. $265 billion. They hold more than 80% market dominance in all markets they compete in.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...

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

#173

Post by dang » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:09 PM UTC

tiltowait wrote: post #32

internetter wrote: post #18

Kinda surprised. Google's core business is advertising. Some vertically integrated aux services (like chrome) feel ripe for antitrust, but I wasn't expecting ads themselves. What is Google without ads?

Being a monopoly, in itself, isn’t illegal. The question is whether the company maintains its monopoly through illegal tactics or leverages that monopoly in illegal manners. (NYT really ought to add “illegal” to their title.)

The HTML doc title has that wording, so we've swapped out the article title for that. Thanks!

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

#174

Post by bix6 » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

olyjohn wrote: post #138

tonymet wrote: post #93

the FTC is like Jim Cramer. Once they judge a business to be a monopoly, the business falls apart and the monopoly is irrelevant. Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial. the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.

Tech companies have set back technology by decades already. We can't to any P2P shit on the internet, instead everything goes through a middle man who will take your money or flood you with ads. We have bandwidth limitations on every connection, even though bandwidth is cheaper than it's ever been. The only universal communications system is still... Regular-ass phone calls and e-mail, which is like 100+ and 50 years…

Blame money. Tech can and has been used to improve our lives. But money talks and the focus is too much on never ending hockey stick growth for its own sake.

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

#175

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #26

internetter wrote: post #18

Kinda surprised. Google's core business is advertising. Some vertically integrated aux services (like chrome) feel ripe for antitrust, but I wasn't expecting ads themselves. What is Google without ads?

("Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist") Everything else. Cloud provider, operating systems, browsers, hosting business apps, phone licenser, Internet provider, smart home manufacturer, and various moonshots. Their ad company is a monopoly because of those other services. Google as an ad company that can't leverage those other lines of business to gain an advantage over other ad companies still has a viable a…

Google can afford to lose money on many of those things because of the ad monopoly. (How much is Android worth in that it keeps Apple out of antitrust trouble with iOS? What quid pro quo does that enable?)

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

#176

Post by crowcroft » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

hamp95 wrote: post #169

CPLX wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue Of course it matters if a middleman is skimming off 70% of the revenue in a given market. > it is incredibly efficient On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"? > What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative. Right, which is…

> On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"? One where the market maker is taking up the cost of providing a market. E.g. Steam takes a 30% cut for providing the infrastructure required to distribute games. Some people/companies can do it for less but it is the best option for a majority of sellers. If the market maker did not the seller…

Are you saying that serving ads costs more than running a news site?

This also neglects the fact that the programmatic market routes billions of dollars intended to be spent on real media (ad placements on real news websites etc), to fraudulent mobile apps and websites and bot traffic.

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

#177

Post by fidotron » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #160

shkkmo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's serious nerd sniping potential in asking how best to construct an automatic bidder, especially with the speed and scale requirements in place. It's an incredibly deep problem, and I don't believe there is a single right answer. The problem is that it is unwise to trust an bidding algorithm designer whose incentives are aligned against yours. Google benefits from higher winning bids.

Key point is that it's a system that you shouldn't trust, not any individual algorithm designer or implementer. Bugs that cost Google money will be found and fixed really quickly; bugs that make Google money will linger and go unnoticed.

Exactly.

In the ad tech space the only winners are the people building and operating the adtech; everyone else is a sucker.

The only truly novel version of it which I have seen emerged from the Turkish hypercasual games space, where they managed to construct a giant audience everyone else thought was worthless, funnel them into their games, and then use the attention in the games to sell access to this apparently worthless audience.

Of course the audience actually were worthless, because all they were really interested in was new free hypercasual games, so the real suckers here were other devs that paid to access this audience but didn't have the adtech chops to make the most of it before the players moved on, and they funded their competition in the process.

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

#178

Post by tmtvl » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

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…

> * Identity providers who have lists of user IDs that belong to "high CTR" audiences (users more likely to click ads)

> * Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's location is so that they can target locally-focused advertisements to them

> * User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted

That's horrible! In a better world such practices would be made illegal and those involved would be hung, drawn, and quartered.

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

#179

Post by imhoguy » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

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.

I think at the beginning Google was the good one keeping display ads high quality, so that even some ad blocking lists didn't remove them straight away. But yeah, today it is impossible to browse some sites or use apps without being tricked into endless maze of close button. And when I see Temu ads I throw up.

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

#180

Post by lifestyleguru » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

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.

> See this graphic https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7.

Which part of this diagram is responsible for displaying ads of blue sweatshirt when I say "blue sweatshirt" in a room next to the room where my smartphone is?