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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

#221

Post by CobrastanJorji »

EarlKing wrote: post #198
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The current court was preceded by a far less conservative court which did precisely dick about the problem for decades. Stop trying to frame this as a party issue when this is a class issue -- and the bourgeoisie controls both sides of the aisle.

I linked to a summary of a UVA paper evaluating the SC decisions of the last century or so and graphing them as pro or anti-corporatist, which concluded that the current court is the most pro-business ever. You have handwaved that it maybe used to be this bad. If you have some sort of basis for your belief, I would be happy to consider it.

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

#222

Post by emodendroket »

ricardo81 wrote: post #202
emodendroket wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this: one of the many complaints about big tech is companies having too much personal data on customers. But if we feel one entity having the data is bad, why is several having it better? That seems worse. Now it's even harder to keep track of.

But most alternatives choose not to retain personal data and have much more stringent privacy policies. Realistically I don't think the average individual can fathom how much personal data the likes of Google has on people. Small example, I deleted my entire Youtube subscription/history several times, I keep getting recommended the same things. Clearly there's more to 'deleting it entirely'.

Perhaps your experience has been different than mine but I find the handling of personal data at very large companies is much more careful than what I have experienced elsewhere.

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

#223

Post by brookst »

postalrat wrote: post #125
dahfizz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-trust lawsuits don't require an absolute monopoly. It requires proving that a company behaved anti-competitively. > The lawsuit said Google had “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.”

Then their first target should be Apple.

I've never understood this kind of "regulators should ignore evidence of wrongdoing as long as there is also evidence of someone else engaging in wrongdoing" thinking. Even granting that Apple is super-mega-unbearably evil, do you really think regulators should serialize investigations and actions, only moving on to the #2 worst offender once the #1 is sorted?

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

#224

Post by brookst »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #118
Closi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone explain how Google has a monopoly when there are competitors in their league? Being a monopoly doesn’t mean you have no competitors - it means you have enough control of the market to artificially affect/set the market price for something (ie that there was not enough competition for efficient pricing).

> it means you have enough control of the market to artificially affect/set the market price for something Does it? Then why isn't every App Store's 30% developer fee a much more obvious monopoly?

Does Ford have a monopoly on selling Mustangs?

The critical thing here is how you define "market". Some people say that iPhones are a market, therefore Apple is a monopoly. Some people (like Apple) say that mobile devices are market, and Apple has like 30% market share.

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

#225

Post by jessaustin »

echelon wrote: post #153
scarface74 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merits of the case decided by who? A bunch of not-lawyers on HN? Do you think the government should step in and not allow any device to bundled with a browser? Why stop at browsers? Why don’t we just force all manufactures to ship every device without an OS?

Windows and Mac scare the user when switching to a non-first party browser. That, at minimum, should be highly illegal. It's wildly anti-competitive when the platform already has home field advantage. System dialogues and prompts continue opening in the platform browser, which further continues to nag the user to switch back. Again, totally unfair. These nags and scares should not be allowed. Competition is what make…

I also really love how they set up the lock screen in windoze to open a new instance of Edge whenever someone clicks it in the middle. Time and again someone asks me why their computer is running slowly and I alt-tab to reveal dozens of copies of Edge displaying idiosyncratic Bing queries about the various subjects of lock screen photos. Yes thanks, these inexperienced users really need that sort of help to open many instances of an also-ran browser that makes their jobs more difficult. These users are incapable of clicking anywhere but the middle of the lock screen, even when they're trying to do so.

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

#226

Post by pxc »

marcosdumay wrote: post #209
pxc wrote: post #151

'Abusing', huh? As though we can expect to see benign monopolies as a norm. Bizarre turn of phrase.

Well, getting a monopoly for competitive reasons and not abusing it in any way is perfectly legal, whatever odds are there if it happening. The government only gets involved when there is some abuse.

Just because the courts pretend not to understand that power corrupts doesn't mean journalists have to.

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

#227

Post by CardenB »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #118
Closi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone explain how Google has a monopoly when there are competitors in their league? Being a monopoly doesn’t mean you have no competitors - it means you have enough control of the market to artificially affect/set the market price for something (ie that there was not enough competition for efficient pricing).

> it means you have enough control of the market to artificially affect/set the market price for something Does it? Then why isn't every App Store's 30% developer fee a much more obvious monopoly?

You would have to show that that apple has colluded with other app stores to maintain a 30% fee. Otherwise, they charge the fee, and a competitor is free to attract developers with a lower fee, which is competition.

You could argue that apple abused their market position to administer the fee. Or you could argue that they are entitled to charge the fee and consumers are free to leave the platform. It's a grey area.

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

#228

Post by andromeduck »

dekhn wrote: post #130
shadowgovt wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 owne…

I am not sure Google could survive splitting prod. The enormous value of internal vertical integration that enabled them to grow ads & search traffic would be hard to replicate if there wasn't one signal source of truth that you could contact directly when there is an infrastructure problem. I think "colossal pain in the ass" underestimates the order of magnitude of pain it would involve (borne by the hapless enginee…

They already have silos so might not be so bad if a separate tools & infrw team can be formed/shared between the resultant companies.

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

#229

Post by impulser_ »

ricardo81 wrote: post #191
impulser_ wrote: post #158

I'm guessing the worst case is they are forced to sell off the exchange side of the Ads business, which isn't that much revenue compared to the revenue they make selling ad space. This is probably going to have a lot less effect than what people are assuming it will have. Google and Facebook have never had more competition in the Ad space. Apple and Amazon are building big Ad businesses fast. That's not the problem.…

>This isn't the reason they are making 100s of billions a year. I do believe that the 're-targeting' Google can afford by having their assets on the majority of sites helps them maximise CPM, which would certainly be a problem for any alternate search engine who isn't interested in tracking people around the web/net. I can't remember specific figures but noted in the UK CMA report that Google generally makes twice as…

I'm not sure on how Bing ads work, but I think Google makes more because they are better at targeting and with limited space and high demand you get higher pricing.

Facebook and Google are really the only two ad platforms that I know off that you can really target ads to the people you want and you can build ads around those you are targeting instead of making generic ads like you see on other platform and TV.

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

#230

Post by basch »

okamiueru wrote: post #207
basch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, and I don't agree with this, the word monopoly appears in the complaint 66 times. The NYT is reporting the story, but the FTC is the one "misusing" the word. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...

I'm just trying to help out here. I don't disagree with you, but it gets tiring that every single time some market position is abused, and the word "monopoly" gets used, there is at least one pedantic getting hung up on the "mono" part. Android/iOS market share? Duopoly really. Call it a monopoly? "How is it a monopoly when..." What they mean. What is always meant, is, you have a market position so significant, that…

But this new paradigm of antitrust isn’t about if there’s one two or three of something. It’s a more complex form of antitrust.

The Amazon antitrust paradox is about how they aren’t a market leader in tons of their product categories but that they can cross leverage advantages between product categories and verticals to create anticompetitiveness. It’s an analysis of the internal structure of the business, not if they have competition in a narrow subset of outcomes.

Monopoly is being used as a substitute for the words bad actor or predatory not duopoly etc. IMHO it’s sloppiness and jargon to invoke emotion, and I’d prefer they used more precise words.

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