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US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

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Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#361

Post by lotsofpulp »

pembrook wrote: post #358
spankalee wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google does not sell individual's data to businesses. Where do you even get that notion?

Defacto, yes they do, that’s the entire value proposition of their advertising model — that they can target customers better than any other platform due to buying intent signals from search queries. When companies buy ads with Google they’re quite literally bidding for microtargeted user intent data.

That is not “de facto” selling data about an individual to other businesses.

No one can go to Google and buy information about a specific person.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#362

Post by whiplash451 »

stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

With you up to the last sentence. What were the learnings for the current crop of companies?

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#363

Post by musictubes »

crazygringo wrote: post #86
ClassyJacket wrote: post #6

They biggest web advertising company definitely shouldn't control the world's most popular browser. Just like we all knew they would, they're blocking ad blockers, and this problem will only get worse. Tell your friends to use Firefox, people.

> they're blocking ad blockers I've tried uBlock Origin Lite on Chrome and it works... perfectly. I haven't noticed a single ad get through. And isn't it supposed to be a lot more performant? Before, I assumed Chrome really was trying to gradually stop ad-blocking. But now that I see it's had literally zero impact, at least on the sites I visit, I'm starting to wonder what all the fuss was about. Was manifest v3 real…

It isn’t brought up because it isn’t true. Plenty of ad blockers for iOS/ipados Safari.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#364

Post by api »

crabmusket wrote: post #349
api wrote: post #287

The most important thing -- and I doubt this would ever happen -- would be to break off the identity (OAuth) provider and make it some kind of public non-profit. One company should not own the identity layer for such a huge chunk of the Internet, and so many people use Google for this.

Man that would be really cool. I do wish governments would move a bit faster on providing such generic public benefit services.

I'm not a huge fan of governments doing Internet services, but the identity layer is something that actually fits within their sphere. Governments already provide the canonical identity layer for society and have since, like, ancient Egypt.

Your drivers' license could have a chip in it capable of FIDO2 etc. and it could be linked with an OAuth provider. I know login.gov already exists but it's not built to be used everywhere.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#365

Post by duskwuff »

baby_souffle wrote: post #300
sitkack wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Google has a search and location data, Google email is on one side if not both of most email chains, receipts, etc. I don't use meta for much. Google on the otherhand takes some pretty dedicated behavior to avoid.

> Are you sure? Google has a search and location data, Google email is on one side if not both of most email chains, receipts, etc. Absolutely not discounting all of that; there are some pretty strong parallels between the data you can infer on a person based on their gmail graph versus their fb messenger graph, for example. Meta has a lot more "self-revealed-preference" data, though. Which of $thesePosts did you eng…

Between Google Search, AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and various other APIs, Google has all the pieces in place to get a pretty good overview of what users are doing online. (And that's not even considering that the user's likely to be logged into a Google browser that's uploading their browsing history wholesale.)

Legally speaking, Google's not supposed to be correlating most of this data. But, as we know well, that doesn't mean they aren't doing it.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#366

Post by mathgeek »

whiplash451 wrote: post #362
stego-tech wrote: post #188

Loving the discourse in the comments here. Speaking as someone who grew up alongside Google in a sense, I fall on the side of the "break it up" camp. It was novel at the time to have a single company so nicely provide us with everything digitally that we could need - G Suite, YouTube, Search, Maps, Advertising, Books, Reader, etc - but in hindsight, we gave too much power to too unaccountable an entity, who in turn u…

With you up to the last sentence. What were the learnings for the current crop of companies?

Both suits, since they went before several courts, established specific actions that companies should avoid (and ones that they could get away with).

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#367

Post by duskwuff »

whiplash451 wrote: post #114
geor9e wrote: post #113

HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…

Maybe because search is an extremely hard problem and requires hundreds of millions (if not billions) of investment to remain competitive?

It's only getting harder and harder for newcomers to compete. Especially with the rise of abusive AI scrapers, webmasters are increasingly hostile to new web crawlers. Google and Bing get a pass because they're well-known, but any new service is fighting an uphill battle; a lot of sites will block them right off the bat. Nor does it help that some large sites (like Reddit) have inside deals with Google to feed them updates directly.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#368

Post by pembrook »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #361
pembrook wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defacto, yes they do, that’s the entire value proposition of their advertising model — that they can target customers better than any other platform due to buying intent signals from search queries. When companies buy ads with Google they’re quite literally bidding for microtargeted user intent data.

That is not “de facto” selling data about an individual to other businesses. No one can go to Google and buy information about a specific person.

I think we’re just arguing semantics.

No, you can’t buy user data on 1 specific person (then again, there’s many examples of people buying ads on a persons name to catch them googling themselves), but you can buy user data on small groups of people.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#369

Post by wrongotron »

burningChrome wrote: post #231

As someone who spent time researching the Ma Bells breakup and being knee deep in the local telecom deregulation, I see a lot of the same proposals when discussing the breaking up of Google and Facebook. This is the short story of what happened in the local telecom deregulation, which I'm pretty sure will happen if you were to break up Google. Consider this took place over the course of 20+ years, but I see the same…

I think you ignore how much the telecom market reshaped itself in the meantime. Pre-breakup AT&T had complete market power over what technologies would or would not get deployed. The use of landlines has plummeted, to be replaced by cell phones. Today the average consumer has significantly greater choice when it comes to carriers, even if many of the usual suspects are still in the game. I question whether the breathing room would have existed in the market without the breakup. If you have an innovative startup idea in a space, and you have exactly one customer to sell to, you have a major uphill battle.

Re: US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case

#370

Post by quickthrowman »

jbm wrote: post #246
loumaciel wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tons of small businesses rely on advertising. Tons of legit businesses only exist because online advertising became easy and widespread.

"Many" feels like it is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. IME this is only true about drop shippers and similar business models. The vast majority of small businesses are, as a rule, awful at advertising. The few ads I see they are very poorly put together. Even when they manage to get people to the business, small businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot. Here…

> Even when they manage to get people to the business, small businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot. Here's an example thread about such from the local reddit. Including some hostile responses from, charitably, overwhelmed small businesses about how you need to call to confirm a price

I’m assuming most of the places that redditor contacted to buy UPS batteries from are B2B shops that aren’t geared to selling to people off the street.

I’m assuming this because sometimes I buy replacement UPS battery strings, and I pay with a purchase order after talking to or emailing an inside sales person, not with a credit card at a register.

Places like this don’t even need to advertise, the professionals they’re selling to know where to find what they need.

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