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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

#61

Post by DrillShopper »

arrosenberg wrote: post #55
chii wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this. why would anti-trust rules prevent _anyone_ from bidding? Apple can sell their browser search, just like mozilla can sell firefox search. And anyone with a browser could do the same. Unless the anti-trust rules somehow become so overarching that the selling of space for advertising becomes illegal?

I think it would be a good move to prevent browser deals. There is no reality in which the winner is Firefox, Kagi or DDG - it will always be Google or Bing. That's clearly anticompetitive - it locks the other browsers out of a major share of the market.

If you're arguing we should split Chrome development from Google then I'm 100% with you there.

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

#62

Post by arrosenberg »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #39
nativeit wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google isn’t a monopoly in the Standard Oil sense of the term. Aren’t they? It doesn’t sound like those two interpretations are mutually exclusive.

In the sense of the Sherman Act and similar legislation, monopolies exist in the sense of having exclusive control over some supply and raising prices against consumers. This isn't what Google does, they generally lower prices for consumers and the competition is only a click away.

The consumer of the ad platform is the advertiser, not the person clicking the ad. Major advertisers either play ball with Google or their ads don't get seen in search. Doesn't seem very different to Standard Oil controlling who got access to refineries.

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

#63

Post by bdcravens »

internetter wrote: post #37
bdcravens wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

("Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist") Everything else. Cloud provider, operating systems, browsers, hosting business apps, phone licenser, Internet provider, smart home manufacturer, and various moonshots. Their ad company is a monopoly because of those other services. Google as an ad company that can't leverage those other lines of business to gain an advantage over other ad companies still has a viable a…

Thanks, I like the last quote. But I'm curious... Would it be preferable to have Google owning all of these services you listed—just not the ad company they depend on, or the inverse—all the companies are spun out? I see your point, but also, if Google continued to own all these other things, it would still be a terrifyingly large spread, no?

Large companies, even monopolies, aren't the problem. Unfair leverage to suppress competition is. Those products without the subsidizing revenue of ads, and ads without the information flows of those products, is the goal.

Who gets what part of the company is the wrong question to ask. The org chart would get split along those business units. In all likelihood, the company called "Google" would be the software side, since that's where search lives.

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

#64

Post by arrosenberg »

DrillShopper wrote: post #61
arrosenberg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be a good move to prevent browser deals. There is no reality in which the winner is Firefox, Kagi or DDG - it will always be Google or Bing. That's clearly anticompetitive - it locks the other browsers out of a major share of the market.

If you're arguing we should split Chrome development from Google then I'm 100% with you there.

Sure, but I'm arguing Apple shouldn't be allowed to sell "default browser" status on iOS. Show the customer a randomized list and let them choose. Google will probably still dominate, but it won't be because they paid to.

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

#65

Post by azemetre »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #33
lupka wrote: post #9

Happy to see this and hopefully there are some changes. Right now I'm dealing with a crazy Adsense issue and there is no recourse, no customer support and no alternative.

There is no shortage of other ad platforms. Breaking up Google isn't going to solve your specific issue lol

No but it would stop a single company from accumulating so much power.

How you can argue such things are democratic are beyond me. There is nothing democratic about trillion dollar corporations that can ruin your business for refusing to play their game.

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

#66

Post by datadrivenangel »

abirch wrote: post #45
blasphemers wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the what the browsers end up doing. If they just surface a select your search engine dialog during set up, most people will just select google and nothing will have changed besides the cost. If they set a non-google search engine by default, they will lose ad revenue because of people not bothering to change the default.

Depends on the default search engine. Many people went of their way to download a web browser that wasn't Internet Explorer for many years even though IE was the default. If the default search were randomly assigned and Google investors were nefarious the investors (not Alphabet) could simply help launch 30 different subpar search engines. Then if a user landed on one of those as a default search engine: the user wou…

It would be great to separate the search index/engine from the ads and allow other search portals to pay for the index and choose how to monetize.

If google actually went about organizing the worlds information, that would be wonderful.

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

#67

Post by ezst »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #40
lupka wrote: post #9

Happy to see this and hopefully there are some changes. Right now I'm dealing with a crazy Adsense issue and there is no recourse, no customer support and no alternative.

If you think antitrust has anything to do with why it isn't profitable for a company at Google scale to pay a human being for every one of the hundreds of millions of people who use AdSense to have customer support...

Of course it has everything to do with antitrust.

Imagine for a second that, instead of 1 Google, there are tens of thousands of alternatives. Offering good customer support becomes once again a competitive advantage. No sane customer thinks "yep, I want no recourse at all in case of problem so google's profit margins are bigger for the sake of their stakeholders".

Moreover, the cost of doing customer support grows less than linearly thanks to economies of scale, from which Google benefits disproportionally, and here again Google chose profits over quality at the expense of the consumer.

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

#68

Post by fidotron »

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.

In fairness to Google on this (and I cannot believe I just wrote that) it's common practice to be on both sides like this, and even to have some external exchange in the middle that you have a deal with just so you can claim it's obviously fair.

That entire industry is a horrifying shitshow of sociopathy, at the expense of absolutely everyone else, both viewers (supply side) and advertisers (demand side).

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

#70

Post by nemomarx »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #40
lupka wrote: post #9

Happy to see this and hopefully there are some changes. Right now I'm dealing with a crazy Adsense issue and there is no recourse, no customer support and no alternative.

If you think antitrust has anything to do with why it isn't profitable for a company at Google scale to pay a human being for every one of the hundreds of millions of people who use AdSense to have customer support...

I feel like there's a scale in between "dedicated employee for every customer" and "normal call center agents with some tiers of support above them to help with issues" yeah?
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