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One has to have a theory of (public) harm. There are a bunch of them from a legal perspective, and maybe they will carry the day. They don't necessarily make se
by jonahbenton 6y ago
One has to have a theory of (public) harm. There are a bunch of them from a legal perspective, and maybe they will carry the day. They don't necessarily make sense from a non-legal colloquial perspective.
From a non-legal perspective, one of the big harms (I would argue) is in the destruction of the business model for small ad-supported publishers. Google was taking 80% of money that should have gone to them, and digital and physical publishers (like local newspapers) have had a mass extinction.
That said, out of the ashes, rises the phoenix. Substack and other subscription models owe their opportunity to Google's monopoly, and in many ways they're the mammals in this ecosystem of dying dinosaurs.
- pbourke 6y ago> Google was taking 80% of money that should have gone to them This seems to presuppose an alternate universe in which Google doesn’t exist but ad revenue is the same?
- jonahbenton 6y agoNo, a universe in which Google exists but wasn't committing fraud as monopolistic mobster middleman, handling both delivery and measurement of delivery. Google did and does what any mobster does- claim the vast majority of the value and let a trickle flow back to the producer, striking deals ordinarily understood to be illegal to maintain their position, while creating reports for producers that conveyed a false view of their role in the middle. Few producers survive with the mob as their distribution.