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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

#341

Post by nixpulvis »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #228
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.

Web ads are bearable for me most of the time, but I'm dismayed by ads in mobile games my kids play. Unskippable 30 second videos that peddle poorly made F2P games. I manage to keep them mostly out of it by paying for worthy games and deleting the rest. However I would in fact happily welcome _some_ ads. Ones that would simply inform me of existence of masterpieces like Tiny Bubbles or Monument Valley rather than pedd…

The fact that mobile gaming is so plagued with scams and bullshit ads is a serious problem. Makes me bot want to engage at all.

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

#342

Post by lolinder »

turtletontine wrote: post #267
Frieren wrote: post #202

This is necessary now, but it should have been done years back. Nowadays, many companies backed up by investors with very deep pockets are doing this in all markets: start to buy middle-man companies in a space, it does not matter which one, dominate the market thanks to monopolistic power. Screw the clients making them pay too much, screw the providers paying them too little. Go for the next market. Google does this…

| This should be impossible, because there are laws against it. That’s what so remarkable: we have a robust system of antitrust laws in this country, they just haven’t been enforced in decades. Thank god the Biden admin started trying to use them again, and that Trump hasn’t stopped these cases in their tracks.

The first Trump admin started the Google search antitrust suit 3 years before the Biden admin filed this one. Attacking Big Tech is a bipartisan affair these days.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...

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

#343

Post by dumbledoren »

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.

Yep. On top of that, it also controls the algorithm. Recently it has been tweaking the algorithm to sell non-relevant keywords to advertisers by making 'exact match' not 'exact' anymore. People have been burning their ad budgets for worthless traffic as a result, and PPC professionals are livid over it with every other post in communities talking about it:

https://reddit.com/r/ppc

Recently someone even posted a timeline of google starting to hide the keywords advertisers are buying and the increase in Google's ad revenue. Eye opening.

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

#344

Post by lolinder »

guywithahat wrote: post #188

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…

You're mixing up antitrust cases. The 2020 case [0], decided in August and going into remedies in a week or so, was about search. This one is about advertising [1], a separate market that the DOJ has argued Google has also been acting anticompetitively in.

Aside from that:

> now AI is taking over, which will further weaken their grip.

Maybe you've missed that they're pulling ahead of OpenAI on the AI front?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...

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

#345

Post by thfuran »

adrr wrote: post #250
ksec wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully HN is finally at a stage people can come out and talk about Ad tech without being harassed or attacked. Could you explain more on this. What do you think makes Google Ad or DoubleClick so special? And >What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative. Correct me if I am wrong, you are suggesting even if publisher only earns 30% of the revenue they still earn more than on othe…

I am on the purchasing side. Google is very efficient when delivering traffic especially their Max Performance product. Probably the cheapest of all platforms. So they are serving relevant ads to users who engage with the ads. This is win for me and I assume also a win for publishers who get revenue due to higher engagement. Also users should benefit because they are getting relevant ads. Linear tv is notorious for n…

I choose option three in the false dichotomy: Render it illegal to attempt to force me to see ads.

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

#346

Post by throw-qqqqq »

cornel_io wrote: post #229
tmtvl wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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…

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 think that is a false dichotomy. Targeting does not necessarily lead to fewer ads.

I am old enough to remember the world before targeted ads (and internet), and back then I did not see more ads than today - on the contrary!

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

#348

Post by dumbledoren »

dragonwriter wrote: post #307
foobarian wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is communism! Using "end game" as it seems to be here -- for the natural ultimate result -- Marx argued that as a pretty central thesis of his work (through the mechanism of capitalist development -> proletarian class consciousness -> socialist revolution -> socialism -> -> withering of the state -> communism.) OTOH, a single entity run for the benefit of a n…

> and, yes, this is where a major non-Leninist Communist criticism of Leninism, and its descendants like Stalinism and Maoism, that feature totalitarian control of a command economy by a narrow self-perpetuating party elite stems from.

People always criticize that, and yet those systems delivered: They raised the Soviet citizens from mud huts to apartments within one generation. One thing that is prominent in the stories about the fall of the Eastern Bloc and its aftermath is how the Soviet citizens never thought that they could lose 'staples' like free education, healthcare, childcare, housing, food, paid vacations, maternity leave, guaranteed jobs etc in capitalism. They thought that they would have everything that Leninist socialism gave them in the USSR and an additional consumer economy. They were dumbfounded to find out that wasnt the case.

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

#350

Post by [deleted] »

bogwog wrote: post #210
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.

Can you provide some sources that support these claims? This comment is so far removed from any viewpoint I've seen before on this topic that I'm worried I might have a massive blindspot. Especially this: > the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.

[deleted]
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