[HN Gopher] Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]
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Google digital advertising antitrust litigation [pdf]
Author : pg_bot
Score : 631 points
Date : 2021-10-24 05:26 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (storage.courtlistener.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (storage.courtlistener.com)
| mathnmusic wrote:
| Google should be broken up into 5 parts:
| Search/Adwords/Mail/Drive, Android, Chrome, Maps & GCP.
| lettergram wrote:
| No ads should be separate from everything imo. Drive and mail
| can each make money on their own.
|
| Search and AdWords are too tied however.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| You mean Google Ads - and no they don't have to be too tied
| together. What is so special about Google Search that Google
| Ads has to be owned by the same entity? I have websites with
| ads on them and I don't own the ad network either like
| 99.99999% of every other publisher out there
| easrng wrote:
| Because they sell specially-formatted ad spots that are
| supposed to look like results, not generic display ads.
| vgel wrote:
| Ads would need to be split up further, as well. It's ridiculous
| that Google controls the marketplace, buying of ads on that
| marketplace, and selling ad placements.
| solidangle wrote:
| Agreed! GCP should be broken up as well. It is incredibly
| unfair to third party services that Google is both supplying
| the platform and the competing services. This is probably a
| bigger problem on AWS though.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Problem is only one of those things make money.
| mathnmusic wrote:
| Android's Play stores makes a lot of money. So much so that
| it's quite comfortable reducing its fees from 30% to 15% for
| some developers.
|
| Maps already charges fees for all location-based apps (cabs,
| deliveries, fleet tracking etc) like Uber. It may have to
| tweak its pricing, that's all.
|
| GCP has a revenue model as strong as AWS. There's a reason
| why Google is pumping money into it.
|
| Chrome is the only one that could be called a loss leader but
| given its dominance, it can figure out a model. If Adobe
| photoshop can survive as a paid software, so can Chrome and
| its Developer Tools.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| That's not a problem, that's an opportunity.
|
| Don't we all love "disrupting" things?
| djrockstar1 wrote:
| I'd say 3 of those make money. The first one, Android with
| the Play Store, and GCP with Firebase gaining popularity,
| should all be bringing in enough money to be self-sustaining.
| stonogo wrote:
| Google has a TON of retired properties that were profit-
| makers, but not unicorns. Smaller Baby Googles would likely
| find solid revenue bringing some of them back.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| That would mean 5 monopolies. I would split them in 5 parts,
| each owning 20% of all current businesses.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| You'd need to control the flow of people between those
| companies for this to work well. It'd be a challenge with us
| Labor law
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| How would this help?
| accountofme wrote:
| So you are saying that no one entity could own more than 20%
| of alphabet? And it would retain all of its monopoly power?
| seanhunter wrote:
| There's a very clear conflict of interest between ads and
| everything else google does, and the documents alledge some
| abuses of the monopoly position around that conflict. So any
| kind of antitrust breakup is very likely to start there.
| Personally, I think it would be quite interesting to split
| ads from everything else and then split ads itself into a few
| competing entities.
|
| I'm not sure you get a benefit to the consumer from having
| multiple entities who can all still do search and manipulate
| ads, keyword sales and search rankings for example.
| willis936 wrote:
| But the ads are how google exists. They keep the lights on
| and the campus hedges trimmed. If you spin off a google
| without ads then would it even succeed or would the google
| with ads just take its old monopolistic position as soon as
| society allowed (forgot) it?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| A monopoly is fine if it doesn't hamper competition and
| doesn't use its position to impact unrelated markets.
|
| Shimano has a near monopoly on bike parts, and it's mostly
| fine. DJI dominates the pro drone market, and it's fine. All
| monopolies aren't evil.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Context matters. With the intellectual property situation
| as bad as it is right now, the monopolies those companies
| hold give them a nearly unbeatable advantage in squashing
| competition. Their IP holdings let them immediately tangle
| up any new businesses with massive legal hurdles,
| regardless of the merits of their claims.
|
| DJI being in China means they will lie, cheat, and steal
| from competitors such that meaningful competition becomes
| impossible.
|
| Innovation and consumer value suffer. Monopolies
| automatically and unavoidably hamper competition and have
| secondary impacts on unrelated products through inflation
| of pricing, e.g. if a cog is overpriced it's taking
| spending away from other markets.
|
| Corporations are not people, they are constructs that act
| toward to goal of self preservation at any cost. Once they
| exceed a certain size, individual humans in the loop lose
| meaningful control over the behavior of the company as a
| whole.
|
| The international legal situation we find ourselves in
| automatically places Chinese companies outside the reach of
| accountability to any rules by which most of the rest of
| the world have to abide.
|
| By themselves, monopolies could be functional participants
| in a healthy economy, but there are too many factors making
| that position completely untenable right now.
| oscargrouch wrote:
| Sovereign states are anemic by now and i'm skeptical that they
| would want to fight where the money and (real) power is, and if
| they grow some balls, or stop being so corrupt, even than, i'm
| skeptical that they will manage to win this fight.
|
| We are entering into a new era where big techs are so massive
| they can fight sovereign states and win, heading us into a new
| era of neo-feudalism were "civil rights" are only granted if
| they are not in the middle of our new digital lords lust for
| profit and power.
|
| So people might think this is unlikely and conspiratory, but
| its just natural human nature, social dynamics and following
| the political vectors by the aggregation of the past events.
|
| If they are willing, they know the secrets of everyone, and its
| just a matter of pressing the right people to bow to their will
| and that's it, we become the fools of Weimar republic that were
| not aware of the dangers ahead of us, because there were no
| historical precedent to make us vigilant and aware, and all the
| signs were well aligned to a hostile takeover.
| libertine wrote:
| Youtube man!
|
| Youtube must be split from Google ASAP!
| onion2k wrote:
| Only the ads part needs to be broken up. It funds all the other
| parts, so they'd break up or shut down on their own.
| underwater wrote:
| This tweet highlights Project NERA, which seems consistent with
| their actions to date.
|
| > Google had a plan called "Project NERA" to turn the web into a
| walled garden they called "Not Owned But Operated". A core
| component of this was the forced logins to the chrome browser
| you've probably experienced (surprise!) [1]
|
| This is classic 90s Microsoft playbook. Detangling the web from
| Google is getting harder and harder over time.
|
| 1:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/14520539415...
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Google wanted to be able to control and close off
| independent websites like The Dallas Morning News just as
| Google can control and close off its own sites like YouTube._
|
| Worth noting that they have this ability today through HTTPS
| certificate management. The web increasingly moves to HTTPS
| (pushed by Google among others) and Google is also operating
| one of a small number of cert transparency logs - in addition
| to the Chrome browser.
|
| If they don't like a site, they can blacklist the certificate
| in Chrome - to cut it off from Chrome users immediately - and
| block acceptance of new certificates from the CT log, which
| will cut off the site from other browsers once the current
| certificate expires.
| my123 wrote:
| No need for that, Google Safe Browsing exists if they want
| to.
|
| However, I don't think that Google is _that_ evil/willing to
| do so at this point.
| greenyoda wrote:
| A big discussion of that tweet can be found here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28974798
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Given that Google is critical for US intelligence supremacy and
| technological dominance, I am curious what the US chooses to do
| with it.
|
| Surely from a free market perspective and for long term growth,
| it needs to be broken into pieces in such a manner that would
| destroy its monopoly power.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Given that Google is critical for US intelligence supremacy
| and technological dominance, I am curious what the US chooses
| to do with it.
|
| Peter Thiel says Google is anti-American because it chooses to
| work with China but not with US. I wouldn't quite agree with
| Thiel but I would say that Google's neoliberal culture and
| neoliberal agenda is starting to become destructive and
| counter- productive in the long term.
| mahogany wrote:
| "Anti-American" is rich, coming from someone who would sell
| the 4th amendment to the highest bidder.
| mrkramer wrote:
| In the age of modern technology and the internet I think
| the sense and meaning of privacy is lost because everything
| is out there on the net waiting to be misused, abused,
| hacked, stolen, leaked or caught just like fish in the
| ocean.
|
| If I was US gov. I would've made law in the early 1990s
| that says every website, blog etc. is private property and
| no entity has right to crawl it if not given permission
| basically eliminating early Internet Search Engine industry
| meaning the behemoth like Google would probably never
| exist.
|
| I would also made law that says that private information of
| a person can only be used in order to facilitate payment
| transactions with operators that provide and sell goods and
| services meaning ecommerce e.g. (Amazon, Ebay, Uber, Airbnb
| etc.)
|
| Basically this law would eliminate early Internet Social
| Networks like MySpace and Facebook which thrive on using
| private information of the people for creating ad solutions
| for advertisers. Subscribing to social networks(buying
| Social Network service) would made privacy and security
| situation much better than it is today.
|
| But internet and world would be much different place and I
| think that using Google and Facebook for "free" comes with
| big trade-offs that every person needs to evaluate
| personally or government needs to step in with clear and
| strict privacy laws.
| blibble wrote:
| > If I was US gov. I would've made law in the early 1990s
| that says every website, blog etc. is private property
| and no entity has right to crawl it if not given
| permission basically eliminating early Internet Search
| Engine industry meaning the behemoth like Google would
| probably never exist.
|
| it would have existed, just outside of the US
| mrkramer wrote:
| Crawling a website in my opinion is akin to someone
| snooping inside your house and making a index of rooms
| and stuff you have.
|
| Robots.txt protocol exists but it is not even official
| internet standard under IETF. You can break robots.txt
| rules and there are no consequences at all. If robots.txt
| protocol was made law then it would be whole another
| story.
| paulluuk wrote:
| But would it still be a "free market" if governments just go
| around splitting up companies once they get (too) big?
|
| Not defending the idea of a free market here, I'm leaning
| pretty far past socialist myself, but I know that the US in
| general cares deeply about free market philosophy.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I think a "free market" has to retain some degree of
| competition and choice. Companies above a certain size (of
| capitalization) or with natural anti-competitive elements
| (like network effects) or with ownership of multiple sides of
| a market or with massive patent war cheats all impede
| competition. They move the free market away from a
| competition driven incentive to something more stagnant that
| can discourage entrepreneurial competitive innovation.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I think a "free market" has to retain some degree of
| competition and choice.
|
| An ideal market is both competitive and free, but the
| former is not a component of (and is often, outside of
| abstract ideals, in tension with) the latter.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| It is about making sure that the free market is actually
| working not so much about freedom as in freedom of expression
| - any course about economics will have section about
| monopolies and its societal cost - showing charts like this:
|
| https://college.cengage.com/economics/0538797274_mceachern/s.
| ..
|
| The cost is real but so is the national security advantage.
| mahogany wrote:
| So in order to keep the free market working, we have to
| make it... less free?
|
| I thought the definition of a free market is one that is
| free of government/outside regulation and interference. But
| it's also a market that is free of monopolies, apparently,
| and the only way to get rid of a monopoly is via
| government/outside regulation and interference. Isn't that
| a contradiction?
|
| Perhaps we should use another name for a market where we
| restrict monopolies -- that site you linked talks about
| "competitive markets".
| clusterfish wrote:
| Yes, sometimes.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
| areoform wrote:
| I would argue that markets tend towards greater "order"
| over time. The idea that regulations are something only
| the government does is somewhat misleading and it leads
| most free market proponents to turn down sub-optimal
| pathways.
|
| Instead, it is more useful to see the initial state that
| new "green-field" markets are in as desirable. Open for
| anyone, including small companies, to come in, build
| something ground-breaking, and then grow.
|
| Overtime, the system tends towards a steady state where
| one of the companies, or a set of companies start to
| dominate the others, leading to the formation of cartels.
| These cartels then impose regulations, be it on the
| lifespan of bulbs, or on the particulars of the ad
| market, which are then enforced using the capital and
| power they have obtained.
|
| These are regulations in all but name. They're enforced
| by an implicit threat of _economic_ consequences and by
| restricting access to resources by changing the
| landscape. In this case, it 's Chrome and FB, which are
| pushing their dominance to ensure that the web becomes
| theirs - explicitly. They're doing this by buying out the
| 'land' (Chrome, Android, Search, Social Media, Ads), the
| 'suppliers' (think about the sheer number of open source
| projects that Google funds and nudges their way), and the
| market ("it's all free!") thereby making it practically
| impossible for anyone to pose a threat to their
| dominance.
|
| Google is controlling who becomes a competitor by
| enforcing rules - in this case, secret rules - that only
| they know of and about. They are, in essence, regulating
| the market, except towards _their_ ends.
|
| Power abhors a vacuum. If a power hierarchy doesn't exist
| in a new space, then a new power structure will
| organically develop in place. Whether or not this new
| structure is aligned with the incentives of the broader
| community and new entrants/players/innovators is
| dependent on who and how the structure is formed.
|
| This is why I would argue that at least with Governments
| there's a _theoretical_ method of incentive alignment and
| accountability when things wrong. Methods that have been
| exercised in the past to course correct. Corporations
| lack that.
|
| It would be the lesser of two evils to create ways to
| reverse stale fields to the original green field state
| every once in a while to allow new ideas and companies to
| grow. It might be more valuable to do so than to allow
| the continued monopoly of these companies.
| conception wrote:
| For a market to be free it must be well regulated. If a
| market is controlled inordinately by a few, it ceases to be
| free.
| pphysch wrote:
| Then it's not a truly free market, because central planning
| (regulation) is sometimes overpowering the price mechanism.
| ddingus wrote:
| The idea of a robust, enduring free market itself needs
| to be questioned.
|
| Complete economic freedom leads to monopolies, who then
| act to preserve and benefit from their position. They do
| this because they know everyone else both wants that
| position and would do the same thing to maintain it. All
| this happens because growth is seen as necessary. Always
| necessary.
|
| Markets with rules can check those behaviors, but come
| with other complications, a big one being bought and paid
| for rule making by bigger players doing what?
|
| Maintaining position and growth.
|
| In the end, why do we even allow markets?
|
| To benefit people.
|
| Factored down, rules aimed at insuring markets actually
| do serve the people means the people have to have a say
| in the rules created with authority granted by the people
| for the purpose of improving things for the people.
| pphysch wrote:
| > In the end, why do we even allow markets?
|
| Because it's the best we got, historically. Decentralized
| price mechanism outperforms wetware planning at
| allocating resources efficiently. Now software has
| changed that and central planning is much more capable.
|
| Truly pure free market economies are virtually
| impossible, because as soon as the first firm is formed,
| it becomes a mixed economy. That is, economic
| transactions done within the firm are not done according
| to the global price mechanism, but to other rules and
| conventions. And the only way to prevent firms from being
| formed would be some extreme regulation i.e. central
| planning...
| ddingus wrote:
| And does it not follow the idea of free markets is
| questionable?
|
| I have long thought it is.
|
| Historically, we got all of this out of the need to
| benefit from our collective labor and resources,
| developed tech...
|
| The only reason there are markets at all is for our
| mutual benefit.
|
| And it follows from there to evaluate market rules to
| insure that actually happens.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Monopoly, while the end goal of any actor under capitalistic
| system, is the antithesis to capitalism itself. Capitalism
| exists to force competition.
|
| So yes, splitting a monopoly should be part of 'free market',
| as having monopolies basically destroys it.
| worrycue wrote:
| I don't know if it "free" but I do know that monopolies that
| abuse their market position makes for a less efficient
| market.
| jfoster wrote:
| I've seen lots of comments recently in response to the Google &
| Facebook advertising issues suggesting that Google should be
| split into X, Y, and Z.
|
| Most of the proposed splits seem like they would do absolutely
| nothing to address the issue at hand, though. The problem in
| digital advertising seems to be that Google controls the
| marketplace, as well as both the buy & sell sides. Even a
| "breaking apart" that proposes splitting "search" from
| "advertising" would do nothing to address the issues that are
| getting raised at present.
|
| I'm not an advertising expert, but these issues seem pertain to
| the buy-side, sell-side, and marketplace associated with digital
| advertising. Any company that still controls all 3 of those will
| retain the existing problem.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Google should be sliced horizontally, not vertically. Each
| resulting company would own a percentage of current business.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| sure lets slice the computers, engineers and offices
| horizontally as well
| msabalau wrote:
| You say this as if it were a bad thing.
|
| And while it may be hyperbolic to literally slice
| engineers, anyone who engaged in a criminal conspiracy
| (from coder to CEO) could be tried and, if convicted,
| jailed. Having this happen broadly would certainly be
| illuminating for anyone working in this space in the
| future.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| downvote all you want but the parent comment makes no sense
| - you can't horizontally slice products - that would only
| make sense if Google had clients that could split fairly
| among several sub-companies. But sure keep armchairing.
| perihelions wrote:
| It's simple, you just have $GO deliver the left half of
| the searchbar while $OG handles the right.
| jfoster wrote:
| As a public company, it's arguably already sliced that way.
| What difference would it make if it's sliced further?
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| My view is that this is an issue finance has already solved.
| Just regulate ad exchanges for fair practice, require
| disclosure or transparency to identify anticompetitive
| behavior, and then license the fuck out of everyone who
| participates in the market. Seems like the industry has grown
| enough and clearly is suffering due to lack of sufficient
| management of externalities and monopoly powers.
|
| The harder part is executing on the above strategy. You will
| need new institutions or see an expansion or extension of
| existing institutions. Imagining the FCC trying to do this
| seems both a likely approach and an incredibly ineffective one.
|
| I would add too that improved regulation of consumer and
| private data would help significantly. This is probably more
| likely than the above.
|
| This lawsuit seems like the perfect timing and impetus to get
| serious about regulation in the digital ecosystem. Just hope we
| don't fuck it up.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > The harder part is executing on the above strategy. You
| will need new institutions or see an expansion or extension
| of existing institutions. Imagining the FCC trying to do this
| seems both a likely approach and an incredibly ineffective
| one.
|
| I completely agree and that's what scares me more and more
| about big tech. We let these huge companies grow for years
| without really considering the scalability of managing them
| and now we find ourselves desperately needing to regulate
| them but not really knowing how.
|
| It reminds me of the content moderation problem with
| Facebook, the cost of hiring enough humans to adequately deal
| with content moderation there would quite possibly bankrupt
| the company, and they know that.
|
| How do you find a sustainable oversight/regulatory strategy
| when the companies themselves were founded largely on their
| desire to not figure out those kinds of problems in the first
| place?
| Xelbair wrote:
| I have slightly simpler proposition - ban digital advertising.
|
| Or at least ban the 'dynamic' one - the one which tries to
| match the user's preferences. Just static, random ads akin to
| TV or billboards next to the roads.
| jfoster wrote:
| How would that address the issue of Google rigging the
| bidding by owning the bidding mechanism, marketplace, and
| managing publisher inventory? There would still be a real
| time auction taking place for each impression.
| singron wrote:
| A huge part of this document is about how Google has
| exclusive access to user ids. If nobody can use user ids,
| then they don't have those advantages anymore.
| Xelbair wrote:
| exactly.
|
| and it also puts the lid on profitability of walled
| gardens - as you cannot sell those cohorts to
| advertisers.
|
| It would be a net gain for society as a whole
| perlgeek wrote:
| > Even a "breaking apart" that proposes splitting "search" from
| "advertising" would do nothing to address the issues that are
| getting raised at present.
|
| Alone it wouldn't help, but what if you split search from
| advertising, and forced the "search" part to up advertising to
| the highest bidder, not just from google ads?
|
| If Google Search really was its own company and with its own
| shareholders, getting the most money for a bid would be more
| profitable than colluding with the rest of former Google.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Just ban advertising straight up. This will kill Google,
| Facebook, Twitter and all the other companies ruining the web.
| Not one tear will be shed at this point.
|
| Also, make it a huge liability to store any kind of personal
| information. Apply heavy taxes on every single bit stored.
| These companies should be trying really hard to forget all
| about us the second they send our HTTP responses, not hoarding
| our personal information like a bunch of stalkers. Make it
| exceedingly expensive for them to do it and they'll stop.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| What happens when a Chinese knockoff Google comes along and
| captures the online ad market? Now you've created a new
| version of the same problem without any leverage.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| You know as well as I do that that will never happen and
| would probably destroy the economy. As bad as these companies
| are, flat out killing them is not a good idea.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| If the economy can't survive the loss of these abusers, it
| deserves to be destroyed. If we do something, we gotta go
| all the way. Half-measures do nothing.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| You do realize what the destruction of the economy would
| entail? That it would mean that many people would lose
| their livelihood and suffer?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| It turns out that people actually prefer getting products
| for free with ads to paying for products. As bad as
| google and facebook are, they are providing what people
| want at the exact price point they want.
| Const-me wrote:
| I think banning online ads will be awesome for economy.
|
| Serving ads is doesn't create any value. By now, it's just
| a tax to be payed to google/facebook.
|
| Why do you think banning online ads gonna destroy the
| economy?
|
| These internet companies don't even pay a lot of taxes, we
| allow them to move profit across jurisdictions to optimize.
| eoo wrote:
| I think this will potentially be the lawsuit of the year. Really
| interesting read.
|
| A lot of the monopoly advantages seem to focus on AdX. I wonder
| if demanding that Google shall not participate in the ad exchange
| business could slowly open up competition in all the other
| markets...
|
| For example, they were concerned that header bidding would make
| AdX fees go down to 5% instead of 22%, thus they used their
| advantage in the ad server market to stifle this (plus the FB
| deal). They are able to do this because they control both markets
| and can modify the data protocols between these two pieces. Same
| applies to scrambling IDs (ad servers and display markets)
| kilroy123 wrote:
| This is exactly why I've moved to de-Google my life as much as
| possible. The writing has been on the walls for years about
| Google.
|
| I know it's not enough, but I choose to opt-out as much as
| possible.
| robin_reala wrote:
| _249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least
| partly a result of Google's throttling. Google throttles the load
| time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays
| in order to give Google AMP a "nice comparative boost."
| Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google
| then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. "Header
| Bidding can often increase latency of web pages and create
| security flaws when executed incorrectly," Google falsely
| claimed. Internally, Google employees grappled with "how to
| [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower."_
|
| I'd be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google employee
| assigned to AMP.
| dessant wrote:
| They're also pushing for the adoption of Signed HTTP Exchanges,
| with several Google employees defending the spec here on HN,
| comparing it to be merely like HTTPS in terms of publishers
| giving up control over their content.
|
| It's clear that Chrome must be separated from Google and
| Alphabet, nothing else will stop them from trying to colonize
| the web.
| zebracanevra wrote:
| _equating it to be merely like HTTPS in terms of publishers
| giving up control over their content._
|
| Where did you read that? I was under the impression that SXG
| is more similar to things like IPFS, where you can have
| content signed by its origin (or in IPFS, content addressed
| by its hash). Once that is achieved, any other site (e.g. a
| CDN like Google or Cloudflare) can cache and serve it
| securely and with authentication.
|
| You can sign whatever content you want with SXG, it isn't
| limited to AMP.
| deadbunny wrote:
| > It's clear that Chrome must be separated from Google and
| Alphabet, nothing else will stop them from trying to colonize
| the web.
|
| Or advocate for open alternatives, use Firefox, and make sure
| any site you build (or you build at work) work perfectly in
| non Chrome browsers.
| dessant wrote:
| > Or advocate for open alternatives
|
| Yes, supporting other browsers is a given, but did you want
| to say "and advocate"? Advocating for alternatives alone
| will achieve close to nothing when you are faced with a
| cartel, regulatory action is desperately needed in this
| industry.
| rytcio wrote:
| The real problem is that Google/Chrome basically run the
| internet. If Google decides to change some internet
| standard, Firefox and web developers all follow suite like
| lemmings. It's like Google has become the authoritative
| leader in web without any sort of process or watchdog.
| Aside from getting people off of Chrome, the other need is
| to get people to stop following Google's leadership on all
| things web.
| deadbunny wrote:
| > The real problem is that Google/Chrome basically run
| the internet.
|
| Only because we let them. We gave them web domination, we
| the nerds told everyone and their mother to install
| Chrome so they do out of habit now.
|
| We sit and watch while Google bend the web to their will
| with AMP and dozens of non standard specs everyone
| hurriedly tries to support while we come up with excuses
| like "it faster", "the dev tools in chrome are better".
|
| Without a monopolistic marketshsre we give them they
| can't do this as easily.
|
| Go install Firefox and make it your default browser. Or
| just carry on using Chrome and wonder why Google keep
| getting away with doing antisocial, anti consumer shit.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > If Google decides to change some internet standard,
| Firefox and web developers all follow suite like
| lemmings.
|
| This works because they have such a large market share.
| It's a chicken/egg problem. Switching to Firefox is the
| best most of us can do to achieve the goal of "getting
| people to stop following Google's leadership on all
| things web."
| imapeopleperson wrote:
| That's criminal
| [deleted]
| magicalist wrote:
| People are being awfully credulous of two sentence fragments
| quoted in an editorial paragraph. Much of this could certainly
| be true but my bullshit meter is going off on the level of
| narrative they're reconstructing in all the non-quoted
| portions.
|
| I dislike AMP because the UX is bad and Google strong armed it
| in the news carousel anyways instead of focusing on performance
| for all sites, but this would be a lot more convincing with the
| source emails entered into the record.
|
| edit: and this is just talking about ad content, right? Unless
| somehow a publisher made their entire page blocked until the
| page's ads load, throttling the load of ads would just make the
| ads load slower. And from what cletus quotes in another
| comment:
|
| > _To respond to the threat of header bidding, Google created
| Accelerated Mobile Pages ("AMP"), a framework for developing
| mobile web pages, and made AMP essentially incompatible with
| JavaScript and header bidding. Google then used its power in
| the search market to effectively force publishers into using
| AMP._
|
| Is the claim that ads in AMP pages don't run javascript or do
| header bidding and so are "fast", but javascript and header
| bidding isn't inherently slow so Google could have made them
| faster (and/or not intentionally throttled)? I've never worked
| much with ads so maybe someone with knowledge of header bidding
| can comment.
| tyingq wrote:
| >"People are being awfully credulous of two sentence
| fragments quoted in an editorial paragraph."
|
| The pdf that this page links to includes much more than two
| sentence fragments on the topic.
| magicalist wrote:
| But not the documents these quotes come from, as far as I
| can tell.
| tyingq wrote:
| I agree, but this seems pretty typical for an initial
| filing. They don't typically show all their cards. So
| snippets like:
|
| >Internally, Google employees grappled with "how to
| [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower."
|
| Could be more, or less interesting, when the actual
| source document is published.
|
| There's some more detail in a highly redacted document
| here: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/
| files/ima...
|
| _" In Google's words, the [redacted] program [redacted].
| Next, Google tried to come up with other creative ways to
| shut out competition from exchanges in header bidding.
| During one internal debate, a Google employee proposed a
| [redacted]. A second employee captured Google's ultimate
| aim of destroying header bidding altogether, noting in
| response that [redacted]"_
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >Or more accurately, the analogy would be if [redacted]
| were a monopoly financial broker and owned the [redacted]
| which was a monopoly stock exchange.
|
| Can someone who has a better understand of legal
| proceedings explain what purpose these redactions serve?
| magicalist wrote:
| > _A second employee captured Google's ultimate aim of
| destroying header bidding altogether, noting in response
| that [redacted]_
|
| So from a probably naive view, getting rid of header
| bidding seems like it would be faster, not slower. Is the
| assertion being made that it isn't faster and it just so
| happens to also enrich the ad network?
| tyingq wrote:
| Yes, you're right. It's faster not to have it, but that
| puts publishers at a disadvantage...Google reaps more
| revenue and gives less in return if it doesn't exist.
| Header bidding is often estimated to improve revenue by
| 10% or so for publishers.
|
| The sequence was first employee probably said something
| like "make it slower if they aren't on AMP", and the
| second employee made some kind of suggestion to kill it
| altogether.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| If you need to keep revenue graphs going up and to the
| right, because that's the primary KPI your unit is judged
| on, at some point it's technically easier to handicap
| competition than improve your own offering.
|
| I think this gives us a timestamp on when Google got
| there.
| tyingq wrote:
| It does seem like the GOOGL shareholder expectation of
| compounded perpetual YoY revenue gains of > 25% leads to
| bad places. The YoY growth of end users is much smaller.
| Something like 5%. So at some point, the inflated
| expectations have to mean a dirty playbook.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _It does seem like the GOOGL shareholder expectation of
| compounded perpetual YoY revenue gains of > 25% leads to
| bad places_
|
| Yeah it seems bizarre that they would try to hold on to
| that big of growth and not moderate it if this is the
| method to get it because there's no way it can be
| sustainably grown for long, but I guess if you're a VP
| only focused on this quarter's goals and the bonus you'll
| get out of it, it doesn't really much matter if growth
| craters a year or two out. You can cash out long before
| then.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Well, and nobody normally wakes up and says "I'm going to
| bend the law really hard and create a potential PR
| disaster, just because."
|
| They do often say "My bonuses are tied to growth, and my
| management is putting extreme pressure on me to deliver
| something that's impossible, and I don't see any way of
| delivering it in the expected time... so I'm going to do
| it the only way I see."
| [deleted]
| windexh8er wrote:
| Bullshit meter?
|
| It seems to me this is yet another validation that Google is
| an ad sales company hell bent on preventing competition,
| controlling the market and lying to end users and
| integrators. All of these pieces are adding up - what was
| conjecture is finally being validated and I, personally,
| believe that Google is not in it for the good of the
| customer, but are only in it for a profit. Death to Google by
| thousands of cuts like this? Game on.
|
| I've said it before, sales organizations only base
| performance on profit. It is the toxin that defines all of
| this misbehaviour. Nobody "thinks" they're doing anything
| wrong because it's talked about as benefiting the
| shareholder. Google isn't immune to this.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _It seems to me this is yet another validation_
|
| That's just what I mean. There's a tiny amount of
| validation and a lot of rhetoric. It would be preferable to
| be able to see the actual sources they're quoting from.
| unknownOrigin wrote:
| It would be preferable if people paid by Google wouldn't
| astroturf this site every time Google is caught doing
| something dirty.
| kylevedder wrote:
| That's a pretty bad faith reply. I'm not paid by Google
| to astroturf (feel free to look at my account) and I
| agree with magicalist: I want to see primary sources
| before drawing any significant conclusions.
| dang wrote:
| You can't attack others like this here. We ban accounts
| that post flamewar comments, such as this one and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733439. If you'd
| please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
| stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
|
| I appreciate and share your desire to protect the
| integrity of the site but we need to do it in a way that
| doesn't do even more damage.
| magicalist wrote:
| Nope, but also please don't try to shut down conversation
| this way.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Just because the floodgates haven't opened with all of
| the insight you may want doesn't mean it's not valid -
| re: "bullshit meter".
|
| Google has an army of the best in legal and part of their
| play is limiting this information from ever being seen.
| I'm curious, what would be enough validation to pass your
| sniff test? And are you saying you think this is being
| overblown?
| hoffs wrote:
| Validation? What else you want validated as I can whip up a
| doc with some claims about things without source/proof too.
| ricketycricket wrote:
| > People are being awfully credulous of two sentence
| fragments quoted in an editorial paragraph. Much of this
| could certainly be true but my bullshit meter is going off on
| the level of narrative they're reconstructing in all the non-
| quoted portions.
|
| This is not an editorial document, it's a legal complaint by
| the Attorneys General of 17 U.S. states and commonwealths
| demanding a jury trial (among other things). The allegations
| are unproven at this point. The demanded trial process
| (discovery, examination, etc.) is what will provide the
| evidence.
|
| One way or another though, we're going to see if all of these
| claims are true. It just will take some time.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _This is not an editorial document, it's a legal
| complaint by the Attorneys General_
|
| It's definitely both, they know their audience is not
| limited to the court. Performative filings by attorneys
| general happen all the time, and being able to set the
| narrative and put the other party on the defensive is
| absolutely part of this process, for good or bad.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >This is not an editorial document, it's a legal complaint
| by the Attorneys General of 17 U.S. states and
| commonwealths demanding a jury trial (among other things).
|
| While I agree that Google is anticompetitive, I don't think
| that specific detail gives as much weight as you think it
| does (or indeed should). The courts have had a notoriously
| bad history with understanding tech, and being part of a
| formal legal process is only weak evidence that a complaint
| has merit.
| kbenson wrote:
| I don't think that was necessarily meant to convey weight
| towards a position of belief, but instead to just clarify
| the situation. They immediately followed up with "the
| allegations are unproven" and "we'll eventually see".
| pja wrote:
| Good grief. AMP always looked fishy, but to be as blatantly
| abusive as this? It's indefensible.
|
| Google has to be broken up.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| > I'd be seriously ashamed at this point if I was a Google
| employee assigned to AMP.
|
| "No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood." [1]
|
| [1] https://despair.com/products/irresponsibility
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I've been screenshotting despair.com posters for over 10
| years. I can't believe they're still around. I really should
| buy something from them someday.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| This is why principles are important. Living by a well
| considered and thoughtful set of beliefs, secular or
| otherwise, has an impact on the world. Even if things look
| hopeless, your actions contribute to the way life unfolds for
| everyone else. Even if things look trivial, not engaging in
| minor infractions against your beliefs is withholding that
| single drop from the flood.
|
| I won't ever use tiktok, and speak against it to friends and
| family when questioned. I support the use of Signal and
| promote basic digital literacy, lending my time to help
| people learn about encryption and protecting their personal
| information, even in seemingly trivial things like not
| playing quiz games on social media.
|
| I don't believe in a monolithic big brother spying on
| individuals, but there is a collective impact of all of those
| systems, if which Google Amp plays a big part. It normalized
| the idea that centralizing the gateways to content was a good
| thing, regardless of Google's intentions. It usurped control
| of a minor piece of web functionality that gave Google a big
| competitive advantage.
|
| People have been commoditized by getting them to give up
| private data without understanding what it is they're giving
| up. At a very basic level, you could look at Facebook - they
| have 3 billion members and make 30 billion dollars a year -
| someone's data is worth $10usd per year on average. Similar
| valuations can be applied to other companies, but Google is
| getting around $150 billion a year for advertising. If you
| could assign a weight to people, some would be worth far more
| than others, and even entirely boring and innocent profiles
| are damaging to consumers, because they're providing
| baselines that enable further and more nuanced manipulation.
|
| It's such an insidious and subtle injury to society that
| getting people to even notice litigation like this suit is
| difficult. Getting them to care, when the attitude of "I've
| got nothing to hide" is hugely demoralizing to people who do
| care.
|
| Gross anticompetitive actions are a part of the problem, but
| the reckless use of algorithms that influence exposure to
| information, its context, and its timing is a huge, hairy
| deal, but even amongst techies it's hard to communicate why.
|
| We are collectively wireheading in a way the majority of
| humans don't have the knowledge or education to recognize as
| dangerous. The knock-on effects are sometimes many degrees of
| separation from any single company's actions or behavior, and
| there doesn't have to be a human in the loop for the
| algorithms to poison the future of a society.
|
| The agency of individuals is stolen by systems like Amp - a
| drop in the digital flood that is drowning liberty and
| sovereignty. It creates a system that gets abused for profit
| or politics or ideology. It reinforces the arms race in
| surveillance technology, but a vast majority of people are
| content with the idea that they have nothing to hide, not
| realizing that they are choosing to grant control over the
| information they will be allowed to consume anywhere within
| the ecosystem they engaged with.
|
| FAANG's actions subtly influence the behavior of billions of
| humans. Innocuous and trite misbehavior on their part gets
| amplified far beyond what anyone would predict, and we have
| almost nothing in human history to measure against. These
| institutions have to be held to a higher standard, and
| societies all over the world must work to make private
| information a resource entirely and absolutely controlled by
| the user.
| billylindeman wrote:
| It always blows my mind seeing the things people who work
| at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest" over,
| and then these insidious things they're willing to just sit
| back and let happen.
|
| When I moved to the bay area working at FB/Google was
| something I held in high regard and was a career goal of
| mine. Now I get hit up by recruiters from them often... and
| I don't message them back. It hurts thinking about how much
| money I leave on the table by not working there, but I just
| don't think if I could live with myself if I became a
| contributing member of their dystopian nightmare machine.
|
| It all starts with the people who work there. If you work
| at google or facebook, you're part of it. You're culpable.
| It's not like I don't understand the calculus and not like
| the right dollar amount wouldn't corrupt my position as
| well, but I wish more people were honest/forthright about
| it. You're a storm trooper.
| nkingsy wrote:
| I work in big tech
|
| I selected all my previous companies because they seemed
| to have a worthy mission from the outside. Each
| disappointed me immensely. At startup scale you have to
| see the sausage be made or at least sit next to it.
|
| I know big tech companies have too much power because
| every other company I've worked at would be most
| accurately described as an unscrupulous Rube Goldberg
| machine for moving money from VCs to ads+cloud.
|
| Do what works for you, but don't be so sure you're
| engaging in a "better" way with this late-capitalist
| hellscape. I feel so much better aligned getting paid by
| big tech to build cool tools for engineers than I did
| getting paid to knife fight for their scraps.
| kbenson wrote:
| The problem is that "worthy mission" is incompatible with
| being a public company for the most part. Once your
| mandate is not profitability but growth, some cohort of
| people at the company will push for that growth in ways
| that others think is unacceptable, and they will hide
| these programs because they know some will objects and
| those that would object are incentivized from all sides
| and from themselves to not want to see them.
|
| Private companies have a much better chance of actually
| following those missions(at least if not struggling). At
| a minimum, not as many incentives are aligned against
| you.
| acomar wrote:
| > It always blows my mind seeing the things people who
| work at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest"
| over, and then these insidious things they're willing to
| just sit back and let happen.
|
| symbolic action is always easy. but you're asking them to
| strike (refuse to work) in response to unethical demands,
| without the collective backing of their peers, in an
| industry that views union activity with - at best -
| suspicion or outright derision. we all like to fancy that
| we'd be the ones to refuse to play along but the reality
| is that when it's you and your job and you're facing the
| possibility of not paying rent or eating food after being
| blacklisted from the industry in response to your
| actions...
|
| don't judge the people who are doing what they have to in
| order to survive. they were compelled by people who had
| leverage over them and our ire should be for those
| people.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| > but you're asking them to strike (refuse to work) in
| response to unethical demands, without the collective
| backing of their peers,
|
| We are not talking about some poor sod blue collar worker
| here. We are talking about techworkers with 6 figure
| salaries who can get a job anywhere. No one is asking
| them to start some movement. They can simply think: "I
| don't want to be a part of this", leave the job and get a
| new job that same day.
|
| > don't judge the people who are doing what they have to
| in order to survive. they were compelled by people who
| had leverage over them and our ire should be for those
| people.
|
| Tech workers with 6 figure salaries who can get a job
| pretty much anywhere they like are doing these things to
| survive? Seriously...? Google had leverage over these
| people? How?
| RNCTX wrote:
| Bullshit.
|
| How many minimum wage employees does Google have in the
| Bay Area? We're talking about a class of six figure
| employees here.
|
| Like he said, you're a storm trooper, just own it.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| They're creating an infrastructure of manipulation
| because of the collective impact of the industry within
| the current legal context of international privacy
| protections. Any individual project or feature can look
| trivial or harmless, like manipulating the order of
| articles in a feed, but the systems used to do it are
| mechanisms implicitly susceptible to bad incentives.
|
| They're collectively pressing buttons and breaking things
| in the global psychology, influencing the zeitgeist in a
| way that no one person or company intends. Obama's
| campaign was the first major successful political use of
| that infrastructure and there's an argument to be made
| that Trump's election was enabled by it. Cambridge
| Anallytica exposed some of the controls and showed a
| portion of what can be done, but we haven't seen the
| worst yet. International troll farms, the recent
| infiltration of Christian and BLM Twitter and reddit, and
| so on.
|
| When people are profiled by advanced algorithms, and
| access to people given based on those profiles, that
| access can be made completely transparent using
| deanonymizing methods through data from other sources.
| Any and every platform, forum, and community becomes
| exposed to hostile, unintended influence.
|
| We need outsized fines that protect private data as if it
| were sacred such that a trillion dollar company would
| fear even a single violation. Such that violating privacy
| would result in individuals going bankrupt or prison
| time. Such that physically bombing a foreign datacenter
| would be seen as reasonable recourse if they were
| uncooperative.
|
| There are things that no government or private
| organization should have absent the informed consent of
| users because of the implicit danger to society's basic
| functioning.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Incredibly powerful summary of a dismal state of affairs.
| How did it come to that?
|
| I feel we are massivelly overrating the level of
| governance, competence and ability to manage our overall
| "success" as modern societies
|
| This was already quite evident with the financial crisis
| and came down as a hammer with the pandemic crisis and the
| ultimate dead-end of the climate crisis.
|
| The denerate, dystopic, digital universe we have evolved
| into is not perceived as a systemic crisis. Massive data
| breaches are normalized. The obvious manipulation and
| influence of political processess the world over are
| shrugged off. The feudalization of economic life is
| portrayed as desirable "disruption". But it is really a
| slow moving car crash and there is no indication we have
| mechanisms to steer away from the deterministic outcome.
|
| Ironically, it is almost certain that better governance
| would have to be based on suitable digital tools and
| networks. There is an alternate Philip K. Dick universe out
| there but we need some magic quantum tunnel to get to it.
| gfodor wrote:
| Just wait until Facebook cracks the tech needed to mediate
| all person-to-person interactions via VR/AR. We are in big
| trouble if nothing changes.
| ralston3 wrote:
| This is a longer way of saying "A man has to live by a
| code". Sadly that's very rare these days :(
| onion2k wrote:
| You do have to wonder what impact this will have on the
| employment prospects of Google engineers in the unlikely event
| that it all blows up for Google. Having a toxic company on your
| resume is never a good thing.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It's gonna be a long time before having Google on your resume
| is seen as anything but good
| tjpnz wrote:
| Not nearly as bad as Facebook.
| zrail wrote:
| Is FB on an engineering resume actually bad?
| VRay wrote:
| No, any household name megacorp on your resume is a good
| thing and a golden ticket to any job you want, evil or
| not
| google234123 wrote:
| "The design of it was discussed in
| https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/3133. It wasn't
| done nefariously. AMP prioritizes the page content and verified
| elements first over non-AMP content (including non-AMP ads)."
|
| From an older discussion
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25448718
| amelius wrote:
| > Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them
| artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a
| "nice comparative boost."
|
| That's it. Webmasters should give all visitors with a Chrome
| user agent a loading penalty of 1 second and a popup saying
| that the website runs faster on Firefox.
|
| I said it before on HN, but the idea was condemned, and I
| partially agreed, but now it seems (at least to me) a fully
| justifiable strategy to make users win back power.
| [deleted]
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Webmasters should give all visitors with a Chrome user
| agent a loading penalty of 1 second and a popup saying that
| the website runs faster on Firefox_
|
| it's for ads:
|
| > _Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving
| them artificial one-second delays_
|
| so would need to limit the +1 second for ads to be
| equivalent, but you could just run "ads" for ad blockers
| instead :)
| username190 wrote:
| IMO Action should be taken against Google here, not the
| average user (about 70% of whom use Chrome).
|
| Throttling based on user agent (Firefox, WebKit Safari, etc)
| would be a bad thing if you ran YouTube and wanted to
| encourage people to use Chrome - it would likewise be bad if
| you ran a website like HN.
|
| Users have power when they have control - Google is taking
| that away, and that's why antitrust legislation makes sense.
| But users lose power when their choice of browser (in a
| market where there are only 2-3 choices) makes their web
| experience artificially worse.
| amelius wrote:
| Then consider the 1 second delay as an advertisement for
| consumer power. Google/YouTube annoys users with similar or
| even longer delays all the time. So I don't think you can
| see this as an "action against the user", unless you
| consider all non-user-tracking advertisements as an action
| against the user.
|
| Also, the campaign can stop when Chrome and Firefox reach
| an equal user-base. So "the user losing freedom of choice
| of browser" is also not a strong argument.
|
| Yes, it's sad that this seems necessary, but you can't
| fight corporate evilness with just goodwill. In a sense,
| this is somewhat similar to the paradox of tolerance [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
| indodima wrote:
| Nice link!
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's sort of amazing how people are boosting this lawsuit up to
| the front page of HN dozens of times over three days, without
| really seeming to grasp that it is one side of a civil law
| suit, and that anyone would be a fool to take a filing like
| this at face value. It's a little thin on evidence, don't you
| think?
|
| Normally when the attorneys general of Kentucky and South
| Dakota put their heads together about something, the rest of us
| point and laugh. But when they put together a document that
| looks like the top 1000 most-unhinged HN comments from users
| like `ocdtrekkie`, critical thinking gets thrown under a bus
| and it's 100% pure credulity.
| Jensson wrote:
| Newcorp and the other media's anti google campaign has worked
| flawlessly. Even techies boarded the train and now think
| Google is worse than Microsoft or Apple. At worst Google is
| as bad as Microsoft or Apple if all the things the articles
| accuse them of is true.
|
| I don't work for Google nor own Google stocks, but among the
| things I am afraid of Google using its position to capture a
| bit too much of the ad-market is among the least of those,
| and that is ultimately what all these accusations boils down
| to. User data is for ads, these anti-competitive practices
| are for ads etc. If ads is the peak of their evil then I'd
| say they aren't terribly evil.
|
| Google's biggest sin was to sit in the way of news media
| profits, that caused a barrage of articles written by news
| media companies targeted at them. I'd say that is evidence of
| news media being evil, not Google being evil.
| tga_d wrote:
| Secretly colluding in backroom deals to intentionally
| hamstring privacy protections seems pretty unambiguously...
| bad? Can you explain how anything Microsoft or Apple has
| done has worse implications for society?
| Jensson wrote:
| Both Microsoft and Apple happily collaborates with CCP,
| that is a big one that Google still doesn't do. Then both
| Microsoft and Apple often performs huge patent
| litigations for nonsense patents they spam, Google
| doesn't. Both Apple and Microsoft uses their industry
| dominance to push their own products and push others
| products out of the market, Google does that as well but
| before it seemed they didn't do it at the same rates, but
| this lawsuit would put Google at roughly the same level
| of Microsoft and Apple.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Both Microsoft and Apple happily collaborates with
| CCP, that is a big one that Google still doesn 't do._
|
| Google has offices in China.
| Jensson wrote:
| But its services aren't available in China. Both Apple
| and Microsoft runs services like search or appstore in
| China. You can't access Google search or Google appstore
| in China since Google refuses to hand over the related
| user data to CCP, both Microsoft and Apple hands over
| that data to CCP and works to help CCP censor its
| critics.
|
| I agree that the "don't be evil" part of Google has
| mostly run out, but some of the effects are still there
| or Google would already be operating in China just like
| Apple or Microsoft. So until they do operate services in
| China I'll say that they aren't more evil than Microsoft
| or Apple who do operate services in China.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| My point is that if they're allowed to operate in China,
| then they have to bend to the will of, and collaborate
| with, the CCP if they want to remain there.
| Jensson wrote:
| But the argument is evilness. That is a problem, but I
| don't see how that makes Google more evil than Apple or
| Microsoft that has already bent to the will of CCP with
| seemingly no complaints.
|
| My argument is basically: Over the past 10 years Google
| has made great strides towards becoming as evil as a
| typical big corporation. They are about there today, not
| sure if they are there or just soon to be, but they are
| certainly not significantly more evil than the other big
| corporations.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Apple or Microsoft that has already bent to the will
| of CCP with seemingly no complaints._
|
| Apple certainly gets complaints for their cooperation
| with the CCP and for their CCP-sponsored censorship in
| China, HK, and abroad. You can search my HN comments on
| Algolia and see that I've complained about it plenty of
| times before.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yep. You'd expect a community like HN to understand that
| the newspaper industry is a gigantic evil cabal, but I
| guess we're just not collectively smart enough.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| I don't think it is necessarily about being "smart" - a
| story like this simply confirms many biases people have
| about big, "evil" corporations and even very smart people
| are prone to confirmation biases.
|
| Mind you, I am most certainly sure that Big Tech has tons
| of shady shit going on, as would any industry of that
| size, but a politically charged lawsuit championed by a
| competing industry is not what I would use as proof.
| finiteseries wrote:
| Sour meta comments are boring, especially when they rope in
| unrelated personal beefs you have with individual users like
| ocdtrekkie. That was a little much.
|
| Consider posting something like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28977462, which inspired
| a lot of sub comments and a good on topic discussion, vs
| yours, which produced "haha Kentucky and South Dakota",
| "Microsoft/Apple bad", "gigantic evil news cabal", and "HN is
| dumb".
| beckman466 wrote:
| > The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly
| a result of Google's throttling. Google throttles the load time
| of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in
| order to give Google AMP a "nice comparative boost."
|
| wow i love when Silicon Valley _literally_ throws away people
| 's time. imagine the cumulative total time being wasted by this
| artificial delay...
| eternalban wrote:
| our time -> their money. our identity -> their money. our
| whereabouts -> their money.
|
| our society ?->?
| noisy_boy wrote:
| their business.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Wow, I feel naive now for defending AMP providing better user
| experience. As it turns out, Google is evil and I simply did
| not want to believe it.
| cupcake-unicorn wrote:
| There were people defending AMP? Everything I've heard about
| it was backlash
| KaiserPro wrote:
| for me, amp loaded quicker and had way less shit on it that
| took ages to load (like videos, tracking and stupid
| animations)
|
| Webdevs moaned because it restricted what they could do,
| which is partially why I liked it. They had to build a page
| that was fast, rather than fancy.
|
| However I do see the downsides, as google owns the stack,
| limits your choice.
| eska wrote:
| If you want something more restricted then just use RSS.
| It's not centralized like AMP.
| mavhc wrote:
| How centralised is AMP in theory and in practise?
| dmw_ng wrote:
| Every client everywhere donates Referrer: logs to
| ampproject.org, which Google run. It's another
| centralized web log in disguise
| jeffbee wrote:
| So it's not centralized at all in other words? Because
| it's an open standard that anyone can implement, both
| client and server, right?
|
| 100% totally decentralized.
| dmw_ng wrote:
| AMP _requires_ you load all JS assets from
| cdnproject.org, which is owned by Google. It is as
| centralized as it comes
| jeffbee wrote:
| AMP does not require any such thing. Anyone can implement
| the AMP cache, there are multiple existing AMP caches,
| and you can serve AMP without a cache, without in any way
| impairing the function of an AMP page.
|
| https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/spec
| /am...
| dmw_ng wrote:
| https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/27546
|
| Perhaps I'm wrong, but my interpretation of this ticket
| is that Google's AMP validator currently does not
| validate self-hosted JS, which means no special handling
| ("acceleration") on their search results.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| RSS only gave/gives me a headline. Its fairly rare that
| the entire article is available via RSS.
|
| Also is doesn't help for dynamic search. The main
| situation I'm thinking of is I'm on moble searching for
| something thats hosted by a local news site. the AMP page
| generally loads in <2 seconds. The original page will
| take 5 megs of data, and ages to load.
| [deleted]
| mrtksn wrote:
| AMP does have better experience from the users perspective.
| The backlash is from the techies only.
|
| I assumed that the non-amp websites were slower due to the
| JS bloat, I still despise what the Web pages has become,
| however it turns out Google wasn't a honest broker here and
| instead of providing a tool that helps them and the users,
| they provided a tool that helps them and harms the users
| and bullies the website owners. That's evil and drains the
| last bits of trust I had left for Google.
| 8note wrote:
| Amp gives you non logged in versions of websites.
|
| Anyone whos usually logged in somewhere is impacted
| negatively
| mrtksn wrote:
| Fair. So far there are three issues pointed out here that
| I'm not happy with too.
|
| To re-cap:
|
| 1) Sharing AMP links is weird, feels wrong and Non-AMP
| links are hard to get
|
| 2) Breaks Safari's reader mode
|
| 3) Gives sub-par experience for websites that provide
| better experience when logged in since the AMP version is
| always the non-logged-in version.
|
| None of those are deal-breaker for me because AMP pages
| come as a search results and fast loading results are
| very valuable for me when skimming to find the right one.
| Once I find it, I can switch to the full version(but
| Google makes it harder and harder. maybe this should be
| 4.).
| ximeng wrote:
| 4) if you don't want amp it's an extra click (once you've
| found the non-amp link) and going back then requires two
| clicks
| tyingq wrote:
| The worst of AMP prior to this story, for me, was the
| carousel behavior. When AMP rolled out, any story you
| clicked from the carousel:
|
| - Left and right swipe events were hijacked, and sent the
| user to somebody else's website with a related story!
|
| - The back button would go to Google, even if you had
| right or left swiped as described above...that is, non-
| google pages were not in the history.
|
| Then, not just carousel pages, these applied to all AMP
| pages:
|
| - A very tall banner at the top pushed your content down.
| It had an [x] button that would send you back to the
| google search rather than the expected behavior of
| removing the banner.
|
| - Finding the real url was 2 clicks deep
|
| And then just the overall weird smugness about calling it
| an open standard. Even though the _" open standard"_
| required including a google-owned javascript file via a
| <script> tag, and the validator would fail you if you
| didn't. You weren't allowed to host it yourself.
| ehnto wrote:
| I think you may even be overselling the user experience.
| I feel it was objectively confusing, because it changed
| the default behavior of the web. A regular user would
| have had no idea what was going on, just that their
| content was in front of them, so that's nice, but what
| next? Are they on Google or the website? When I click a
| new link why does the whole website change design, is
| this a different website now? What is going on.
| matsemann wrote:
| AMP had an (intentional..?) bug on Firefox for years,
| making it impossible to scroll in the internal page.
|
| Luckily it wasn't a big problem, since Google also
| intentionally gimped the search results to an old mobile
| version when using Fx, so one didn't get amp links.
| eska wrote:
| At this point I always assume that it's out of malice
| instead of incompetence. These kinds of smaller bugs for
| things that work by default are just too common for
| Google.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes - Google Cloud breaks console logins for Firefox on a
| regular basis. They'll eventually respond to a bug report
| but it's clearly not a priority, and that can't be
| intentional when tiny open source projects have much
| better automated testing.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| > Google also intentionally gimped the search results to
| an old mobile version when using Fx
|
| I guess this is my reminder to mention once again that
| using a Chrome useragent on FF mobile gets you better
| search results. It's one of the extensions you can
| download on FF for Android right now, in fact.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Everything about AMP is strictly worse in _my_
| experience.
|
| In Australia, AMP pages load slower, not faster.
|
| AMP breaks the iPhone Safari user interface, by not
| actually scrolling the whole page.
|
| The URLs don't represent the actual site to which the
| user will navigate.
|
| Logins break.
|
| App-integrated links don't work properly.
|
| And on and on.
|
| AMP is a cancer on the web enforced by a monopoly for
| their own shady purposes.
| tazjin wrote:
| On Android, Google Translate in Safari doesn't work on
| AMP pages which I find somewhat ironic.
| selsta wrote:
| FWIW Amplosion (paid iOS extension to automatically
| redirect AMP pages) is quite highly ranked on the app
| store.
|
| It clearly isn't only techies that dislike it so much
| that they actually pay to get rid of AMP.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Could be, I can't remote-sense feelings but never heard
| of a non-techie complaining about it. It might have
| become annoying when sharing though, I think they later
| made it harder to find the non-amp link(The AMP link
| looks weird, as if you are sharing the wrong URL).
|
| Anyway, the AMP experience was a fresh breath in the
| world of 10-20 seconds webpage loading times. You see the
| lightning icon, tap it and the content instantly comes.
| Swipe right and left to go through the other results and
| everything is displayed instantly, top notch experience -
| especially when Googling for stuff from the news
| websites.
| selsta wrote:
| I have found AMP to be an awful experience. It messes
| with native scrolling physics, pages are often incomplete
| or straight up broken. It also disables Reader mode on
| iOS so I'm always forced to load the full web page
| anyway. Luckily iOS 15 web extensions have solved that
| problem.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > It also disables Reader mode on iOS so I'm always
| forced to load the full web page anyway.
|
| I agree. It's one of the imperfections of the AMP. I like
| AMP for quickly skimming between the results and then
| load the original page if I find something lengthy ro
| read.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It's not an imperfection, it's by design. Reader mode
| removes ads.
|
| It also strips out all the crap the site's UX/UI people
| use to try and keep you on the site.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| >never heard of a non-techie complaining about it.
|
| I think most non-techies have no idea what AMP is to
| begin with.
|
| It's just, once again, "my phone is doing some annoying
| and unexpected shit I didn't ask for".
| acdha wrote:
| > AMP does have better experience from the users
| perspective. The backlash is from the techies only.
|
| This is factually incorrect: as the allegations noted,
| there are many cases where AMP slows page load time - it
| required a megabyte of render-blocking JavaScript with no
| fallback. I could tell which sites used AMP because they
| loaded slower and failed entirely if you had a less than
| perfect network connection -- this was quite noticeable
| on the subway here in DC. I heard plenty of normal people
| complaining about it because it was a daily occurrence.
|
| In addition to scrolling, the other thing which people
| noticed was that AMP broke the URL for sharing. This had
| several outcomes: one was that desktop users often got
| less usable mobile pages but the other was that it made
| spoofing easier because people trusted the google.com
| domain. This was used by fake news sites in the 2016
| election cycle and at least the Russian government used
| it to spearphish investigative journalists.
|
| They knew all of those risks in advance -- and people
| accurately predicted them in 2015 - and the stated
| motivation was hard to reconcile with how much less work
| it would have taken to see the performance benefits by
| simply incorporating speed into search rankings at a high
| weight; this suggests that theories about the goal of
| controlling third-party ad markets were correct.
| worrycue wrote:
| To me it didn't really make much of a difference other
| than preventing me from easily copying the URL.
| tyingq wrote:
| AMP was a historical irritant for me, and I do recall the
| tide turning over time. It was initially hard to criticize
| it here without your comments being downvoted pretty hard.
| There were a set of defenders that believed it was solely
| about page loading time, and that any "trojan horse"
| accusations were from conspiracy theorists.
|
| I think part of it was that the AMP team members were
| active here, and seemed genuine and competent. I'm somewhat
| curious how much they knew. This delay thing wasn't the
| only terrible part of AMP. The initial banner with the [x]
| button that sent you back to Google was terrible. As is the
| still-present hijacking of swipes and back button behavior
| on other people's content.
|
| I did an Algolia comment search and can see my AMP rants
| getting more traction over a 4 year period.
|
| Edit: I think it also had defenders because it forced sites
| like news organizations to re-think their 20MB+ ad and
| tracker laden story pages. So it wasn't all bad.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >I think it also had defenders because it forced sites
| like news organizations to re-think their 20MB+ ad and
| tracker laden story pages. So it wasn't all bad.
|
| This was mainly it. Modern basically-just-text-content
| sites are hilariously bloated and slow, and this seemed
| like a genuine attempt to fix it. I remember I defended
| it for those reasons. It didn't pan out that way, though.
|
| Also, I definitely remember AMP critics, or at least
| skeptics, getting plenty of upvotes from the very
| beginning, I'm not sure it was that hard to criticize.
| IlPeach wrote:
| It's crazy to me that the team dedicated to AMP had no
| control and awareness of any schemes were pulled behind their
| back. This is such a huge org problem.
|
| Unless, of course, the team leadership was on it and this was
| an insider job.
| [deleted]
| Vespasian wrote:
| If the allegations are true, they knew exactly what was
| happening and even took steps to make it seem like Google
| was not in full control of AMP.
|
| Whether front line engineers knew isn't that important. AMP
| Leadership definitely did.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > AMP Leadership definitely did.
|
| did they though? couldn't this be a small (artificial
| delay) library injected server side by some higher ups at
| Google?
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| I guess that depends: do we believe that AMP developers
| and leadership did this, possibly misguided by a promise
| from on high of "don't worry, this is normal," or do we
| believe that higher-ups were doing secret development
| work that went unnoticed by everyone else?
|
| I think it's easier to believe that the AMP team was
| simply naive, or willfully blind to the implications, or
| they didn't care (probably all 3; teams are big enough
| that there's room for all).
| tmcw wrote:
| See page 90:
|
| > Google ad server employees met with AMP employees to
| strategize about using AMP to impede header bidding,
| addressing in particular how much pressure publishers and
| advertisers would tolerate.
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| thank you for finding (and posting) this.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| It happens. Just make sure to remember this the _next_ time
| you 're tempted to assume a corporation is acting in good
| faith.
| FractalHQ wrote:
| I'm on my phone so I can't find it now, but I remember an
| elaborate GitHub or chrome dev thread where users and google
| devs explored the 1 second delay in depth, and a reason for it
| relating to an issue where some ads could break or fail to load
| without the delay. Not sure how legitimate my memory is, but I
| recall folks on hn defending it at the time.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| In case anyone reading is unaware Google already inserts
| artificial delay into page loading times, to allow for header
| bidding. Online advertising proponents would argue this delay
| is below human perception. But the perceptibility of the wait
| should be for users, not Google, to decide; it is artifical and
| undisclosed delay, for the benefit of advertising. If users
| were told about it and could avoid it, no doubt they would. As
| we can see, artificial delay can be used as an anticompetitive
| measure.
|
| These tactics, similar to deliberately introduced
| incompatibilities or performance differences, are old hat. For
| example, through the 90's, third party software for Windows
| never ran as smoothly as software issued by Microsoft. It was
| not the same "user experience". So long as this sort of conduct
| remains "legal", these companies interpret that as permission
| to engage in it.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| So much software is too slow today. I don't think developers
| remember that users will not perceive your software as
| instant if you don't get the result in 100ms.
|
| I cancelled my evernote subscription because it is too slow
| to start up. If I need to access a note on my phone, I don't
| want it to take perceived time, because then I have to go
| through the effort of remembering what I am trying to write.
|
| I have switched to Apple notes, which seem to get this.
| VRay wrote:
| At two large tech companies I worked for, people loved to
| throw around the term "blink of an eye!" to justify
| anything around 100ms
|
| "Oh, that'll load in the blink of an eye! Only as much
| latency as the blink of an eye!" etc
|
| It was damn frustrating to try and explain to these clowns
| that things look like crap if you pile up 2+ blinks of an
| eye on top of them. In the case of VR, even one "blink of
| an eye" is about 10x too much delay
| mthoms wrote:
| Is this delay on the HTML page being served? Or on the
| associated (ad-loading) scripts?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > it is artifical and undisclosed delay, for the benefit of
| advertising
|
| So ad blocking makes everything faster!
| kbenson wrote:
| > Google already inserts artificial delay into page loading
| times, to allow for header bidding.
|
| How does this allow for header bidding? Anything needed could
| be done in page or with a connection that delays the response
| until some condition is met.
|
| The browser adding an artificial delay seems like it's just a
| way for the browser to control the process, and when the
| browser is controlled by an ad network, that makes me very
| suspicious as to the motives for an artificial delay.
| [deleted]
| triska wrote:
| What a read. Almost every single paragraph in the document leaves
| me speechless. For example, quoting from the document:
|
| _" Google likes to claim that it will "never sell your personal
| information to anyone," with Google CEO Sundar Pichai deceptively
| claiming that such a policy is "unequivocal." But Google
| leverages intimate user data and personal information to broker
| billions of daily online ad impressions between publishers and
| advertisers that target individual users based almost entirely on
| their personal information. Internal documents confirm that
| Google knows its users are deceived by its misrepresentations,
| even as it reaps billions from ads that use personal data to
| target those users. In Orwellian terms, it's a beautiful thing
| for Google, the destruction of words like "sell" and
| "personal.""_
|
| Or:
|
| _" Google presents a public image of caring about privacy, but
| behind the scenes Google coordinates closely with the Big Tech
| companies to lobby the government to delay or destroy measures
| that would actually protect users' privacy. Of course, effective
| competition is concerned with both price and quality, and the
| fact that Google coordinates with its competitors on the quality
| metric of privacy--one might call it privacy fixing--underscores
| Google's selective promotion of privacy concerns only when doing
| so facilitates its efforts to exclude competition."_
| bawolff wrote:
| I don't think the first one is a bombshell. It was always clear
| google was using personal data to target ads.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The first one helps to discredit the litigation.
|
| The paragraph's first sentence is supposed to insinuate that
| Google is lying about not selling people's data, and the rest
| of the paragraph says that Google is not selling data. And
| then the last sentence makes a completely false claim using
| popular buzzwords.
|
| What was the point of the paragraph, other than to invoke
| unnecessary emotions for no reason?
| Jyaif wrote:
| The jurors (your average american) won't notice that the
| first paragraph contains no content.
| Vespasian wrote:
| I always tell people that it would be against Googles interest
| to sell your data. Their deception is working exceptionally
| well and it's not even a lie.
|
| After all there is much more money made in selling your
| attention repeatedly then there is in selling you data once.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Internal documents confirm that Google knows its users are
| deceived by its misrepresentations
|
| Yeah. These silly terms of service mean nothing to anyone. Even
| Google knows this! Almost nobody reads them. Those who do,
| won't understand them. Who can really consent to all this
| surveillance under these circumstances? This is NOT a deal
| between equal parties, the user is severely disadvantaged.
| People click the checkbox because it won't let them create an
| account otherwise. They don't have a choice.
|
| Courts should just invalidate the contracts and start treating
| Google as if nobody consented to its exploitation. Apply heavy
| fines for every single user wronged.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > In Orwellian terms, it's a beautiful thing for Google, the
| destruction of words like "sell" and "personal.""
|
| Disagree with the claim here. Certainly, Google is utilizing
| your personal information against you, but:
|
| 1. That's certainly not selling your personal info.
|
| 2. To make this argument, US states must concede that active
| commercial advertising has an aspect of harm and manipulation.
| I doubt any of them are actually willing to go ahead and adopt
| that position consistently.
|
| Having said that... when we read Google's claim that
|
| > it will "never sell your personal information to anyone"
|
| let's also not forget that it's quite willing to give it for
| free to the US government, in bulk and forever.
| djrockstar1 wrote:
| 159-169, about Google being able to decrypt end-to-end encrypted
| WA (WhatsApp) communications is terrifying. The fact that Google
| has known this for over 5 years and made no effort to notify the
| public is what really got me. What's fucked up is that Google
| Drive backups are the only ones WA offers, and naturally everyone
| wants their messages backed up so they turn it on, not knowing
| the implications.
| oezi wrote:
| And what are the implications?
|
| Is Google analyzing uploads to Google Drive to serve you
| targeted ads? That would be a big breach in trust.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Is Google analyzing uploads to Google Drive to serve you
| targeted ads?
|
| Is there any reason to believe they're not doing that? It's
| already a known fact that they scan files for malware and
| other illegal files such as CSAM. WhatsApp backup contents
| are a gold mine of personal information.
| jvolkman wrote:
| Well, they explicitly say so in their privacy policy.
|
| > We don't show you personalized ads based on your content
| from Drive, Gmail, or Photos.
| RNCTX wrote:
| > and what are the implications?
|
| Remember when Google was working on the DoD's autonomous
| murder drone project?
|
| Isn't WA the predominant means of text communication for
| people who travel abroad regularly?
| Jensson wrote:
| > Remember when Google was working on the DoD's autonomous
| murder drone project?
|
| They did just a demo, Amazon and Microsoft are the biggest
| contractors in that space. News media loves to shit on
| Google in these scenarios but most of it is just Google
| trying to take a pie of markets others are already in. So
| all these articles just amounts to Google becoming as evil
| as the other tech giants.
|
| For example, we know Microsoft takes on these DoD AI
| projects. Maybe the VSCode telemetry is used to help them
| make murder drones? We also know Microsoft collaborates
| with CCP to operate its bing search in China. Maybe they
| hand over the VSCode telemetry to CCP? People don't ask
| those questions about Microsoft, so why ask them about
| Google?
| bawolff wrote:
| Google clearly should have communicated this better, but also
| not exactly shocking.
|
| How would you make a backup end-to-end encrypted without asking
| for a passphrase or relying on on device storage? I don't think
| its technically possible.
|
| Maybe google could have tied it to your login credentials, but
| then no more password resets.
| ikiris wrote:
| WA?
| [deleted]
| djrockstar1 wrote:
| WhatsApp. My bad on that one - edited it.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I think WhatsApp addressed this recently. It was an issue with
| both iOS and Android, where chat backups were not end to end
| encrypted. I think this was an absolutely absurd gap that
| betrayed customer trust, but it isn't clear to me if Facebook
| is more at fault than Google and Apple or if it is the other
| way.
|
| WhatsApp blog post on encrypted backups:
| https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/end-to-end-encrypted-backu...
| zahllos wrote:
| Slight nitpick I know but decrypt here is the not quite the
| right word. The communications are still encrypted in flight
| but they are necessarily decrypted (by WhatsApp) on the end
| (your device). This unencrypted file is then provided to drive
| if you select back up with Google drive in WhatsApp.
|
| I'm in two minds about this one. I'm not really a fan of Google
| but realistically we're talking about backing up messages from
| a Facebook app. It is also possible to opt out and I know non
| technical people who have done so on the basis they don't want
| "more Google".
| Springtime wrote:
| _> This unencrypted file is then provided to drive if you
| select back up with Google drive in WhatsApp._
|
| And in terms of the grandparent's point about the public not
| being notified for 5 years, perhaps not by Google is
| accurate, though it was raised by Telegram's founder in
| response to Snowden's recommendation of WA back in 2016 [1]
| and covered elsewhere [2]. Snowden was rather dismissive of
| the relevant point about this, which always puzzled me.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/durov/status/778618631060066304
|
| [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170729003715/https://www.ma
| keu...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > This unencrypted file is then provided to drive if you
| select back up with Google drive in WhatsApp.
|
| Why can't they just encrypt the data?! It makes no sense. I
| manually back up my messages because of this. After some time
| WhatsApp will start nagging me to enable cloud backups. I
| suppose this fits into the "annoy users until they give up
| their privacy" theme in the litigation document.
| lozenge wrote:
| Encrypt it with what key? WhatsApp doesn't have passwords,
| it's fully based on phone number verification. Do you want
| WhatsApp to hold the key for you? Or prompt you to create a
| key which they won't be able to recover?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Or prompt you to create a key which they won't be able
| to recover?
|
| Yes. I have a YubiKey I could use for this.
| gerash wrote:
| There are a lot of allegations here and I'd like to know which
| ones turn out to be true.
|
| That said, I'd also like to understand the motivation behind the
| fact that only red states AGs are in the plaintiffs. I rarely
| associate red state AGs with any form of integrity and in fact
| red state governments generally represent the frontiers of
| kleptocracy. So color me skeptical
| reilly3000 wrote:
| I've worked in advertising/media buying, at a header-bidding at
| network that (obligitorily) used DFP/Ad Manager, and an
| enterprise publisher. Its all true. Their hegemony of ad
| serving (which isn't free), their bid preference, their rigging
| of AMP ads, and also search promotion of AMP properties are all
| extremely real and monopolistic dynamics. I wish this action
| came sooner.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Welp, it's time to de-google my networks then. Facebook traffic
| is already blocked, now I wonder how much Web content I will lose
| when I block all google traffic.
| therealmarv wrote:
| That's a complicated topic. Because man things stop working if
| you block whole Google from your network. Just imagine webfonts
| or embedded Google maps like in apps Uber or Yelp.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Yes, exactly. Many websites already don't work if they use
| any of google-based frameworks or services, while my ad
| blocker blocks non-1st party domains by default. If a website
| or app doesn't work then, well then c'est la vie.
| alangibson wrote:
| Let's never forget that we techies need to help protect the
| integrity of the internet even if there is no immediate, obvious
| harm to consumers. We're all at least suspected that Google was
| playing dirty with AMP, but it was frequently defended based on
| some pretty trivial consumer benefits. I see some minds being
| changed in this thread, especially when it comes to AMP, so
| that's a step in the right direction.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Seems like a big nothingburger. Doubt anything will come of this.
| balozi wrote:
| A very curious collection of plaintiffs. Is this another partisan
| issue? Does this abuse not harm Californians or New Yorkers? For
| that matter, why wouldn't the Federal gov not lead this?
| mrobot wrote:
| They lobbied on some antitrust bills:
|
| https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/bills?c...
|
| An interesting one is the "1 Agency Act", which was "To transfer
| antitrust enforcement functions from the Federal Trade Commission
| to the Department of Justice, and for other purposes." --
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2926...
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| I hope we can keep politics out of this thread, but I couldn't
| help but notice all of the plaintiff states are dominantly
| Republican states. Any ideas why that would be and why the "blue"
| states aren't present?
| rhexs wrote:
| You "hope we can keep politics out of the thread", and then,
| shockingly enough, are the only person to bring politics into
| an antitrust thread about gross systemic abuse of Google's size
| and power to drive standards and privacy.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| There is a bias against technology in the red tribe, as they
| generally lean left (or are perceived to do so).
|
| Not that it matters, we need a new generation of anti-trust
| over this. Google must be prohibited from engaging in selling
| or buying ads.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| Not sure about this particular case but I think there's
| multiple different ones going on so just looking at this might
| be a bit misleading of whose taking an interest. Eg. there's an
| NY case mentioned here: https://ag.ny.gov/press-
| release/2021/attorney-general-james-... The Biden DoJ is also
| digging: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/technology/google-
| antitru...
| jclulow wrote:
| I assume it's because Republicans are, on average, more
| butthurt about technology companies of late because of the bare
| minimum level of fact checking some of the social platforms
| have engaged in during the most recent election cycle.
| Regardless, Google should be nailed against the wall, and
| though there is little doubt in my mind they will in absolutely
| no way be appropriately punished for their poor behaviour, it's
| difficult to complain about people taking shots at them.
| willis936 wrote:
| Could you expound on "bare minimum level of fact checking "?
| It seems to me that one tribe was proportionately de-
| platformed for their violations of ToS and is unhappy with
| not having the power to do something about it.
|
| If the road to hell is paved with good intentions then maybe
| the road to heaven is paved with bad intentions?
| jclulow wrote:
| Don't be taken in by the idea that balance for the sake of
| balance is some kind of absolute good. If I say that the
| earth is flat, and you say that the earth is round, the
| newspaper headline probably shouldn't be that nobody can
| agree on what shape the earth is.
|
| One tribe, as it happens, says rather a lot more daft and
| dangerous things than the other. It's not possible to _hope
| and good cheer_ someone into doing something, but it is
| possible to _terrify_ them with angry rhetoric and
| falsehoods. I think people who are making a bunch of shit
| up should probably not be given a megaphone, whether
| they're speaking for my tribe or yours.
| mrobot wrote:
| Except both tribes put out slightly difference flavors of
| the one major falsehood: that US foreign policy helps
| anyone, anywhere, for any reason, ever.
| juanani wrote:
| As long as the tribes think voting makes a difference,
| let em vote.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| I assumed it was because of the major tech industry presence
| in the states that are conspicuously absent. Offices and
| datacenters, and thus lobbyists on retainer.
|
| I admit I'm not very current on this stuff, but isn't Texas
| one of the few states in that list that has a sizeable number
| of datacenters?
| ls15 wrote:
| > Any ideas why that would be and why the "blue" states aren't
| present?
|
| Most of Google's political donations go to democrats.
|
| https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/90-perc...
| Jensson wrote:
| If this becomes too big of a deal then Google will just shut down
| Google Ads to other sites, or spin it out as a separate entity.
| It doesn't make them that much money compared to just running ads
| on their own site, and nobody can claim they are anti-competitive
| in a marketplace that only serves ads for their own sites.
| cletus wrote:
| I've had a few people call me a shill for Google on these threads
| since I'm a Xoogler/Ex-Facebooker (it's literally in my profile)
| so I'm going to quote myself here [1] from 7 months ago:
|
| > Giving advantageous ranking (including, but not limited to,
| showing AMP content in Top Stories) is the very definition of
| using your market power in one area (search) to force publishers
| to adopt something else you created.
|
| > For a company that is (or should be) very careful about
| attracting antitrust attention from the US/EU, this seems
| completely reckless.
|
| I've always hated AMP. Publishers are forced into it by the
| ranking advantages. Users have no opt out. It breaks the mobile
| UI (eg pinch to zoom). It's horrible.
|
| There was a time when the _idea_ wasn 't terrible because a lot
| of websites were terrible and slow on mobile, somewhat ironically
| in no small part due to all the ad libraries they loaded.
|
| But it was clear who benefitted the most here was actually
| Google. Now I always suspected that this was the result of some
| org trying to increase their impact.
|
| If it turns out as the suit alleges:
|
| > To respond to the threat of header bidding, Google created
| Accelerated Mobile Pages ("AMP"), a framework for developing
| mobile web pages, and made AMP essentially incompatible with
| JavaScript and header bidding. Google then used its power in the
| search market to effectively force publishers into using AMP.
|
| Boy oh boy is that a problem. And again I'm going to say I called
| it.
|
| The other damning part:
|
| > The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a
| result of Google's throttling. Google throttles the load time of
| non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order
| to give Google AMP a "nice comparative boost."
|
| Wow. Just... wow.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26561769
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| > There was a time when the idea wasn't terrible because a lot
| of websites were terrible and slow on mobile
|
| Yes, and that time was the early 2000's, and the solution was
| not AMP but WAP[1]. Google effectively re-invented WAP about 15
| years after it was no longer necessary.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
| phatfish wrote:
| I had completely forgotten about WAP, but i remember using a
| WAP browser of some sort on an old Sybmian Nokia now i think
| about it.
|
| Before add-ons worked with Firefox mobile (and I could
| install ublock), browsing the web on a phone was awful. If i
| remember it was around the time that AMP launched in 2015
| that Firefox mobile got add-on support. So there was
| certainly a problem more recently that 15 years ago.
|
| The adverts on news sites were so bad that AMP was able to
| make mobile pages clearly better from a UX point of view. But
| that was largely a problem of Googles own making, and their
| "generous" fix was obviously stacked in their favour.
|
| All users needed was the ability to install an ad-blocker on
| their mobile browser, but of course Google was never going to
| allow that for Chrome.
| rob_c wrote:
| About time. Don't think there's anything more to add on this.
|
| Let the truth whatever it may be win out.
| antonzabirko wrote:
| This is good, now if only we could tax the damn company lol.
| option_greek wrote:
| Surprising that Volkswagen and Boeing can be under scrutiny and
| pay massive fines but this EvilCorp gets a pass at everything.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The surprising (or not so surprising) thing about VW was that
| anyone who works in ECU tuning can tell you that a)the
| emissions cheating has been going on for decades and b)everyone
| has been doing it. They can pop open the assembly language for
| the ECU and said "and here's where it detects a signal from the
| ABS controller that only two wheels are being driven, and
| here's the data table of mixture and timing values it switches
| to."
|
| It was also pretty absurd given that the US used to exempt
| "trucks" (including SUVs and even "crossovers") from passenger
| car emissions standards. This was (decades ago) to make things
| easier for farmers, supposedly, by sparing them the cost of
| emissions control equipment on their farm trucks. But the auto
| industry sold the government on the concept that what amounted
| to a jacked up station wagon car on bigger tires somehow didn't
| need to meet the same emissions standards as a passenger car,
| so they got to make more powerful engines with less emissions
| controls, and this is part of the reason we have SUVs
| everywhere.
|
| I've been told by multiple Ford superduty owners that they rip
| out the urea injection and diesel particulate filter systems
| because "they're unreliable" and "it's such a pain keeping the
| DPF fluid topped off" and "it hurts performance." You can buy
| DPF in damn near any gas station that sells diesel, any auto
| parts store, any big-box retailer, any truck stop...and you get
| a warning well before the tank runs dry.
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