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Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

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Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#191

Post by hoffs »

windexh8er wrote: post #123
magicalist wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are being awfully credulous of two sentence fragments quoted in an editorial paragraph. Much of this could certainly be true but my bullshit meter is going off on the level of narrative they're reconstructing in all the non-quoted portions. I dislike AMP because the UX is bad and Google strong armed it in the news carousel anyways instead of focusing on performance for all sites, but this would be a lot more c…

Bullshit meter? It seems to me this is yet another validation that Google is an ad sales company hell bent on preventing competition, controlling the market and lying to end users and integrators. All of these pieces are adding up - what was conjecture is finally being validated and I, personally, believe that Google is not in it for the good of the customer, but are only in it for a profit. Death to Google by thousa…

Validation? What else you want validated as I can whip up a doc with some claims about things without source/proof too.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#192

Post by ddingus »

pphysch wrote: post #182
conception wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a market to be free it must be well regulated. If a market is controlled inordinately by a few, it ceases to be free.

Then it's not a truly free market, because central planning (regulation) is sometimes overpowering the price mechanism.

The idea of a robust, enduring free market itself needs to be questioned.

Complete economic freedom leads to monopolies, who then act to preserve and benefit from their position. They do this because they know everyone else both wants that position and would do the same thing to maintain it. All this happens because growth is seen as necessary. Always necessary.

Markets with rules can check those behaviors, but come with other complications, a big one being bought and paid for rule making by bigger players doing what?

Maintaining position and growth.

In the end, why do we even allow markets?

To benefit people.

Factored down, rules aimed at insuring markets actually do serve the people means the people have to have a say in the rules created with authority granted by the people for the purpose of improving things for the people.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#193

Post by phatfish »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #108
cletus wrote: post #87

I've had a few people call me a shill for Google on these threads since I'm a Xoogler/Ex-Facebooker (it's literally in my profile) so I'm going to quote myself here [1] from 7 months ago: > Giving advantageous ranking (including, but not limited to, showing AMP content in Top Stories) is the very definition of using your market power in one area (search) to force publishers to adopt something else you created. > For…

> There was a time when the idea wasn't terrible because a lot of websites were terrible and slow on mobile Yes, and that time was the early 2000's, and the solution was not AMP but WAP[1]. Google effectively re-invented WAP about 15 years after it was no longer necessary. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

I had completely forgotten about WAP, but i remember using a WAP browser of some sort on an old Sybmian Nokia now i think about it.

Before add-ons worked with Firefox mobile (and I could install ublock), browsing the web on a phone was awful. If i remember it was around the time that AMP launched in 2015 that Firefox mobile got add-on support. So there was certainly a problem more recently that 15 years ago.

The adverts on news sites were so bad that AMP was able to make mobile pages clearly better from a UX point of view. But that was largely a problem of Googles own making, and their "generous" fix was obviously stacked in their favour.

All users needed was the ability to install an ad-blocker on their mobile browser, but of course Google was never going to allow that for Chrome.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#194

Post by [deleted] »

magicalist wrote: post #148
tyingq wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but this seems pretty typical for an initial filing. They don't typically show all their cards. So snippets like: >Internally, Google employees grappled with “how to [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower.” Could be more, or less interesting, when the actual source document is published. There's some more detail in a highly redacted document here: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/defau…

> A second employee captured Google’s ultimate aim of destroying header bidding altogether, noting in response that [redacted] So from a probably naive view, getting rid of header bidding seems like it would be faster, not slower. Is the assertion being made that it isn't faster and it just so happens to also enrich the ad network?

[deleted]

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#195

Post by easrng »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #4
lettergram wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No ads should be separate from everything imo. Drive and mail can each make money on their own. Search and AdWords are too tied however.

You mean Google Ads - and no they don't have to be too tied together. What is so special about Google Search that Google Ads has to be owned by the same entity? I have websites with ads on them and I don't own the ad network either like 99.99999% of every other publisher out there

Because they sell specially-formatted ad spots that are supposed to look like results, not generic display ads.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#196

Post by tga_d »

Jensson wrote: post #139
jeffbee wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of amazing how people are boosting this lawsuit up to the front page of HN dozens of times over three days, without really seeming to grasp that it is one side of a civil law suit, and that anyone would be a fool to take a filing like this at face value. It's a little thin on evidence, don't you think? Normally when the attorneys general of Kentucky and South Dakota put their heads together about something,…

Newcorp and the other media's anti google campaign has worked flawlessly. Even techies boarded the train and now think Google is worse than Microsoft or Apple. At worst Google is as bad as Microsoft or Apple if all the things the articles accuse them of is true. I don't work for Google nor own Google stocks, but among the things I am afraid of Google using its position to capture a bit too much of the ad-market is am…

Secretly colluding in backroom deals to intentionally hamstring privacy protections seems pretty unambiguously... bad? Can you explain how anything Microsoft or Apple has done has worse implications for society?

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#197

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

TheColorYellow wrote: post #185
jfoster wrote: post #5

I've seen lots of comments recently in response to the Google & Facebook advertising issues suggesting that Google should be split into X, Y, and Z. Most of the proposed splits seem like they would do absolutely nothing to address the issue at hand, though. The problem in digital advertising seems to be that Google controls the marketplace, as well as both the buy & sell sides. Even a "breaking apart" that proposes s…

My view is that this is an issue finance has already solved. Just regulate ad exchanges for fair practice, require disclosure or transparency to identify anticompetitive behavior, and then license the fuck out of everyone who participates in the market. Seems like the industry has grown enough and clearly is suffering due to lack of sufficient management of externalities and monopoly powers. The harder part is execut…

> The harder part is executing on the above strategy. You will need new institutions or see an expansion or extension of existing institutions. Imagining the FCC trying to do this seems both a likely approach and an incredibly ineffective one.

I completely agree and that's what scares me more and more about big tech. We let these huge companies grow for years without really considering the scalability of managing them and now we find ourselves desperately needing to regulate them but not really knowing how.

It reminds me of the content moderation problem with Facebook, the cost of hiring enough humans to adequately deal with content moderation there would quite possibly bankrupt the company, and they know that.

How do you find a sustainable oversight/regulatory strategy when the companies themselves were founded largely on their desire to not figure out those kinds of problems in the first place?

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#198

Post by billylindeman »

robbedpeter wrote: post #47
jsiepkes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google employee assigned to AMP. "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood." [1] [1] https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility

This is why principles are important. Living by a well considered and thoughtful set of beliefs, secular or otherwise, has an impact on the world. Even if things look hopeless, your actions contribute to the way life unfolds for everyone else. Even if things look trivial, not engaging in minor infractions against your beliefs is withholding that single drop from the flood. I won't ever use tiktok, and speak against i…

It always blows my mind seeing the things people who work at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest" over, and then these insidious things they're willing to just sit back and let happen.

When I moved to the bay area working at FB/Google was something I held in high regard and was a career goal of mine. Now I get hit up by recruiters from them often... and I don't message them back. It hurts thinking about how much money I leave on the table by not working there, but I just don't think if I could live with myself if I became a contributing member of their dystopian nightmare machine.

It all starts with the people who work there. If you work at google or facebook, you're part of it. You're culpable. It's not like I don't understand the calculus and not like the right dollar amount wouldn't corrupt my position as well, but I wish more people were honest/forthright about it. You're a storm trooper.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#199

Post by finiteseries »

jeffbee wrote: post #134
robin_reala wrote: post #7

249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. “Header Bidding can often increase latency of web page…

It's sort of amazing how people are boosting this lawsuit up to the front page of HN dozens of times over three days, without really seeming to grasp that it is one side of a civil law suit, and that anyone would be a fool to take a filing like this at face value. It's a little thin on evidence, don't you think? Normally when the attorneys general of Kentucky and South Dakota put their heads together about something,…

Sour meta comments are boring, especially when they rope in unrelated personal beefs you have with individual users like ocdtrekkie. That was a little much.

Consider posting something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977462, which inspired a lot of sub comments and a good on topic discussion, vs yours, which produced “haha Kentucky and South Dakota”, “Microsoft/Apple bad”, “gigantic evil news cabal”, and “HN is dumb”.

Re: Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]

#200

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #95
jfoster wrote: post #5

I've seen lots of comments recently in response to the Google & Facebook advertising issues suggesting that Google should be split into X, Y, and Z. Most of the proposed splits seem like they would do absolutely nothing to address the issue at hand, though. The problem in digital advertising seems to be that Google controls the marketplace, as well as both the buy & sell sides. Even a "breaking apart" that proposes s…

Just ban advertising straight up. This will kill Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the other companies ruining the web. Not one tear will be shed at this point. Also, make it a huge liability to store any kind of personal information. Apply heavy taxes on every single bit stored. These companies should be trying really hard to forget all about us the second they send our HTTP responses, not hoarding our personal info…

What happens when a Chinese knockoff Google comes along and captures the online ad market? Now you've created a new version of the same problem without any leverage.
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