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4) Pay an unaffiliated third party to run the auction, and pay to bid like every one of their competitors. Or if technology doesn't allow this, make payments to
by jkaplowitz 7y ago
4) Pay an unaffiliated third party to run the auction, and pay to bid like every one of their competitors. Or if technology doesn't allow this, make payments to cause the same outcome. This is roughly your second paragraph, just a slight variant.
Choice of third party is tricky, but a dedicated or existing trade association that includes them and any interested major competitors on equal terms would probably do it.
- summerlight 7y agoThis makes sense in principle, but I'm seeing a bunch of legal/technical/transparency issues on selecting the third party over the globe. The root problem is a trust issue and I still don't see how Google can convince bidders that the auction is run by some entities which won't do any (implicitly) good for Google in return of selecting them, especially Google still owns a full control on picking the "third party". This can be solved if a state picks the third party, but now we have even bigger problems; you will have to enforce the same policy on most of the platform holders with similar issues (virtually every single major tech firms)
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoAnd that doesn't account for the fact that big corporations have a huge say in what the government does. Hoo boy.
- whalabi 7y agoI don't like it being an auction because then customers aren't necessarily getting the better choices, they're getting the choices backed by the most wealth It would also harm not for profit search engines. Why not choose based on popularity?