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Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

nytimes.com

281–290 of 510 posts

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

#281

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Trillions of dollars are spent on advertising outside of Google. You can advertise in print, billboards, radio and television ads, Netflix, or on social media behemoths. Hackers call every big business they do not like a "monopoly". What's next, Burger King is a monopoly? I dislike Google more than most and would never buy nor sell ads with them, but they have no monopoly on advertising.

I’m sorry, this perspective is absurd. I’m talking about a web site that shows ads. You’re suggesting they pivot to running off billboards? To creating TV shows? > What’s next, Burger King is a monopoly? I think this just illustrates that you’re not grasping the concept. Of course Burger King isn’t a monopoly. With my car when looking for a drive through dining experience I can go to McDonalds. Or Wendy’s. Or whateve…

Situation 1: You want to advertise your product or service. There are endless options outside of Google, including some options where the audience is counted in the hundreds of millions.

Situation 2: You want to let others advertise their products or service in your space. There is an endless amount of companies which you can contact to make advertising deals. If you are too lazy to do that and want a third party to take care of it, then you can use Google as a middle man. But they are not obliged to do business with you.

If the justice wants to go after Google, then they could (and should) prosecute Google (and Meta, and Twitter) for all the scam and malware ads they permit through their platform. That is billions of dollars of money laundering, and the CEOs should be imprisoned for this. For life.

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

#283

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> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should drive the price down, because fewer advertisers are competing for the same potential ad impression. The article describes Google's influence as "Google controls the auction-style system," which is a bit more open-ended about the specific alleged practices.

> It was argued that this approach allows Google to charge higher prices to advertisers while sending less revenue to publishers such as news websites. It could depend on how they 'limit the number of bidders'. If they sell seats to be able to bid, then the bids are lower to account for that, and publishers get a share of the bid, not the fee bidders pay. I'm guessing though...

You could limit to one mark and a bunch of planted bidders in an attempt to control competition. If you win with your plants, you get to pay yourself anyway.

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

#284

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If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is communism! Would have probably slept much better at night.

So you're acknowledging that the best way to make a population powerless and then rob them blind is Communism?

No, because we aren't even doing that the best way. Can't even fail successfully.

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

#285

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None of that seems at all user-hostile to me, it's literally all aimed at making sure what the user is shown is more likely to actually be useful to them. I guess this is a big and probably unbridgeable divide, some people think this sort of thing is obviously evil and others, like me, actually prefer it very strongly over a world where all advertising is untargeted but there is massively more of it because it's so m…

"useful to them" - do I really need to know how much one day dental implants cost in 2025?

They do them in one day now?

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

#286

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…

Running a DSP is quite expensive if you have all the features advertisers want.

Digital Signal Processor?

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

#287
post #239

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Google is playing all sides of the dice. They used adsense to enlist publishers. They used adwords to get marketers. They used an ad buying and selling platform to corner the entire ad line. Google bought Doubleclick for $3 Billion. Today it is worth $22 Billion. When Google got into ad-tech, they drifted away from their core market: users. And started to endorse the other side that turned users into products.

IIRC, before Google got into ad-tech, they didn't have a business model. Not sure whether "core market: users" make sense in this context.

Their business model was search advertising. And they created many product products from that revenue. They tried to monetize the other products which is why they got into ad tech .

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

#288
post #71

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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.

Psychopathopoly.

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

#289

I've always been somewhat opposed to this, because there's already like 10 different search alternatives, and now AI is taking over, which will further weaken their grip. Google is on top because they do the best job; I use Yandex primarily, but I switch back to google all the time for coding related questions. In terms of advertising, there's billions of views on Facebook/Instagram/X to get, in addition to all the o…

> Google is on top because they do the best job

You think a court hasn't considered that angle?

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that seems at all user-hostile to me, it's literally all aimed at making sure what the user is shown is more likely to actually be useful to them. I guess this is a big and probably unbridgeable divide, some people think this sort of thing is obviously evil and others, like me, actually prefer it very strongly over a world where all advertising is untargeted but there is massively more of it because it's so m…

I'm on the other side of the divide from you. However, mine and many other folks' position is not preferring untargeted intrusive annoying ads over targeted intrusive annoying ads. It's preferring almost zero ads with maybe the rare, non intrusive easily avoidable ad on certain appropriate websites[1]. That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo. [1] a shopping website…

> That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo.

And so you're paying for the content you're reading as well?

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