[HN Gopher] Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising ...
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Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge
rules
Author : IdealeZahlen
Score : 593 points
Date : 2025-04-17 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| doom2 wrote:
| Decision here:
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Google really should start floating some plans for splitting
| itself up. Things worked out pretty well when Ma Bell was split
| up. Some people thought it would all fail, but the companies have
| done a good job competing and cooperating at the right times.
|
| If Google comes up with the plans, it's better than some
| antagonist.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Google seems harder to split up than Bell to me. Bell was split
| regionally which makes sense since each region has it's own
| wires and can make money separately. Google has the problem
| that all their products other than adds lose money (or make
| money through integration with Google adds)
| alabastervlog wrote:
| This is exactly why it's important to bust them up: all those
| other products are effectively "dumping" on whatever sector
| they compete in. This even discourages time-investment (to
| develop) and learning-to-use investment (for users) for
| _free_ alternatives, not just commercial ones.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| All of their products helped the sector they are in. They
| didn't "dump" into it. Google continually improved areas
| where other companies previously refused to, even if they
| were charging for their services.
|
| Mail. Internet browsers? Does it really need to be stated?
| Open source. Kubernetes. Open source. Tensor architecture.
| Freely released.
|
| I don't see the argument for breaking Google up other than
| people are holding some vendetta against Google for being
| successful AND a pretty good citizen in the overall
| landscape so to speak.
|
| If anyone needs to be broken up it's Microsoft. Microsoft
| actively harms every other competitor by bundling all their
| services together to the point where businesses won't even
| look at other software (teams? Azure is basically sold on
| nepotism).
| bdcravens wrote:
| Their business apps division is probably a billion dollar
| business.
|
| Their cloud generates a couple of billions in _profit_
| each year.
|
| Besides that, I don't think giving away anything for free
| justifies any activity. If we're trying to compare to
| Microsoft, remember that Internet Explorer was free, and
| modern day Microsoft literally owns Github.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| Revenue is not really a consideration when talking about
| _illegal_ monopolies. That is an incorrect way to view
| this. It's about anti-competitive practices. That's what
| the laws are about (and the reason for their existence).
|
| Google is not anti-competitive. At no point am I forced
| or even "guided" into doing business with Google, at any
| stage, in any department. There are 8 billion other ad-
| networks out there, and there are plenty of mail
| providers to choose from, and plenty of search providers
| to choose from, and plenty of cloud providers to choose
| from. If you're on gmail (even business), or Google
| Cloud, or Adsense, there really isn't much stopping you
| from switching to something else. There's no real lock-
| in.
|
| You cannot say the same with Microsoft. A lot of
| businesses are so dependent on MS's offerings they might
| as well just be glorified subsidiaries. You don't really
| have an Excel drop in, or an AD drop in, or a messaging
| app drop in that comes with all the other services.
| Google doesn't hand out Cloud credits with the express
| purpose of roping more of your business infrastructure
| under one company.
|
| Internet Explorer was not free. You needed Windows. And
| if you had Windows you HAD IE, regardless of whether you
| wanted it or not, or even tried to remove it.
| CPLX wrote:
| > Google is not anti-competitive.
|
| While you're welcome to this opinion you might want to
| address the fact that Google has recently lost THREE
| separate trials, each of which individually and
| separately produced a verdict that they are, in fact, in
| violation of laws against unfair competition.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| You mean the three trials which are definitely not
| politically motivated, right?
| bdcravens wrote:
| > Internet Explorer was not free. You needed Windows. And
| if you had Windows you HAD IE, regardless of whether you
| wanted it or not, or even tried to remove it.
|
| Can you use Gmail, Google Drive, Chrome sync etc and opt
| out of allowing Google to use any of your data for
| advertising services?
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| I can in fact, go to a different mail provider, use a
| different file hosting and sharing service, and use
| different browsers with different sync technologies.
|
| All of that I can do _for free_ with little to no hassle.
|
| This was not the case with IE. You are not doing a fair
| comparison here, and it's bordering on dishonest.
| xigency wrote:
| I think you misunderstand what 'dumping' means in this
| market context. Sure, free software like Linux is great.
| But if you didn't have that preconceived notion, a
| competitor dumping free software on the market to make
| others' initiatives unprofitable would look like an anti-
| trust violation, rather than a charitable act of
| community.
| bdcravens wrote:
| That's a business model problem then.
|
| Any other business burying money into various endeavors would
| have to cut losses at some point, which underscores the point
| of an unfair monopoly.
|
| Google isn't operating at a loss in all products. About 12%
| of revenue is cloud; about 12% is everything else. Their
| business apps is estimated to be a billion-dollar business on
| its own. Cloud is profitable, and earns probably 1.5-3
| billion dollars a year in profit.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Any other business burying money into various endeavors
| would have to cut losses at some point
|
| Google has a massive graveyard full of killed projects,
| they are cutting their losses, few companies cut as much as
| they do:
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| bdcravens wrote:
| While at first glance this may disprove the idea that
| they don't cut losses, it actually furthers the argument
| that advertising revenue creates perverted incentives,
| since they blew massive amounts of money on projects with
| no financial value. Moreover, while those products are
| dead, the data gained likely made its way into the
| advertising information flow. If you were a competitor to
| one of those dead products, or an advertising company
| that has to carefully evaluate the cost effectiveness of
| an auxiliary product, Google has an "unfair" advantage
| over you.
| ajross wrote:
| Yeah. The problem with splitting up Google is that Google
| products, taken in isolation, are _themselves_ keys to
| preventing other monopolies.
|
| Split off Android to swim on its own and we get an iPhone
| monopoly. Split off Workspace and we go back to the days of
| MSOffice's monopoly. Splitting out Chrome essentially kills
| the World Wide Web as an application platform as no one else
| wants to support it. Cloud would probably stand alone
| competitively, but if not it's going to be an Amazon
| monopoly.
|
| Basically Google is strong in search and ads (also AI, though
| that isn't a revenue center yet and there's lots of
| competition) and second place in everything else. IMHO it's
| very hard[1] to make a pro-consumer argument behind killing
| off all those second place products.
|
| [1] And yeah, they pay my salary, but I work on open source
| stuff and know nothing about corporate governance.
| snozolli wrote:
| _Split off Android to swim on its own and we get an iPhone
| monopoly._
|
| Why? Android appears to be profitable.
| ajross wrote:
| Only Google-integrated Android devices are profitable.
| You really think Graphene/Lineage/etc... devices have a
| chance in the market vs. _Apple Computer_? Splitting off
| the integration means those devices have to pay for it or
| go without. Even Amazon failed in this space.
|
| Which is to say, the parts of Android that are
| "profitable" are the parts tied to the broader corporate
| product suite.
| snozolli wrote:
| _Only Google-integrated Android devices are profitable._
|
| I don't understand what you're trying to say. Pixel
| devices? Android devices being paid by Google to use
| Google's app store, browser, and default search engine?
| What does any of that have to do with whether or not
| Android is separated?
|
| _You really think Graphene /Lineage/etc... devices have
| a chance in the market vs. Apple Computer?_
|
| What does that have to do with whether or not the Android
| 'division' of Google would survive being spun off?
| ajross wrote:
| If the only way to sell a profitable product is to buy
| its core value-add (Google integration) from someone
| else, then your product isn't profitable by definition.
| Split off Android and Pixels become just another Fire
| Phone, and will compete just about as well (or worse,
| since the spun-off Android division wouldn't even have
| free Amazon integration).
|
| Again, there are Google-free Android phones in the market
| today. They do very poorly.
| newsclues wrote:
| The baby bells just bought each other up, and nothing really
| changed
| bdcravens wrote:
| Then there's no harm in splitting Google and letting them buy
| up those companies in 30 years.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Even worse, when the local exchange carriers were renting
| their infrastructure and trying to compete on the thinnest of
| margins, it allowed the baby bells to see who could survive
| and who couldn't. Those who didn't survive went under. The
| successful smaller CLEC's, were then bought by the baby bells
| for their customers.
|
| They essentially created a test market for their competitors,
| then simply acquired the ones who presented any kind of
| competition or had decent enough management to properly
| manage the very thin margins they were working at.
|
| So yeah, even when the govt _thought_ they had leveled the
| playing field and allowed competition, all it did was give
| those baby bell companies another competitive advantage.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > Things worked out pretty well when Ma Bell was split up
|
| In what way? They all just re-consolidated back into
| monopolies. I have one choice of telecom provider in my
| location: if I don't like Xfinity, I get to eat shit. At least
| Ma Bell had to get the government's permission to raise prices;
| frankly, I'd prefer having that back.
| ablerman wrote:
| It's worse than that, they reconsolidated but BellLabs was
| shut down in the process. So, they got the same control they
| previously had except they weren't spending on research. IMO,
| they should have been prevented from reconsolidating.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > In what way?
|
| It's fairly straightforward to argue that the internet as we
| know it wouldn't have been possible without the Bell labs
| split up. There were dozens of large telecommunications
| companies that were enabled by the split, and those companies
| built much of the equipment used in the early internet.
|
| Not to mention Unix.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Xfinity is Comcast which I don't think has much connection to
| the Baby Bells or their reconsolidation. Unfortunately the
| the cost of running cable to the broad US suburbs is a pretty
| big natural barrier to competition.
|
| https://i.redd.it/7v0zi94tms181.jpg
| lupka wrote:
| Happy to see this and hopefully there are some changes. Right now
| I'm dealing with a crazy Adsense issue and there is no recourse,
| no customer support and no alternative.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| There is no shortage of other ad platforms. Breaking up Google
| isn't going to solve your specific issue lol
| azemetre wrote:
| No but it would stop a single company from accumulating so
| much power.
|
| How you can argue such things are democratic are beyond me.
| There is nothing democratic about trillion dollar
| corporations that can ruin your business for refusing to play
| their game.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| How can Google ruin your business?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| By refusing to send you traffic that you rely upon for
| revenue? For reasons that likely wouldn't even come to
| light in a lawsuit?
| afavour wrote:
| I've seen countless examples, e.g. a business that
| depends on online advertising gets its account suspended
| for incorrect reasons and there is literally no-one to
| reach at Google to get unsuspended.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| Do you have a documented example of this?
| nickff wrote:
| Not parent, but there are many examples of this; they're
| often (but not always) unsympathetic cases due to the
| business model of the business which has been destroyed.
| lupka wrote:
| This is happening to me right now. I have run a site for
| 14 years that gets most of its traffic during the current
| two week stretch (it's related to NBA playoffs).
|
| All of a sudden, Adsense revenue has gone to basically
| zero. $90 of earnings from Sunday has even disappeared.
|
| There is no way to contact a real person at Google. You
| can just post in their dumb little forum and someone with
| no authority who doesn't even work there will reply to
| you with the same pointless info from their FAQ.
|
| If things go the way they have been, it seems like
| roughly $2k in revenue that's been pretty consistent for
| the last decade is going to be basically zero this year
| and there's nothing I can do about it.
|
| Thankfully, this is just a side project and I'll be fine,
| but its not hard to see how they could screw someone over
| who relied on it.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| You could just go to a different ad network? At that
| amount of money you're not on the ad exchange.
|
| I don't see how this is ruining your business. A vendor
| is not playing well with you, just go to another one?
| lupka wrote:
| The key factor is the timing. During the primary week
| where this product generates income, Google completely
| screwed me over with no warning and no answers about
| what's going on. I am of course looking into
| alternatives, but that takes time, and 3 days from now
| it'll be too late.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If you made your business become completely dependent on
| a third party, you were already a failure and shouldn't
| have a business. Being a successful businessman is not a
| right. It's competition.
| CPLX wrote:
| The reason monopolies are illegal is precisely because
| they force people to be completely dependent on a third
| party.
|
| Is a farmer "a failure who shouldn't have a business" if
| some asshole buys up every single railroad, port, and
| truck in the country he lives in?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| No, but if he makes himself for example completely
| dependent on Monsanto, he shouldn't have a business,
| because he's in practice an employee with all the
| financial responsibilities of a business and none of the
| benefits of having a business. And none of the benefits
| of being an employee either.
|
| If your business model is to make yourself completely
| dependent on a single third party, then you shouldn't
| have a business.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Wow, all those fortune 500 companies whose infra entirely
| relies on 3rd party cloud infrastructure really must be
| in for a rude awakening. You should update them with your
| cunning analysis and inform them they are failures.
| efsavage wrote:
| The tone here isn't great but parent is more correct than
| not. This is why large companies don't use freebie
| services. They vet companies and partners, sign
| enterprise deals with support, SLAs, penalties,
| insurance, even bonds in some cases. It costs more, and
| it's hardly fun for most people, but it's all part of
| mitigating those risks. And it's not just tech, you see
| the same thing in non-tech industries like manufacturing.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It really isn't. Most businesses export core business
| functions to a third party in some way. This is just a
| snotty navel gazing post without much content that was
| responded to in kind.
|
| It's completely reasonable to use adsense to generate
| revenue and then be upset when they inevitably fuck you
| (and they will). It's not a chance to make a (completely
| uninformed) "ah, that's your own fault" comment,
| deflecting from scumbag practices google engages in.
| Hasu wrote:
| I love it when my counterparty's breach of contract is my
| fault because I foolishly trusted that they would do what
| they said they would in exchange for my money.
|
| I'm sure you also believe that she was asking for it
| because she was wearing a short skirt and your dad was
| right to hit you because you wouldn't shut up.
| bigyabai wrote:
| If you aren't prepared for the contingency where your
| counterparty bails, then yes, strategically you are
| failing to commoditize your product for the specific
| market. I think that's the basis of competition and free
| market economics.
| azemetre wrote:
| lol in what world is breaking paid user contracts and
| flagrantly getting away with it democratic? What does
| free market even mean in this context? That the big
| trillion dollar corporation can bury you in legal fees or
| remove your means of making money with no way to question
| the decision to prove it was done in error?
|
| This is insane. In no free society would this be just.
|
| They need to rightfully be broken up to ensure a free
| society for everyone, not just the cohort of people that
| own alphabet stocks.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Show me the contract where Google promises to bring web
| traffic to your business.
| afavour wrote:
| Isn't one of the specific complaints about monopolies
| that it leaves you with no choice but to be dependent on
| the third party?
|
| If Google blocks my access to the only viable ad network
| do you really think it's reasonable to say I need to set
| up my own ad exchange?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Trillions of dollars are spent on advertising outside of
| Google. You can advertise in print, billboards, radio and
| television ads, Netflix, or on social media behemoths.
|
| Hackers call every big business they do not like a
| "monopoly". What's next, Burger King is a monopoly? I
| dislike Google more than most and would never buy nor
| sell ads with them, but they have no monopoly on
| advertising.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm sorry, this perspective is absurd. I'm talking about
| a web site that shows ads. You're suggesting they pivot
| to running off billboards? To creating TV shows?
|
| > What's next, Burger King is a monopoly?
|
| I think this just illustrates that you're not grasping
| the concept. Of course Burger King isn't a monopoly. With
| my car when looking for a drive through dining experience
| I can go to McDonalds. Or Wendy's. Or whatever. When
| operating a small to medium size web site that depends on
| advertising for revenue the viable alternatives to Google
| essentially don't exist.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Situation 1: You want to advertise your product or
| service. There are endless options outside of Google,
| including some options where the audience is counted in
| the hundreds of millions.
|
| Situation 2: You want to let others advertise their
| products or service in your space. There is an endless
| amount of companies which you can contact to make
| advertising deals. If you are too lazy to do that and
| want a third party to take care of it, then you can use
| Google as a middle man. But they are not obliged to do
| business with you.
|
| If the justice wants to go after Google, then they could
| (and should) prosecute Google (and Meta, and Twitter) for
| all the scam and malware ads they permit through their
| platform. That is billions of dollars of money
| laundering, and the CEOs should be imprisoned for this.
| For life.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Of course it's not democratic, but what business ever is?
| There is no recognized right to access the advertising
| market on terms that you like.
| azemetre wrote:
| Yes there is no right to access an advertising market for
| Google, luckily the government agrees they are an illegal
| monopoly. Hopefully the ramifications are massive and
| company breaking.
| fallingknife wrote:
| If that happens this will do nothing for you. You will go
| through some other company where you can't talk to a
| human.
| dlachausse wrote:
| What other ad platforms do you recommend for monetizing
| mobile apps?
|
| Any that you've had good luck with? My research on this has
| come up with no good options for non-game apps.
| rom16384 wrote:
| You could try AppLovin MAX, even if it's best for games.
| dlachausse wrote:
| Thanks! That looks like exactly what I'm looking for.
| lupka wrote:
| Do you have a recommendation of an alternative that I can
| switch to easily and on short notice? The site I'm having
| trouble with gets 95% of its traffic for the year this week
| so I'm scrambling.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Make it so you either sell ad space or offer a marketplace
| for ad space sellers and advertisers. Don't allow a company
| to do both and you conveniently catch most social media
| players too...
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| If you think antitrust has anything to do with why it isn't
| profitable for a company at Google scale to pay a human being
| for every one of the hundreds of millions of people who use
| AdSense to have customer support...
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Are there hundreds of millions of AdSense customers though?
| ezst wrote:
| Of course it has everything to do with antitrust.
|
| Imagine for a second that, instead of 1 Google, there are
| tens of thousands of alternatives. Offering good customer
| support becomes once again a competitive advantage. No sane
| customer thinks "yep, I want no recourse at all in case of
| problem so google's profit margins are bigger for the sake of
| their stakeholders".
|
| Moreover, the cost of doing customer support grows less than
| linearly thanks to economies of scale, from which Google
| benefits disproportionally, and here again Google chose
| profits over quality at the expense of the consumer.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I feel like there's a scale in between "dedicated employee
| for every customer" and "normal call center agents with some
| tiers of support above them to help with issues" yeah?
| 6510 wrote:
| They have one of the best LLM's in the world. I got _5000
| images rejected_. Now I can read about the requirements and
| not figure out why. It gets truly hilarious where the images
| are rejected by means of AI. It means they can produce 100%
| accurate reasons right on the rejection page. Ill even pay
| for it. I would also pay if it can correct the images. They
| have plenty of good but complex services that LLMs could
| deliver wonderful support for. Their LLM could also sell me
| services I currently cant be bothered to look at. Eventually,
| over the years the LLM can slowly be allowed to negotiate and
| make decisions too.
| LordShredda wrote:
| A smaller ad company can afford to have customer support. If
| there are tens or hundreds then each one can lose customers,
| better than one massive company that doesn't care or can't
| afford and would rather keep the money than pay for support.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Just switch away from Adsense.
| lupka wrote:
| Do you have a recommendation of an alternative that I can
| switch to easily and on short notice? The site I'm having
| trouble with gets 95% of its traffic for the year this week
| so I'm scrambling.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Sorry I don't - I was purely prompting the idea that there
| should be no anti-trust related issue that would stop you
| switching.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| A drop-in replacement for Adsense is a very good idea
| though. I wonder if someone knows of one here.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| tried carbon ads?
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Google isn't a monopoly in the Standard Oil sense of the term.
| Its ad revenue is big because it occupies so much user attention.
| I actually think many suggested remedies would actually make
| Google more profitable.
|
| For example, prohibiting Apple-Style search deals would mean that
| Google gets a smaller amount of traffic, but that traffic would
| come with zero cost. That could end up being more profitable. A
| similar argument applies to Chrome or any other customer
| acquisition vehicle.
|
| The real barriers to making Google competitive are fixable but
| require a different sort of regulation outside of antitrust.
| yoshicoder wrote:
| I mean it wouldn't make sense for it to be more profitable for
| google if there were no search deals, since otherwise they
| would just cancel the deal themselves. Clearly they see long
| term value in blocking out competition even at that high of a
| price
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Google can't cancel it right now because then otherwise Bing
| would bid for it. Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from
| bidding it would protect against this.
|
| A historical parallel is when tobacco advertising was banned,
| and cigarette companies because more profitable. Advertising
| greatly affected which cigarettes people smoked but had a
| smaller (though still real) impact on whether they smoked. So
| the companies kept most of the revenue with none of the
| advertising cost.
| chii wrote:
| > Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it
| would protect against this.
|
| why would anti-trust rules prevent _anyone_ from bidding?
| Apple can sell their browser search, just like mozilla can
| sell firefox search. And anyone with a browser could do the
| same. Unless the anti-trust rules somehow become so
| overarching that the selling of space for advertising
| becomes illegal?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I think it would be a good move to prevent browser deals.
| There is no reality in which the winner is Firefox, Kagi
| or DDG - it will always be Google or Bing. That's clearly
| anticompetitive - it locks the other browsers out of a
| major share of the market.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| If you're arguing we should split Chrome development from
| Google then I'm 100% with you there.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Sure, but I'm arguing Apple shouldn't be allowed to sell
| "default browser" status on iOS. Show the customer a
| randomized list and let them choose. Google will probably
| still dominate, but it won't be because they paid to.
| staunton wrote:
| Google could argue (correctly?) that if split, Chrome
| couldn't exist without browser deals?
| DrillShopper wrote:
| That's belied by the fact that Chromium exists, and I
| speculate they spun up Chromium in case they were ordered
| to break up.
|
| The engine is also used in several other web browsers,
| many of which do not have the clout to survive solely on
| ads. Yet another reason Google claiming this is absurd.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| You highlight some genuine points of difficulty for
| antitrust enforcers.
|
| If the rules were targeted at Google only then Google's
| lawyers would argue this is unequal application of the
| law. Even if the courts rejected Google's argument
| there'd be a real risk end up with exactly the same
| situation but with Bing in a couple of years time as they
| become the default search on every device / browser.
|
| If "pay for default" deals were banned altogether then
| Firefox might be seriously hurt, which isn't exactly good
| for the competitive tech ecosystem.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| The real reason that tobacco advertising ended on
| television is the fairness doctrine.
|
| After the FCC agreed that the fairness doctrine applied
| here every station was required to run one PSA for every 10
| tobacco ads. The industry, realizing that nobody would stop
| advertising without being forced to, actually lobbied
| Congress for the passage of the law banning it. One reason
| total revenue went up was that stations were no longer
| required to run anti-smoking PSAs.
| elpool2 wrote:
| It would make sense if Apple decided to still have Google be
| their default, even without the payment. Not sure how likely
| that is though.
| blasphemers wrote:
| It depends on the what the browsers end up doing. If they
| just surface a select your search engine dialog during set
| up, most people will just select google and nothing will have
| changed besides the cost. If they set a non-google search
| engine by default, they will lose ad revenue because of
| people not bothering to change the default.
| abirch wrote:
| Depends on the default search engine. Many people went of
| their way to download a web browser that wasn't Internet
| Explorer for many years even though IE was the default.
|
| If the default search were randomly assigned and Google
| investors were nefarious the investors (not Alphabet) could
| simply help launch 30 different subpar search engines. Then
| if a user landed on one of those as a default search
| engine: the user would switch to Google.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It would be great to separate the search index/engine
| from the ads and allow other search portals to pay for
| the index and choose how to monetize.
|
| If google actually went about organizing the worlds
| information, that would be wonderful.
| nativeit wrote:
| > Google isn't a monopoly in the Standard Oil sense of the
| term.
|
| Aren't they? It doesn't sound like those two interpretations
| are mutually exclusive.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| In the sense of the Sherman Act and similar legislation,
| monopolies exist in the sense of having exclusive control
| over some supply and raising prices against consumers.
|
| This isn't what Google does, they generally lower prices for
| consumers and the competition is only a click away.
| dlachausse wrote:
| What realistic alternatives are there in the mobile app ads
| space that aren't geared towards games?
|
| I'm genuinely curious because some apps can be hard to
| monetize in any other way.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In the sense of the Sherman Act [...]
|
| > This isn't what Google does [...]
|
| Odd, then, that this is the second case within a year where
| Google has been found, in fact, to have violated the
| Sherman Act. This suggests that your description of what
| the Sherman Act means, or of what Google does (or both) are
| wrong in significant ways.
| no_wizard wrote:
| The consumer harm standard is an outgrowth of the work of
| Robert Bork, who was Solicitor General for Nixon and Ford,
| respectively.
|
| It was not established by legislation but rather as a
| matter of conservative legal doctrine. Before Bork the
| commonly held evaluation standard was based on the Rule Of
| Reason.
|
| The Sherman Antitrust Act didn't establish any guidelines
| for how it was suppose to be interpreted (the whole thing
| is only a few pages in length) and the Clayton Act only
| expanded upon what actions could be considered as part of
| an Anti trust case.
|
| The consumer welfare standard has no basis in legislation,
| only legal doctrine.
|
| It's unfortunate we haven't codified anything more
| concrete, as the consumer welfare standard has a number of
| flaws, as admittedly did prior legal doctrine.
|
| The Rule of Reason was more rigorous, though not flawless,
| as far as market competition goes though, my view is it is
| a better legal doctrine overall and could be updated to
| better address todays and future concerns, particularly
| with digital goods and technology.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I judge this Chicago-school-pushed shift in antitrust
| enforcement _so bad_ that I usually mark it out as the
| first noteworthy step on our current thrust toward
| authoritarianism.
|
| The market consolidation we've seen since, and the
| concentration of power, have been absolute poison for
| both liberal democracy and the good aspects of
| capitalism, so far as contributing to the common good.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The consumer of the ad platform is the advertiser, not the
| person clicking the ad. Major advertisers either play ball
| with Google or their ads don't get seen in search. Doesn't
| seem very different to Standard Oil controlling who got
| access to refineries.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 87% of Googles revenue in 2023 was advertising. $265 billion.
| They hold more than 80% market dominance in all markets they
| compete in.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Market share and market dominance are very sensitive to how
| you define the market.
|
| Facebook has >$100B ad revenue [1]. Does that compete with
| Google? Reasonable people can probably disagree about exactly
| how much so. From an advertisers perspective they compete for
| the same marketing budget, but from a consumers point of view
| they feel like different products.
|
| Things get even more tricky when we compare YouTube to
| TikTok, or Amazon search result ads to Google search ads.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/544001/facebooks-
| adverti...
| internetter wrote:
| Kinda surprised. Google's core business is advertising. Some
| vertically integrated aux services (like chrome) feel ripe for
| antitrust, but I wasn't expecting ads themselves. What is Google
| without ads?
| bdcravens wrote:
| ("Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist")
|
| Everything else. Cloud provider, operating systems, browsers,
| hosting business apps, phone licenser, Internet provider, smart
| home manufacturer, and various moonshots. Their ad company is a
| monopoly because of those other services.
|
| Google as an ad company that can't leverage those other lines
| of business to gain an advantage over other ad companies still
| has a viable ad business. They can compete on the basis of that
| lone company's strengths.
|
| ("If you're nothing without this suit, then you shouldn't have
| it")
| internetter wrote:
| Thanks, I like the last quote. But I'm curious... Would it be
| preferable to have Google owning all of these services you
| listed--just not the ad company they depend on, or the
| inverse--all the companies are spun out?
|
| I see your point, but also, if Google continued to own all
| these other things, it would still be a terrifyingly large
| spread, no?
| bdcravens wrote:
| Large companies, even monopolies, aren't the problem.
| Unfair leverage to suppress competition is. Those products
| without the subsidizing revenue of ads, and ads without the
| information flows of those products, is the goal.
|
| Who gets what part of the company is the wrong question to
| ask. The org chart would get split along those business
| units. In all likelihood, the company called "Google" would
| be the software side, since that's where search lives.
| lanstin wrote:
| They are a problem in terms of an efficient free market;
| they make the information flow asymmetrically biased in
| their favor, and cause higher prices and implicit
| collusion. That is true even without any intent to harm.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Sure, but generally speaking that's an orthogonal to the
| issue of antitrust. The same could be same of many of the
| typical "big tech" players, or even some of the YC
| "winners".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Google can afford to lose money on many of those things
| because of the ad monopoly. (How much is Android worth in
| that it keeps Apple out of antitrust trouble with iOS? What
| quid pro quo does that enable?)
| tiltowait wrote:
| Being a monopoly, in itself, isn't illegal. The question is
| whether the company maintains its monopoly through illegal
| tactics or leverages that monopoly in illegal manners.
|
| (NYT really ought to add "illegal" to their title.)
| dang wrote:
| The HTML doc title has that wording, so we've swapped out the
| article title for that. Thanks!
| ndiddy wrote:
| The original Google research paper by Brin and Page explicitly
| points out that a search engine financed by advertising is
| inherently anti-consumer:
|
| > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial
| search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising
| business model do not always correspond to providing quality
| search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine
| one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of
| Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which
| explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated
| with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search
| result came up first because of its high importance as judged
| by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation
| importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search
| engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads
| would have difficulty justifying the page that our system
| returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and
| historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we
| expect that advertising funded search engines will be
| inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the
| needs of the consumers.
|
| > Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate
| search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A
| good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling
| companies the right to be listed at the top of the search
| results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of
| bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not
| clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay
| money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar,
| and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less
| blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For
| example, a search engine could add a small factor to search
| results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from
| results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult
| to detect but could still have a significant effect on the
| market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an
| incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example,
| we noticed a major search engine would not return a large
| airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a
| query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive
| ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search
| engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted
| in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search
| engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point
| of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer
| advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what
| they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported
| business model of the existing search engines. However, there
| will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to
| switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But
| we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed
| incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search
| engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
|
| Kind of funny how they basically predicted Google's degradation
| years in advance.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| They were really smart guys. But smart guys don't stand a
| chance in the face of _all that money_ because it attracts
| people who _know how to manipulate and control smart people_.
| Smart people think they're at the top of the totem pole. But
| really its _those without ethics_ who sit at the top in our
| society.
|
| This is a conundrum humanity must address if we're to survive
| over the long term, IMO.
| lanstin wrote:
| A powerful argument against excessively large corporations.
| When the companies are competing fiercely, the amoral folks
| can't game the system.
| foobarian wrote:
| > This is a conundrum humanity must address if we're to
| survive over the long term, IMO.
|
| Who's to say that this is not actually an evolutionary
| adaptation that allows the more ruthlessly led tribes to
| dominate their enemies? The stat about 1/25 of individuals
| being sociopaths is very telling
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Each and every one of us has the ability to _choose to be
| better_. That so many just "go along with whatever" is
| why I personally think we're unlikely to survive over the
| long term, unless a more enlightened species leads us by
| the hand.
| pyfon wrote:
| Can we get to human or better intelligence through
| evolution without tribal behaviours?
| moshegramovsky wrote:
| Even if you're correct, is that the world you want? (And
| to be clear, I'm not saying it's the world you want.)
|
| DNA isn't destiny.
| moshegramovsky wrote:
| This is seriously one of the best things I've ever read
| here. Extremely well said.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Your kind words are appreciated, thank you.
| pyfon wrote:
| Not only that, username checks out!
| dboreham wrote:
| Psychopathopoly.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| If there isn't a Voight-Kampff test for this there needs
| to be.
| imiric wrote:
| You're implying that smart people are somehow inherently
| ethical, but were manipulated by unethical (and less
| smart?) people. Whereas some of the least ethical people in
| history were also very smart. Intelligence is practically a
| requirement for truly abhorrent behavior.
|
| Greed is humanity's greatest weakness. When faced with the
| opportunity of unimaginable wealth, most people would
| sacrifice their ethics and morals, assuming they had any to
| begin with.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Google is playing all sides of the dice. They used adsense to
| enlist publishers. They used adwords to get marketers. They
| used an ad buying and selling platform to corner the entire ad
| line.
|
| Google bought Doubleclick for $3 Billion. Today it is worth $22
| Billion. When Google got into ad-tech, they drifted away from
| their core market: users. And started to endorse the other side
| that turned users into products.
| hnfong wrote:
| IIRC, before Google got into ad-tech, they didn't have a
| business model. Not sure whether "core market: users" make
| sense in this context.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Their business model was search advertising. And they
| created many product products from that revenue. They tried
| to monetize the other products which is why they got into
| ad tech .
| turtletontine wrote:
| You've nailed the first two stages of enshittification in
| your story there. Stage 1: bring in users with a genuinely
| good product they like! Stage 2: once users are locked in,
| prioritize your business customers (in this case,
| advertisers) and make things continually worse for your
| users.
|
| But stage 3 is just as crucial: once the advertisers are
| locked in, make things worse for THEM just for your benefit.
| That's how google makes such obscene margins on adverting.
| Publishers and advertisers would love an alternative - but
| google has done an excellent job of preventing that through
| unlawful monopolization tactics. Hence thus case, and why
| it's so important.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The market is being unfairly defined based on how things worked
| decades ago instead of looking at the modern landscape. Tech
| evolved rapidly and the way things worked decades ago may not be
| optimal for the end user as things change.
| seydor wrote:
| > how things worked decades ago
|
| you mean, before monopolies?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Everything is a monopoly if you limit the market enough.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Monopolies in and of themselves aren't a problem, and
| aren't illegal. Unfair leverage to prevent competition is.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The existence of competition doesn't always make things
| better. For example forcing middlemen to exist so that
| there is competition can lead to a worse situation than
| without middlemen. Direct to consumer is unfair leverage
| to middlemen, but it can be better for consumers.
| CPLX wrote:
| This is not correct and a common misconception, on both
| sides of the argument.
|
| Both monopolies and monopolistic actions are illegal,
| each alone is enough to be in violation of the law.
| bdcravens wrote:
| You're right, but probably not in the way you think.
|
| This probably calls for even stronger consumer protections,
| since the natural limit of human scalability created something
| of a limitation as to how large and dominant a company could
| be.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| If the Meta case goes this way too, the ripple effects could be
| huge. Might affect the bay area, startup scene and a lot of
| others in ways we can't even grasp yet. All we can do is wait and
| see..
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Pretty crazy how this case gets the full support of thr DOJ,
| along with actions against Harvard, Colombia ect. I dont mind
| Google being broken up, but how am i supposed to respect the law
| when the same DOJ lets out ponzi schemers and bond villians
| because they donated 500k to a Trump friendly super pac.
|
| If im Google or anoother tech company im going to be Divesting
| from the United States as much as possible.
| Extropy_ wrote:
| Who are these people that are let out (of jail? prison?)
| because they donated to a super PAC? Not arguing, just curious
| megaman821 wrote:
| I don't think this article explains it well. Google sells ad
| space on behalf of the publishers and also sells the ads on
| behalf of the advertisers. It also runs the auction that places
| the ads into the ad space. See this graphic
| https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7. Parts of this can
| definately be broken up without destroying Google.
| coliveira wrote:
| Google can extract as much money as they want from this
| equation, up to the limit of available capital for advertising.
| They just need to squeeze more from publishers and at the same
| time increase click costs. They have been doing both of these
| for several years.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > They just need to squeeze more from publishers and at the
| same time increase click costs.
|
| but publishers receive stable share of click cost (67%?), so
| they should be happy with this arrangement.
| stasomatic wrote:
| That's assuming a click happened. Premium pubs prefer
| guaranteed fixed CPMs no matter the amount of real clicks.
| I've worked for a few years at one of the major native ad
| companies, I'm very familiar with how the sausage is made.
| riku_iki wrote:
| In both scenarios publishers look good:
|
| 1. CPC: google has strong incentive to generate clicks,
| because that's where they get revenue: advertisers are
| charged per click.
|
| 2. CPM: publishers get their guaranteed CPM if that's
| their choice.
| whatever1 wrote:
| At the very least the exchange has to be audited. Currently we
| have no idea whether the prices are a result of natural supply-
| demand dynamics or whether the exchange keeps artificially
| pumping the prices with lackluster demand
| fidotron wrote:
| Or design errors in the algorithms doing the bidding!
|
| There's serious nerd sniping potential in asking how best to
| construct an automatic bidder, especially with the speed and
| scale requirements in place. It's an incredibly deep problem,
| and I don't believe there is a single right answer.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > There's serious nerd sniping potential in asking how best
| to construct an automatic bidder, especially with the speed
| and scale requirements in place. It's an incredibly deep
| problem, and I don't believe there is a single right
| answer.
|
| The problem is that it is unwise to trust an bidding
| algorithm designer whose incentives are aligned against
| yours. Google benefits from higher winning bids.
| scarmig wrote:
| Key point is that it's a system that you shouldn't trust,
| not any individual algorithm designer or implementer.
| Bugs that cost Google money will be found and fixed
| really quickly; bugs that make Google money will linger
| and go unnoticed.
| fidotron wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| In the ad tech space the only winners are the people
| building and operating the adtech; everyone else is a
| sucker.
|
| The only truly novel version of it which I have seen
| emerged from the Turkish hypercasual games space, where
| they managed to construct a giant audience everyone else
| thought was worthless, funnel them into their games, and
| then use the attention in the games to sell access to
| this apparently worthless audience.
|
| Of course the audience actually were worthless, because
| all they were really interested in was new free
| hypercasual games, so the real suckers here were other
| devs that paid to access this audience but didn't have
| the adtech chops to make the most of it before the
| players moved on, and they funded their competition in
| the process.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Well yes, a higher winning bid will win the auction,
| unless it's a Private Marketplace auction.
| fidotron wrote:
| Isn't the point that some bidders will not know which it
| is when they make the bid?
|
| RTB bid requests have support for the normal auction
| based bids but also indicating possible private
| marketplaces which may come into play depending on the
| exchange and seller, meaning that the highest bidder will
| have indicated to the world their price, but not won the
| auction, so they may (erroneously) conclude next time to
| try bidding higher, leading to price distortions.
|
| I suspect a large proportion of advertisers still believe
| the whole thing is a nice transparent fair auction
| process, and have no idea of how convoluted it has
| become.
| secondcoming wrote:
| They do know if the bid is part of a PMP. They can still
| place an Open Market bid if allowed but they should
| reduce their expectation of winning that auction, even if
| they're the highest bidder not because of skullduggery
| but because the publisher has a prior arrangement with a
| DSP or advertiser.
|
| Valuing a bid is a complex and interesting task. Ever
| since Second Price auctions started dying out DSPs should
| have moved to essentially algorithmic trading. A price
| calculation depends on tens if not hundreds of factors
| that are evaluted on a per auction basis.
|
| Advertisers have been demanding more transparency into
| where their money is going for quite some time now. If
| you're an advertiser and your DSP isn't giving you
| detailed reporting into the fees they're being charged
| then it's time to move DSP.
| jt2190 wrote:
| Yeah I'm listening to a legal analyst on Bloomberg radio and
| there's a _lot_ of detail that's getting lost under the
| headline. It's not yet even clear yet that Google would need to
| divest from _anything_ in order to address this.
|
| Bloomberg Radio April 17 2025:
| https://www.youtube.com/live/iEpJwprxDdk?si=9WaFIJENUwyIJvpk
| fidotron wrote:
| In fairness to Google on this (and I cannot believe I just
| wrote that) it's common practice to be on both sides like this,
| and even to have some external exchange in the middle that you
| have a deal with just so you can claim it's obviously fair.
|
| That entire industry is a horrifying shitshow of sociopathy, at
| the expense of absolutely everyone else, both viewers (supply
| side) and advertisers (demand side).
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| On the plus side, it would be nice to make an example of
| Google and deal a blow to ad tech in general. At this point
| even putting to sleep the entire google(or any other ad tech
| company of your choosing) Board is acceptable if it means ad
| tech shuts down.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > Parts of this can definately be broken up without destroying
| Google.
|
| its about Display Ads business, which is 10% of Google revenue
| as per article. So, everything there can be broken up without
| destroying Google.
| pydry wrote:
| The question is more "would you expect google to reoffend given
| the chance again?"
|
| Not "is it strictly necessary for them to be broken up to
| prevent them from reoffending"?
|
| 100% I would expect them to reoffend. No question whatsoever.
| shostack wrote:
| There's a lot of unknowns at this point, but here's an industry
| piece for a more informed perspective on it.
|
| https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/google-is-found-guilty...
| hammock wrote:
| And crucially, there are leaked emails, other evidence that
| demonstrate (at the very least historical and occasional)
| corruption of this dual- (multi?) agency arrangement. Among the
| allegations:
|
| The Google ad exchange favored its own platforms, limiting the
| ability of other exchanges to compete fairly in bidding for ad
| inventory. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-
| department-s...
|
| In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices
| for ad inventory.
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-giv...
|
| Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on who
| will win a bid, again to inflate prices.
| https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-rig...
|
| Google entered market allocation agreements to create an unfair
| playing field. https://www.winston.com/en/insights-
| news/avoiding-antitrust-...
| andreimackenzie wrote:
| > In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the
| prices for ad inventory.
|
| This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should
| drive the price down, because fewer advertisers are competing
| for the same potential ad impression. The article describes
| Google's influence as "Google controls the auction-style
| system," which is a bit more open-ended about the specific
| alleged practices.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| > It was argued that this approach allows Google to charge
| higher prices to advertisers while sending less revenue to
| publishers such as news websites.
|
| It could depend on how they 'limit the number of bidders'.
| If they sell seats to be able to bid, then the bids are
| lower to account for that, and publishers get a share of
| the bid, not the fee bidders pay. I'm guessing though...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You could limit to one mark and a bunch of planted
| bidders in an attempt to control competition. If you win
| with your plants, you get to pay yourself anyway.
| fn-mote wrote:
| I'm willing to believe there's an issue with Google's ad
| sales, but this comment doesn't have the specifics I'm
| interested in - in spite of all of the citations.
|
| > In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the
| prices for ad inventory.
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-
| giv...
|
| I had a hard time finding any specifics in that article. It's
| about closing arguments and does not even mention the number
| of bidders.
|
| The DOJ press release [1] would be a better citation.
|
| > Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on
| who will win a bid, again to inflate prices.
| https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-
| rig...
|
| Note that this link is just to the _definition_ of bid
| rigging, not an accusation against google.
|
| > Google entered market allocation agreements to create an
| unfair playing field. https://www.winston.com/en/insights-
| news/avoiding-antitrust-...
|
| This is an article "Avoiding Antitrust Issues In Search Term
| Ad Agreements".
|
| [1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-
| release/file/1563...
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Wasn't part of the Double Click acquisition some sort of
| guarantee this exact situation wouldn't happen?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the
| prices for ad inventory.
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-
| giv...
|
| Note that this link says absolutely nothing to support the
| sentence before it. Which isn't a surprise given that
| limiting the number of bidders could hardly drive the prices
| those bidders are paying _up_. But the issue isn 't even
| mentioned.
| crowcroft wrote:
| When a media buyer puts $1.00 in on one side of the system, on
| average only $0.60 makes it to the publisher. In some cases
| less than $0.50 gets to them.
|
| Advertising is an intentionally complex system so that
| companies can clip the ticket at multiple stages throughout the
| process. Google should be broken up, but the whole ad tech
| system needs to go into the bin if these problems are going to
| ever get fixed.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/02/15/how-muc...
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| The (Open)RTB system makes things more competitive and
| reduces costs for advertisers by making unsold inventory
| available to an automated marketplace while also increasing
| revenue for smaller publishers who otherwise wouldn't have
| been able to create first party relationships with
| advertisers. The middlemen are various identity providers and
| other tracking/data enrichment services, as well as third
| party exchanges, DSPs and SSPs. Believe it or not this system
| makes it a lot cheaper than just having someone buy ad space
| directly on a website
|
| > Three industry studies showed less than 50 cents of every
| dollar goes to showing ads.
|
| Every penny of what is spent goes to showing ads, by
| definition. However, that doesn't mean that every penny goes
| to _the publisher_. The advertiser may look at the 60 cents
| being spent on everybody between them and the publisher and
| say "hey, I'm getting ripped off! I could be paying 4
| cents/CPM instead of 10 cents/CPM!" but each middleman
| (usually) adds some kind of value to increase acquisition
| rate. For example:
|
| * Identity providers who have lists of user IDs that belong
| to "high CTR" audiences (users more likely to click ads)
|
| * Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's
| location is so that they can target locally-focused
| advertisements to them
|
| * User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product
| recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction
| events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted
|
| * Exchanges which conduct auctions across multiple DSPs to
| get a better price for publishers while also making more
| inventory available to advertisers
|
| At one company I worked for, we allocated impressions ahead
| of time. Based on prior years' data and viewer ratings of TV
| shows, we could _predict the future_ , determining how many
| viewers a video or TV show would get, and then selling the
| advertising inventory based on that prediction. That shit
| ain't free!
|
| All of these things are designed to increase your acquisition
| rate from x% to y%, where x > y. Sure, you could just pay
| $5,000 a month to a website to show a banner ad directly, but
| a larger % of your money would be wasted on users who are
| utterly uninterested in your banner.
| crowcroft wrote:
| > each middleman (usually) adds some kind of value
|
| This is the argument that gets made, but very rarely is it
| true.
|
| From Neumann et al in 2019 [1]
|
| "When investigating gender (being male) and age (three
| different tiers: 18-24, 25-34 and 35-44 years)
| individually, we find that digital audiences for gender are
| on average less often correct than random guessing
| (accuracy of 42.3%)."
|
| If the accuracy of targeting is worse than random guessing
| on average then it's value is less $0.00. Advertisers would
| reach more of their target audience by simply buying more
| media instead of spending money on 'targeting' even after
| you discount wastage to $0.00 in 'value'.
|
| I agree with everything you're saying about programmatic
| *in theory*, but I would argue that in practice the whole
| system is just broken.
|
| [1]
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3203131
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I have tried to sell ads and never been able to fill all
| my inventory and often the rates are poor and the ads
| brand destroying. If you are _The New York Times_ it is
| different but a site that makes $1000 /mo in ads can't
| afford an ads salesperson and in the big scheme of things
| that is royalty.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Have you tried prebid? It lets you send your bid requests
| to as many exchanges as you want so you can advertise
| your inventory to as many DSPs as possible
| PaulHoule wrote:
| When I talk about "sell" I mean sell directly with a
| human touch. Like the way a newspaper or a network of
| radio stations has actual salespeople that sell ads.
| tmtvl wrote:
| > _* Identity providers who have lists of user IDs that
| belong to "high CTR" audiences (users more likely to click
| ads)_
|
| > _* Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User 's
| location is so that they can target locally-focused
| advertisements to them_
|
| > _* User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting,
| product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user
| interaction events and build profiles of people who can be
| retargeted_
|
| That's _horrible_! In a better world such practices would
| be made illegal and those involved would be hung, drawn,
| and quartered.
| tlb wrote:
| Geotargeting of ads is essential for local businesses.
| Banning it would make advertising only practical for
| national brands. It would be bad for the world if only
| national brands could advertise.
| prepend wrote:
| I live in a unique town name in the US, pretend it's
| "Foo."
|
| I tried to buy ads for "Foo photography" as people in my
| town literally type that in. And my budget wasn't enough
| to buy all instances of that search.
|
| I didn't need geotargeting for my local business.
|
| Comically google kept trying to geotarget. Every time it
| did this I would get people all over the place who
| searched "photography" and a large percentage was burned.
| I kept trying to turn off geotargeting.
| cornel_io wrote:
| None of that seems at all user-hostile to me, it's
| literally all aimed at making sure what the user is shown
| is more likely to actually be useful to them.
|
| I guess this is a big and probably unbridgeable divide,
| some people think this sort of thing is obviously evil
| and others, like me, actually prefer it very strongly
| over a world where all advertising is untargeted but
| there is massively more of it because it's so much less
| valuable...
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| I'm on the other side of the divide from you.
|
| However, mine and many other folks' position is not
| preferring untargeted intrusive annoying ads over
| targeted intrusive annoying ads. It's preferring almost
| zero ads with maybe the rare, non intrusive easily
| avoidable ad on certain appropriate websites[1]. That is
| why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great
| lengths to avoid the status quo.
|
| [1] a shopping website having a _single_ banner on the
| home page announcing an ongoing sale for HP laptops is
| OK. However, if I search for lenovo laptops and I see a
| HP laptop as the first "sponsored" result....(Looking at
| you amazon).
|
| And about tracking, I absolutely don't want my librarian
| running to my travel agent telling him I recently looked
| up france travel guides. The digital equivalent of this
| happens daily to everybody. It's simply a no-no for me,
| there can never be a justification for it.
|
| The fact is that if you ban these two classes of
| practices, the whole of ad tech comes crashing down. I
| hope everyday for this to happen.
| LunaSea wrote:
| > That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to
| great lengths to avoid the status quo.
|
| And so you're paying for the content you're reading as
| well?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| "useful to them" - do I really need to know how much one
| day dental implants cost in 2025?
| dboreham wrote:
| They do them in one day now?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| According to all these ads I keep seeing, yes.
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| As someone who has worked in AdTech I would respectfully
| disagree. It is indeed complex but it is incredibly
| efficient. Also it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns
| 75% or 30% of the total revenue. What matters is how much
| they are earning compared to the next best alternative.
|
| Some companies like Google are incredible at this. Google is
| not a "monopoly" in this space. In fact the world has far too
| many Google equivalents but absolutely no one comes close to
| Google in generating top dollars for publishers. I am saying
| this after working for 10+ years competing against Google.
| xmprt wrote:
| Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do they
| do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like it's
| impossible to do both because what's good for one group is
| bad for another. Fortunately with healthy competition we
| solve this problem since alternatives could be used.
|
| But since Google is playing both sides and has so much sway
| over the market, they're able to manipulate things. Even if
| they're not manipulating things to their benefit, it's
| still not great to have a single party have so much
| control.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a two-sided market and it doesn't have to be
| either/or. Google has a wide range of advertisers so it
| can find one that converts on your site and it has a wide
| range of sites so it can find ones that work for a given
| advertisers. Also Google has a large database and user
| inventory for personalization so it can find ads that
| convert on your site even if your site wouldn't attract
| ads otherwise. the personalization economy has all sorts
| of ads and might be brand destroying in the case of
| retargeting but you see that crap everywhere whereas many
| Google alternatives run brand-destroying ads and pay you
| $0.00 after rounding.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| > Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both
|
| but that is the value of a marketplace, aligning buyers
| and sellers via the price mechanism
| oblio wrote:
| Isn't this decision about Google abusing their
| marketplace (as all marketplace owners will inevitably
| do), by pushing their own stuff?
|
| Every setup where someone makes the platform and sells
| stuff built on top of it is inherently abusive. You just
| don't know when the abuse will come and against whom.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do
| they do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like
| it's impossible to do both because what's good for one
| group is bad for another.
|
| There's certainly _some_ tension between advertisers and
| publishers, in that advertiser would like to pay less and
| publishers would like to be paid more; but there 's a lot
| of things an ad exchange can do that are good for both.
| Selecting ads to display that result in meaningful
| downstream conversion is good for both advertisers and
| publishers, because they'll both get paid and maybe
| something about the user getting something they want too.
|
| Showing inappropriate and ineffective ads isn't great for
| the advertiser, and it might make the publisher money in
| the near term, but it can drive users away and tends not
| to be sustainable --- advertisers stop advertising in
| venues where they don't get results.
|
| The value of a _good_ ad exchange for the publisher and
| the advertiser is when it provides reasonable matching at
| a lower cost than the parties arranging advertising
| directly. Possibly some amount of assurances for both
| sides too --- the exchange should ensure the advertising
| code and destinations aren 't going to compromise the
| publisher or their user and should ensure that the ads
| paid for are actually seen (to the degree possible).
| There's room for the exchange to profit from scale while
| still being lower cost than self-managed advertising.
| CPLX wrote:
| > it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of
| the total revenue
|
| Of course it matters if a middleman is skimming off 70% of
| the revenue in a given market.
|
| > it is incredibly efficient
|
| On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the
| matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly
| efficient"?
|
| > What matters is how much they are earning compared to the
| next best alternative.
|
| Right, which is why _it is illegal to prevent there from
| being a next best alternative_ via anti-competitive
| practices which is precisely was was proven in this trial
| after a detailed examination of the evidence.
| hamp95 wrote:
| > On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the
| matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly
| efficient"?
|
| One where the market maker is taking up the cost of
| providing a market. E.g. Steam takes a 30% cut for
| providing the infrastructure required to distribute
| games. Some people/companies can do it for less but it is
| the best option for a majority of sellers.
|
| If the market maker did not the seller would get more
| revenue but would also eat the cost directly instead of
| paying someone else to do it.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Are you saying that serving ads costs more than running a
| news site?
|
| This also neglects the fact that the programmatic market
| routes billions of dollars intended to be spent on real
| media (ad placements on real news websites etc), to
| fraudulent mobile apps and websites and bot traffic.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| 30% is a long way away from 70% and Steam are providing
| substantially more of a service for that cut.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > One where the market maker is taking up the cost of
| providing a market
|
| Does a landlord on a literal physical market take 30% of
| revenue? I find that unlikely.
|
| How did we arrive here, where supposedly 'efficient'
| digital marketplace is a form of rent higher than
| actually building physical rent, and expenses on wages
| and materials for a typical business?
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Unfortunately a lot of economic activity in general today
| is just money-on-money financialism. It is all just
| gambling and rent seeking and dishonesty. These practices
| are whitewashed and given various names. The one for
| rent-seeking is "market making".
|
| Ad platforms too are fundamentally about letting someone
| perceive ROI lesser than their real ROI, for your own
| benefit. For me, it falls under the same category as all
| of the above - zero productivity endeavours.
|
| Maybe we should go back to the previous millenium and
| make usury illegal. Should fix all of these problems,
| albeit in a nuclear fashion.
| mathteddybear wrote:
| It is 'incredibly efficient' because it is incredibly
| good at predicting clicks, conversions, or even
| conversion values. Which in turn makes it efficient.
| Sure, there is something called "auction" there, but
| Sothesby's or Tattersalls generally don't have buyers
| bidding based on what some machine-learning prediction AI
| computed in a jiffy (or maybe they do these days, who
| knows).
| adrr wrote:
| There are three parties. Media Buyers, publishers and
| users. As a publisher, you can go with "dumb" platforms
| that don't deliver quality users to media buyers because
| of relevancy, you'll make less money m. Apple ad platform
| is 40/60 split but for media buyers, it's not efficient
| so we spend less money on it. Assume publishers make less
| money with it as well.
|
| We seen dumb platforms with linear tv. Go watch any TV
| with an antenna.
| ksec wrote:
| Thankfully HN is finally at a stage people can come out and
| talk about Ad tech without being harassed or attacked.
|
| Could you explain more on this. What do you think makes
| Google Ad or DoubleClick so special? And
|
| >What matters is how much they are earning compared to the
| next best alternative.
|
| Correct me if I am wrong, you are suggesting even if
| publisher only earns 30% of the revenue they still earn
| more than on other alternative platform?
| adrr wrote:
| I am on the purchasing side. Google is very efficient
| when delivering traffic especially their Max Performance
| product. Probably the cheapest of all platforms. So they
| are serving relevant ads to users who engage with the
| ads. This is win for me and I assume also a win for
| publishers who get revenue due to higher engagement.
|
| Also users should benefit because they are getting
| relevant ads. Linear tv is notorious for non relevant ads
| like all the drug ads for conditions you don't have. If
| you're forced to see ads, wouldn't you want ads that are
| relevant?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| No, I personally want to see ads that are as irrelevant
| as possible. I hate getting a sales pitch forced on me,
| and would rather see something funny or entertaining
| showing off an irrelevant product in a clever way than
| whatever your customers want to shove in front of my
| eyes.
|
| This is why I block all ads, but still appreciate super
| bowl commercials.
|
| And I have discovered that this actually works on me. I
| like the Nike ads, so on the occasions when I buy
| sportswear, I have positive feelings about Nike stuff. I
| spend 100-10000x more on stuff that isn't sportswear, but
| I think Nike gets more value from me watching that ad
| than anyone who advertises some "relevant" SaaS product
| or whatnot.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This doesn't make sense.
|
| Why would any advertiser pay the same in such a scenario?
|
| They would obviously value your attention much less on
| average if that was a hard limit.
| greenchair wrote:
| I don't think relevant ads are healthy for the many
| people who do not have enough self-control to resist
| temptation. Ads are essentially playing mindgames
| triggering fear/jealousy on these people to steal their
| money. For the people who do have self-control, they
| don't need other people trying to tell them what to buy.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| That's a good argument against bad and exploitative ads.
|
| Not all ads are necessarily bad. Eg have you ever seen an
| ad for an event in your town? Maybe a play or a concert
| you'd want to see. Those to me feel more like "public
| notice: thing is happening" and every once in a while
| I'll actually go buy tickets. But technically, those are
| ads, just not the kind of exploitative ad you are talking
| about.
|
| A good ad informs, while leaving the decision up to you.
| A bad ad distracts you with garbage and/or tries to get
| you to indulge in your worse impulses
| 9dev wrote:
| You phrase it like it would be a good thing to manipulate
| people into buying stuff they don't need, to generate an
| artificial demand by exploiting others.
| worik wrote:
| > If you're forced to see ads, wouldn't you want ads that
| are relevant
|
| Thank Dog that is a false dichotomy. I am not forced to
| see ads, my ad blockers are effective. Back in the day I
| moved mountains to get MythTV working so I could dodge
| the ads on linear TV
|
| I do not want those creepy greedy monkeys anywhere near
| my data
|
| No. A thousand times no!
| milesrout wrote:
| >Thankfully HN is finally at a stage people can come out
| and talk about Ad tech without being harassed or
| attacked.
|
| Is this comment some sort of performance art? When was
| the last time any post about ads wasn't filled with
| people posting about how advertising is evil, all
| advertising should be banned, ads on the internet are
| "stealing personal information" and other things like
| that?
|
| There may have been a point where the way ads are
| delivered on the internet was positively received on HN
| but it has not been for at least a decade.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It was 10 years ago when I was serious about it but I found
| every monetization venue other than Google was a joke. If
| you had the right kind of site you could make money with
| Adult Friend Finder but everything else paid somewhere
| between 0-10% what Google did and it wasn't worth the brand
| destruction that usually resulted.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| > the world has far too many Google equivalents
|
| No it doesn't. As explained by the parent, Google is in a
| unique position w.r.t to the publishers, the sellers and
| the bidders.
|
| There's a ton of very talented adtech companies out there,
| but they only get to play an unfair game.
| crowcroft wrote:
| In theory, I agree. In practice the whole system is rotten.
|
| * Google unilaterally changing bid mechanics raising costs
| 15% https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-changed-ad-
| auctions-ra...
|
| * Conversion attribution and cookie bombing fraud from both
| Criteo and Steelhouse
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/criteo-versus-steelhouse-
| clic...
|
| * Phunware click flooding fraud https://www.forbes.com/site
| s/augustinefou/2021/01/17/ubers-l...
|
| * A nearly unending list of different mobile ad frauds
| https://www.fraud0.com/resources/ad-fraud-cases-of-the-
| past-...
|
| * Viewability fraud
| https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/31/procter-gamble-chief-
| markete...
|
| * Session hijacking fraud
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/ad-
| indus...
|
| This doesn't sound like a healthy and efficient industry.
| Not only do vendors clip the ticket aggressively, they
| divert dollars that advertisers are intending to go to
| quality media/real publishers, and siphon it off to
| fraudulent sites and apps where they generally take a
| higher margin.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You're absolutely right, publishers are picking Google with
| cause, but if Google prevented competition, that's not a
| real choice is it?
|
| There has to be some sort of competition for markets to be
| efficient, and you're essentially suggesting there hasn't
| been a viable alternative in a decade.
| prepend wrote:
| It matters when monopoly forces increase the cost to
| publishers and thus harms them.
|
| It can be great compared to next best and they are still
| harmed by illegal practices that make it worse off.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| > Also it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or
| 30% of the total revenue. What matters is how much they are
| earning compared to the next best alternative.
|
| Not if Google illegally monopolizes the market unfairly
| hindering 'the next best alternative'.
|
| > Google is not a "monopoly" in this space.
|
| You've made that comment on a post where a judge has ruled
| "Google is illegally monopolizing"...
|
| > In fact the world has far too many Google equivalents but
| absolutely no one comes close to Google in generating top
| dollars for publishers.
|
| They have not been able to compete in a fair market.
|
| This comment has some great examples..
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719246
| secondcoming wrote:
| Running a DSP is quite expensive if you have all the features
| advertisers want.
| dboreham wrote:
| Digital Signal Processor?
| tomwojcik wrote:
| demand-side platform, i assume
| bilekas wrote:
| Breaking those parts away from google absolutely wouldn't
| destroy them, over the years I've been so surprised from
| googlers at most levels explaining how much money they make
| from all their different services. While advertising is
| absolutely a big one, it's by no means the only one, and if i
| understand the situation correctly, the more advertising
| options that are actually viable for companies will not even
| kill their advertising business. But big business real doesn't
| like competition.
| Clubber wrote:
| Everyone related to the company, from shareholders down to
| the lowest on the totem pole are incentivized in some way to
| show quarterly growth, so they will do so at all costs.
| 38 wrote:
| use the actual link please
|
| https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2023/01/6371209cd0cce428b526...
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| > See this graphic https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7.
|
| Which part of this diagram is responsible for displaying ads of
| blue sweatshirt when I say "blue sweatshirt" in a room next to
| the room where my smartphone is?
| glitchc wrote:
| Decoupling the advertising marketplace from the platform would
| be a huge win for consumers. It would also help Google focus on
| products again instead of constantly bowing to the almighty ad
| dollar.
| crowcroft wrote:
| And sometimes they're the publisher as well!
| lucb1e wrote:
| There's some irony in having to click past a Google tracking
| wall to see the graphic you shared in this thread, especially
| when that graphic isn't actually Google's. It's from Gizmodo:
| https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2023/01/6371209cd0cce428b526...
| (contained in this article: https://gizmodo.com/google-lawsuit-
| justice-department-ads-an...)
|
| Was looking over my mom's shoulder last week to see what site
| she was reading out some information from. It was "google.com"
| but looked like a third party website, probably this AMP thing?
| Google really is hijacking everything
| brikym wrote:
| It's a lot more complex than that. Google has been caught
| putting their finger on the scale in the auction process. Not
| not entirely sure how they did it but I believe they were
| outbidding third party bidders by a cent because they're
| downstream in the chain.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| http://archive.md/20250417144711/https://www.nytimes.com/202...
| tonymet wrote:
| the FTC is like Jim Cramer. Once they judge a business to be a
| monopoly, the business falls apart and the monopoly is
| irrelevant. Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the
| Windows / IE monopoly trial. the AT&T break up set American
| technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip
| production.
| snozolli wrote:
| _the AT &T break up ... killed our domestic chip production_
|
| That's an interesting take that I've never heard before. Do you
| have any source that goes into detail?
| spamizbad wrote:
| AT&T was broken up in 1982. Our manufacturing peaked around
| 1990 and what really pushed it downward was China joining the
| WTO. We also halted a lot of fab construction domestically
| after the GFC of '08.
| tonymet wrote:
| the *case started in 1973 and was threatened for almost a
| decade beforehand. That put the entire industry on edge.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| To the contrary AT&T proved itself incapable of delivering
| end-to-end innovation. Sure it lowered the cost of
| intercity links for long-distance calls dramatically but
| couldn't pass savings on to the consumer. _Picturephone_
| was a technical tour de force but demonstrated AT &T
| couldn't deliver new services other than little things like
| call waiting and caller id.
|
| Notably high profits from long-distance dialup calls kept
| online services stuck at 2400 bps for most of the 1980s.
| Futurists circa 1960-1970 thought online services were
| going to become widespread about 15 years than they really
| did and AT&T was the #1 thing to blame.
| vkou wrote:
| This is an interesting theory, but US manufacturing output
| actually peaked ~2022-2024.
|
| US _wages paid_ to manufacturing jobs are going down year-
| over-year, because of automation, and, uh, other factors. But
| the amount of products that are produced has grown year over
| year... Or was growing, until _waves at everything in 2025_.
| CPLX wrote:
| > Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE
| monopoly trial
|
| The fact that we actually were enforcing antitrust at the time
| absolutely prevented MS from getting a strangehold on the
| consumer internet as it was taking off. It's the reason you're
| posting on this forum in the first place, as it was essential
| to the success of tech startups in the first dot-com era.
|
| Then we stopped enforcing antitrust laws, and after about 10
| years or so the new market leaders had developed the stifling
| set of monopolies we're all dealing with today.
|
| Breaking up Google (which seems inevitable, this is the third
| distinct recent case where they've been proven to be a
| monopoly) is likely to be good for literally everyone,
| including even Google shareholders.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Tech companies have set back technology by decades already.
|
| We can't to any P2P shit on the internet, instead everything
| goes through a middle man who will take your money or flood you
| with ads.
|
| We have bandwidth limitations on every connection, even though
| bandwidth is cheaper than it's ever been.
|
| The only universal communications system is still... Regular-
| ass phone calls and e-mail, which is like 100+ and 50 years old
| respectively. Everything else is proprietary and doesn't work
| with other systems.
|
| We have to launch tens of thousands of satellites and beam data
| into outer fucking space in order to get internet to people.
|
| Most of the "internet" all runs in 1 of 3 cloud providers.
|
| We are forced to use Chrome on Windows, or use a Phone to
| browse the web or deal with endless captchas and having to
| prove that we are humans.
|
| Search engines are all fucked and barely work. Everything is
| full of junk and trash. Now we need that chip production to run
| massive data centers to train some AI on how to sift through
| all the trash.
|
| I don't know who else to blame but the tech industry itself.
| bix6 wrote:
| Blame money. Tech can and has been used to improve our lives.
| But money talks and the focus is too much on never ending
| hockey stick growth for its own sake.
| ndiddy wrote:
| > Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE
| monopoly trial.
|
| That trial found Microsoft guilty of antitrust practices and
| ordered the company to be broken up. What caused it to be a
| waste of time was that Microsoft appealed the decision, which
| bought them enough time that the 2000 election happened and the
| Bush DoJ decided to give them a slap on the wrist instead of
| continuing to pursue a breakup.
| hash872 wrote:
| An appellate court overturned & greatly limited the Microsoft
| decision and found that the judge had engaged in misconduct.
| An appellate court has nothing to do with the administration
| in charge at the time
| dabockster wrote:
| 9/11 also happened during that time. Punishing the people
| that declared war upon the United States and destroyed the
| Twin Towers was the larger priority than breaking up one
| company.
| nashashmi wrote:
| > the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades
|
| Actually it helped the telecom industry prosper because of
| independent innovation. The innovators became separate from the
| utilizers. This allowed both sides of the industry to mature
| into full three-part businesses.
|
| I will give you that it killed other shiny unprofitable
| technologies. But imagine if that same thing happened with IBM?
| Where would IBM be today? How many old tech would be shown the
| door? How many companies would be buying the latest and
| greatest innovations?
| whack wrote:
| > _Once they judge a business to be a monopoly, the business
| falls apart and the monopoly is irrelevant_
|
| You're ignoring the reverse causality. Antitrust lawsuits
| against Microsoft in the 1990s/2000s put them on edge, and made
| them think twice about strong-arming their competition. Back
| when Google was starting to make a name for themselves, MS
| strongly considered adding a warning on Internet Explorer,
| telling people to "beware" of any results they see on Google.
| MS eventually decided against it, because of the antitrust
| magnifying glass they were under. Having a level playing field
| allowed Google to grow exponentially, and eventually rendered
| MS' monopoly irrelevant.
|
| Monopolies use anticompetitive tactics to preserve their moat,
| and continue being monopolies. When antitrust legislation works
| effectively, this moat disappears, and the monopolist is
| eventually overrun and becomes irrelevant.
| oblio wrote:
| > the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and
| killed our domestic chip production.
|
| Are we gonna pretend W<Intel> never happened?
| bogwog wrote:
| Can you provide some sources that support these claims? This
| comment is so far removed from any viewpoint I've seen before
| on this topic that I'm worried I might have a massive
| blindspot.
|
| Especially this:
|
| > the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and
| killed our domestic chip production.
| jongjong wrote:
| The most surprising thing about big tech is that most of them
| seem to be less useful than ever and yet they are making more
| money than ever.
|
| For example, it seems like nobody uses Oracle products anymore,
| yet Oracle stock is at an ATH.
|
| Microsoft Windows is less popular than ever and yet Microsoft
| stock is at an ATH.
|
| Apple peaked years ago and yet ATH.
|
| Does anyone still use Facebook regularly? FB stock is ATH.
|
| Something doesn't add up.
| whatgoodisaroad wrote:
| Java is an Oracle product
| olyjohn wrote:
| "Java was designed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. It
| was released in May 1995 as a core component of Sun's Java
| platform."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)
|
| Oracle did what they always do, buy shit out and then milk
| people for money. That's all they do with it, and why nobody
| actually uses Oracle's JDK anymore.
| hnfong wrote:
| To state the obvious, OpenJDK is also an Oracle product.
| disqard wrote:
| > Something doesn't add up
|
| The economy moved away from being founded on Marx's C-M-C to
| firmly being fixated on M-C-M' which in plain English, means
| "We now use Money to make more Money, leveraging Commodities as
| an intermediate step. The Money is all that matters, not the
| social benefit/harm" -- IMO, that helps explain why, even
| though many _people_ are suffering financially, the _market_ is
| at an ATH.
| CPLX wrote:
| > most of them seem to be less useful than ever and yet they
| are making more money than ever
|
| This is the _classic_ sign of a company that has achieved
| monopoly.
|
| They don't serve their customers any more _because they don 't
| have to_.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| The Court's Opinion:
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...
| kemitchell wrote:
| Court Listener has the opinion here:
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.53...
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I would love to see a company compete in the ad space with the
| goal of making ads _less intrusive_. If ads didn 't attack me and
| cause the viewport to jump and become obscured while reading, my
| first impression with the products would be better, and the sites
| the ads are on would get more viewership.
|
| Quality ads would be at a huge premium.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| If we must have ads, the best quality ads I see online are dumb
| ads. Just an image as a link. The most effective ads I see are
| ones on blogs where the blogger sells ad space (side columns)
| and they're just images that directly link to the product. The
| ads are relevant to the blog and readers. 99% of other online
| ads I see are visual garbage and irrelevant. The "targeting" is
| abysmal.
|
| Convincing all of these sites that Google, Meta, or other
| services, are "superior" for ads genuinely seems like
| incredible marketing. They've siphoned up enormous amounts of
| money and in return put in place a miserable user experience
| while making media companies wholly reliant on them.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Sell "dumb" ads with effort made to make the ads
| simultaneously stand out and fit into the theme of the site.
| Like how quality newspapers do it sometimes.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| The exact company you're asking for existed already, almost two
| decades ago. It was called Project Wonderful, and initially
| focused on independent blogs and webcomics.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful
|
| It never managed more than modest success and never expanded
| far outside its initial sphere. It shut down in 2018 because it
| was unable to compete with all the monopolist walled garden ad
| spaces.
|
| There are various small projects that could claim to be
| successors to that ethos -- but (to a rounding error) no one
| has heard of them because, contrary to your claim, the revealed
| "premium" that users place on "quality ads" is dwarfed by the
| premium that advertisers place on aggressive attention vampires
| (and the latter are the ones actually paying)
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| Can you share some names? Would be interesting to check them
| out.
|
| I understand why such a company will never make big money,
| but I don't see why it couldn't operate and survive. Running
| a small-scale ad network incurs small-scale costs. I guess
| the problem would burnout of people maintaining it.
| imhoguy wrote:
| I think at the beginning Google was the good one keeping
| display ads high quality, so that even some ad blocking lists
| didn't remove them straight away. But yeah, today it is
| impossible to browse some sites or use apps without being
| tricked into endless maze of close button. And when I see Temu
| ads I throw up.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I think the deed is done. We are never going back to "good" ads
| anymore. The market's greatest revenue makers are those who are
| dumb ad clickers. We need more intrusive ads to get them on
| board now. The smart ones can still use adblock.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| Web ads are bearable for me most of the time, but I'm dismayed
| by ads in mobile games my kids play. Unskippable 30 second
| videos that peddle poorly made F2P games.
|
| I manage to keep them mostly out of it by paying for worthy
| games and deleting the rest.
|
| However I would in fact happily welcome _some_ ads. Ones that
| would simply inform me of existence of masterpieces like Tiny
| Bubbles or Monument Valley rather than peddle anything. This
| idea of a tiny ad network with curated content comes up in my
| head often. Sure it won't make any money it would do some good.
| pyfon wrote:
| Turning that on its head, maybe you want something like a 90s
| shareware lost, curated by someone. Then the games you'd play
| for free are now ad free (the game is its own ad to get more
| levels). And you get that curated list. But yeah less money
| than dialing up ads to 11 while trying to find the whale
| who'll spend 1000 a week.
| pyfon wrote:
| I'd use the web more without an adblocker if this were the
| case.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I don't know whether they are a monopoly but I would like them to
| fix several things
|
| 1) Fix your search engine. Stop ignoring keywords, your product
| as it is currently sucks
|
| 2) Stop antagonizing people with user hostile actions in Chrome
|
| 3) Enough with the ideological censorship
| thrance wrote:
| Google doesn't need to fix anything for you, they basically own
| the market. Their won't be any changes unless the state does
| something. But I wouldn't expect the most corrupt
| administration to date to stand against one of the wealthiest
| organizations in the country.
|
| Also, what censorship are you referring to? Them complying with
| the new regime in advance and removing pride month from the
| calendar? Or are you playing into the conservative fantasy of
| being supposedly censored online despite evidence of the
| contrary [2] ?
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/google-
| calen...
|
| [2] https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/publication/false-accusation-
| the-u...
| heromal wrote:
| > 3) Enough with the ideological censorship
|
| What's this referring to? It seems to me they've stayed out of
| the culture war stuff (compared to Meta who is wading in it,
| for example).
| alganet wrote:
| Advertisement seems to be a hot topic for endless discussion
| these days.
|
| Throw in some "that thing sells ads" and endless tarpit
| discussion ensues with no clear conclusion.
|
| We should be better than this.
| adrr wrote:
| Weird calling them a monopoly when they only control 26% of the
| market for digital marketing. For comparison when Microsoft was
| found guilty, they had 90% of the desktop market. Att was at 100%
| when they were broken up. Standard oil was at 90%.
|
| Is this lowest percentage of market for a company being found
| monolopy?
| Clubber wrote:
| Being a monopoly is legal, it's using your monopoly status at
| the expense of the competition is what isn't legal.
| adrr wrote:
| Never said it was illegal. Hence my phrasing monopoly and not
| an illegal monopoly aka monopoly that abuses their position.
| But was defines a monopoly? 26% of market doesn't sound like
| a monopoly to me looking at past antitrust actions. Which why
| i ask my question, is this lowest percentage of the market
| for antitrust action?
| Clubber wrote:
| _In the global search engine market, Google maintains a
| dominant position. In January 2025, its market share was
| approximately 89.62% across all devices, and 93.89% in the
| mobile search market. While Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! hold a
| smaller share of the market, Google continues to be the
| leading search engine._
| adrr wrote:
| What does search have to do with this? This is on their
| display ads.
|
| You can read decision here. No mention of search.
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed
| .53...
| hnfong wrote:
| > You can read decision here. No mention of search. I
| count 13 mentions of "Google Search" and 44 mentions of
| "search" in the linked document.
|
| Of course this doesn't mean the monopoly is in "search",
| but before you complain that I just grepped the document
| for the keywords without reading it, here's the actual
| relevant text: Plaintiffs have proven
| that Google has willfully engaged in a series of
| anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly
| power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets
| for open-web display advertising. For over a decade,
| Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange
| together through contractual policies and technological
| integration, which enabled the company to establish and
| protect its monopoly power in these two markets. Google
| further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing
| anticompetitive policies on its customers and eliminating
| desirable product features. In addition to depriving
| rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary
| conduct substantially harmed Google's publisher
| customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately,
| consumers of information on the open web. Accordingly,
| Google is liable under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman
| Act.
|
| So it's quite clear the court thought Google was a
| monopoly in "publisher ad server and ad exchange markets
| for open-web display advertising". Not "market for
| digital marketing" as you alluded to.
|
| I really don't know what to make of your comments here --
| either you read the document and decided to just spin it
| as some braindead decision, or you didn't read the
| document and just wantonly claimed it didn't mention
| "search".
| franczesko wrote:
| Google also destroyed journalism as we know it. Who knows how the
| industry would look like, if it wasn't suffocated by its monopoly
| PunchTornado wrote:
| facebook destroyed journalism
| ars wrote:
| Media companies destroyed journalism by making news into
| entertainment instead of information. For example by finding
| the one extremest in a group of people and running stories
| about his minority - but exciting - viewpoint, instead of the
| boring viewpoint of most of the group.
| franczesko wrote:
| "this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google's
| publisher customers"
|
| From the money perspective it was Google. But I agree on
| Facebook's contribution, as they've pretty much created an
| advertising cartel together
| fallingknife wrote:
| Journalism destroyed itself
| chris_va wrote:
| (disclaimer that I was the TL of Google News a very long time
| ago, so feel free to ignore what I say as biased)
|
| I would argue that monster.com and craiglist, which
| collectively removed the majority of newpaper revenue, were
| probably the nail in the coffin. You can see some of the
| decline pre-internet in this 1999 take:
| https://niemanreports.org/newspapers-arrive-at-economic-cros...
| ... which already laments the decline of journalism.
|
| Pre-internet, editorial boards were fundamentally gatekeepers
| of knowledge. They were certainly not unbiased, but for the
| most part they had a level of integrity. Now, one can find (or
| have pushed) any "narrative" one chooses, whether or not it
| bears any resemblance to reality. While Google does make it
| easier to find any/all of this content, I would argue that the
| intrinsic incentives of social media platforms for more
| engagement are probably the high order bit.
| xlinux wrote:
| All the ads i see on youtube are nothing but scams. Google has
| become evil.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I've always been somewhat opposed to this, because there's
| already like 10 different search alternatives, and now AI is
| taking over, which will further weaken their grip.
|
| Google is on top because they do the best job; I use Yandex
| primarily, but I switch back to google all the time for coding
| related questions. In terms of advertising, there's billions of
| views on Facebook/Instagram/X to get, in addition to all the
| other sites. I get they're a big player, but I worry we're just
| beating Google because they're down, not because it's good for
| the consumer.
| wbl wrote:
| This is not that case. This case is about how Google only
| serves certain ad inventory to people who use their products.
| jack_h wrote:
| Then what is the definition of a monopoly? It doesn't appear
| to be the same definition as "the exclusive possession or
| control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service."
| Do they exclusively control all ad inventory? Do they control
| all devices receiving ads? GP states that they don't have
| exclusive control broadly, just within their own ecosystem.
| That's not the definition of a monopoly though, so it seems
| like a motte and bailey calling google a monopoly.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I guess my argument is you can use one of the other dozen ad
| platforms
| IshKebab wrote:
| Well they certainly _gained_ dominance by being the best and I
| would say they still are the best. But maybe there was some
| competitor that could have usurped them by being even better if
| not for their anticompetitive tactics. I wouldn 't put money
| against that...
| gregw134 wrote:
| There's really only one alternative, Bing. Virtually all the
| other western search engines are using the Bing api, and just
| slightly modify the results.
| barkerja wrote:
| I use Kagi -\\_(tsu)_/-
| p3rls wrote:
| Really? Even non-technical people are waking up and seeing the
| 3 in web3 stands for India, OnlyFans and AI content.
|
| As someone who runs a large platform in the music niche, every
| independent interesting webapp in the kpop community besides me
| has been killed by Google's ceaseless enshittification and I'd
| be thrilled if everyone who worked there had their stock
| options reduced to 0 to atone for what they've done to the
| internet.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Online advertising isn't limited to ads in search results. They
| can include ads everywhere and work as a platform for others as
| well.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > Google is on top because they do the best job
|
| You think a court hasn't considered that angle?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Curious to see how Google search holds up over the next few
| years. I find myself not using it at all unless I am looking for
| something very specific such as the website for a company or
| local restaurants, etc.
|
| Anything informational now I use ai.
| kytazo wrote:
| Wait until you see AI
| Frieren wrote:
| This is necessary now, but it should have been done years back.
|
| Nowadays, many companies backed up by investors with very deep
| pockets are doing this in all markets: start to buy middle-man
| companies in a space, it does not matter which one, dominate the
| market thanks to monopolistic power. Screw the clients making
| them pay too much, screw the providers paying them too little. Go
| for the next market.
|
| Google does this for ads. But, with Apple, does the same for app
| vendors. Amazon does it for all kinds of brands with physical
| products. Uber does it for taxi drivers and their clients. All of
| them take a big chunk of the profit while making things more
| expensive, but they are the only real option to reach clients as
| they have used tactics to monopolize entire markets.
|
| This should be impossible, because there are laws against it. If
| it is allowed the future of the economy is one big corporation
| with all workers working for it, and everybody buying from it. It
| looks like a scifi dystopia.
| foobarian wrote:
| If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is
| communism! Would have probably slept much better at night.
| timewizard wrote:
| So you're acknowledging that the best way to make a
| population powerless and then rob them blind is Communism?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I don't know, capitalism seems to be doing a pretty good
| job of it right now. I'd have to see some hard numbers on
| efficacy.
|
| Has anyone done a normalized any% speedrun to breadlines on
| these two fierce contenders? Can monarchy get in on this?
| milesrout wrote:
| We are wealthier than we have ever been so I fail to see
| how capitalism has made us poor.
|
| Poor compared to what? The past when we were poorer?
| mystified5016 wrote:
| No, because we aren't even doing that the best way. Can't
| even fail successfully.
| timewizard wrote:
| So real "capitalism devolved into communism" has never
| been tried before?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is
| communism!
|
| Using "end game" as it seems to be here -- for the natural
| ultimate result -- Marx argued that as a pretty central
| thesis of his work (through the mechanism of capitalist
| development -> proletarian class consciousness -> socialist
| revolution -> socialism -> <stuff mostly left as an exercise
| for the reader> -> withering of the state -> communism.)
|
| OTOH, a single entity run for the benefit of a narrow group
| of stakeholders employing all labor, supplying everything,
| and effectively enslaving everyone through private control of
| the means of production is _not_ Communism, or even socialism
| (defined by _proletarian_ control of the means of production)
| but just monopolistic capitalism (and, yes, this is where a
| major non-Leninist Communist criticism of Leninism, and its
| descendants like Stalinism and Maoism, that feature
| totalitarian control of a command economy by a narrow self-
| perpetuating party elite stems from.)
| turtletontine wrote:
| | This should be impossible, because there are laws against it.
|
| That's what so remarkable: we have a robust system of antitrust
| laws in this country, they just haven't been enforced in
| decades. Thank god the Biden admin started trying to use them
| again, and that Trump hasn't stopped these cases in their
| tracks.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Go figure that it's taken so long to do this that it was possibly
| almost mooted by Google enshittifying itself out of existence.
| matthest wrote:
| First, let me say I'm glad the FTC is going after monopolies.
| True capitalism requires competition, not massive corporations.
|
| That said, I feel like going after Big Tech is a massive misuse
| of resources. Not because it's not a monopoly (it is), but
| because there's a far more important monopoly that should be
| broken up: healthcare insurance.
|
| Something like 7 corporations dominate 70% of the healthcare
| insurance market. The AMA had a study last year that concluded
| these insurance companies are charging monopoly pricing.
|
| This is why Americans are paying astronomical prices for
| healthcare.
|
| This is IMO by far the most pressing issue. Yet the FTC is
| seemingly spending all its time going after Big Tech, which has a
| comparatively lower impact on the quality of everyday Americans'
| lives.
| smj-edison wrote:
| Or Visa and MasterCard...
| fallingknife wrote:
| I don't really see how that's possible. They are prevented by
| law from charging more than 25% on top of what they pay out to
| medical providers. The problem is the providers who are
| represented by the AMA.
| matthest wrote:
| https://acdis.org/articles/news-ama-report-details-health-
| in...
| fallingknife wrote:
| This relies entirely on market concentration and doesn't
| even bother to address the legal cap on premiums enacted in
| the ACA. I expected it to be trash because it is written by
| people who have every incentive to try to blame insurance
| companies and I was correct.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| health insurance is a legally-sanctioned cartel that should be
| eliminated entirely
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I'm confused how this is a monopoly, is it just the "if we define
| a market as Google ads, then Google has a monopoly problem"? Like
| defining iOS apps as a market (and somehow failed)?
|
| Even if they play games with the auctions to keep the price up,
| at the end of the day X company is spending $5 per thousand
| clicks (or whatever) because they think it's worth it. Google can
| charge whatever they want, they run the platform, and it's not as
| if anyone is forced to use them.
|
| I just don't see how you could in the same breath (how the
| government basically has) that the app store isn't a monopoly,
| but Google ads are. There's other ad companies, there is no other
| way to get an app on iOS.
| turtletontine wrote:
| Um, no, the market is obviously not defined as "google ads."
| You could bother to do one single search (maybe even with
| google!) before spewing nonsense.
|
| Specifically, part of the case found google liable for
| "unlawfully [tying] its publisher ad server and ad exchange" in
| violation of the Sherman antitrust act. Basically, google has
| locked down both the supply side (sites with space the sell for
| ads) and demand side (market of advertisers bidding on that
| space) so it can play both sides - and (crucially!) it has
| integrated them so as to lock in both advertisers and
| publishers. That's how you unfairly build a monopoly.
|
| And funny that you use the App Store as an example. Two years
| ago google lost an antitrust case brought by epic games about
| their android store practices:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Google?wprov=sft...
| timewizard wrote:
| > I'm confused how this is a monopoly
|
| An example from the case would be: Google bought Admeld. Then
| it disabled it's real time bidding feature. This created short
| term losses for them but gave them long term advantage in
| market control.
|
| > Even if they play games with the auctions to keep the price
| up
|
| Then it should be noticed, competitors should form, and the
| market should move away from this provider. Yet this has not
| happened because Google keeps buying those competitors.
|
| > and it's not as if anyone is forced to use them.
|
| Technically? Yes. Practically? No.
|
| > that the app store isn't a monopoly, but Google ads are.
|
| Our federal courts are separated into districts. Not all of
| them use the same precedents and market logic when deciding
| cases. This is probably why congress passed a law that prevents
| large companies from removing cases to the district of their
| choice and instead forces them to hold the case where the
| prosecutor decides.
|
| The latter point is one reason why this case ended up
| differently.
|
| > There's other ad companies
|
| Loss leading, exclusive contracts, and price fixing are all
| crimes that can be committed in that environment. The bar for
| anti trust isn't "100% market domination." It's actually pretty
| nuanced. That's a good thing.
| kazinator wrote:
| People are illegally thinking of nothing but 'google.com' when
| they are about to search for something, rules judge.
|
| In so doing, they leave Google no choice but to reluctantly
| comply in behaving like a monopoly.
|
| This flagrant behavior is punishable by exposure to pages and
| pages of spam, advertising, inauthentic content, nonsensical AI
| summaries (unless 'fucking' is added to the query) and malware.
|
| Our reporter tried reaching out to a few representatives of the
| people to see what they have to say for themselves, but they were
| too busy doom-scrolling YouTube shorts or TikTok to even blink
| their eyes.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| They should dig into admob while they're at it. They love
| screwing devs over and have purposely left their email option
| broken for years now. They'll cut you off even when it's their
| fault and you'll have no means of recourse. It's a joke, but they
| have the best ecpm around unfortunately.
| HackerThemAll wrote:
| It seems the judge went with reasoning resembling an orange
| monkey logic. "I know online advertising better than anyone else
| on the planet, and Google is a monopoly".
|
| US&A has already turned into idiocracy.
| somerandomness wrote:
| Talk to the ruling directly: https://radpod.ai/share/court-
| ruling-google-violated-the-she...
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Could this be used as a shakedown by Trump (give me 1 billion and
| I'll get the case withdrawn)
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Sundar booking flights to Mar A Lago
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