Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

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 cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

Kind of funny how they basically predicted Google's degradation years in advance.

They have one of the best LLM's in the world. I got 5000 images rejected. Now I can read about the requirements and not figure out why. It gets truly hilarious where the images are rejected by means of AI. It means they can produce 100% accurate reasons right on the rejection page. Ill even pay for it. I would also pay if it can correct the images. They have plenty of good but complex services that LLMs could deliver wonderful support for. Their LLM could also sell me services I currently cant be bothered to look at. Eventually, over the years the LLM can slowly be allowed to negotiate and make decisions too.

You highlight some genuine points of difficulty for antitrust enforcers.

If the rules were targeted at Google only then Google's lawyers would argue this is unequal application of the law. Even if the courts rejected Google's argument there'd be a real risk end up with exactly the same situation but with Bing in a couple of years time as they become the default search on every device / browser.

If "pay for default" deals were banned altogether then Firefox might be seriously hurt, which isn't exactly good for the competitive tech ecosystem.

A smaller ad company can afford to have customer support. If there are tens or hundreds then each one can lose customers, better than one massive company that doesn't care or can't afford and would rather keep the money than pay for support.

Revenue is not really a consideration when talking about _illegal_ monopolies. That is an incorrect way to view this. It's about anti-competitive practices. That's what the laws are about (and the reason for their existence).

Google is not anti-competitive. At no point am I forced or even "guided" into doing business with Google, at any stage, in any department. There are 8 billion other ad-networks out there, and there are plenty of mail providers to choose from, and plenty of search providers to choose from, and plenty of cloud providers to choose from. If you're on gmail (even business), or Google Cloud, or Adsense, there really isn't much stopping you from switching to something else. There's no real lock-in.

You cannot say the same with Microsoft. A lot of businesses are so dependent on MS's offerings they might as well just be glorified subsidiaries. You don't really have an Excel drop in, or an AD drop in, or a messaging app drop in that comes with all the other services. Google doesn't hand out Cloud credits with the express purpose of roping more of your business infrastructure under one company.

Internet Explorer was not free. You needed Windows. And if you had Windows you HAD IE, regardless of whether you wanted it or not, or even tried to remove it.