4 ms·

They rejected bids with higher bid prices to prefer their own inventory. The auction was rigged.

londons_explore 5y ago
If there was even a single instance of that, a bidder would know... Every losing bidder gets information about the winning bid. Nobody is saying "I bid $1.00, yet the winning bid was $0.90". You could almost argue that the auction time limits lead to this case "I would have bid a dollar, but you finished the auction before I could say that!". But the time limits are 100 milliseconds plus, which in computer terms is an age. If you can't get your bid in in that time, it's just badly written software that hasn't precomputed the bid ahead of time.
- p49k 5y ago
  You only have access to non-Google bids, which makes it impossible to have enough information to know if the auction is unfair. Google is the final arbiter of what ad gets shown, Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner, and you have to trust Google that it did not improperly advantage itself in the auction (which the complaint reveals that it did in fact advantage itself).
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    > Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner Citation needed. See https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/downloads/realtime-bidding-proto https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/download... The "minimum_bid_to_win" field of the BidResponse message contains this info for all first price auctions.
    - p49k 5y ago
      This protobuf spec is in no way relevant to the situation outlined in the anti-competitive behavior complaint. The protobuf spec is related to using the Authorized Buyers RTB protocol within AdX. That's an ecosystem that lives entirely within Google itself, so there's no reason Google would want to disadvantage anyone since people using this are already essentially paying Google for the privilege. What the lawsuit is referring to is header-bidding, where an auction occurs client-side (or server-side using an O/O server endpoint) and the result is passed to GAM for competition via Dynamic Allocation. Google is being accused of trying to kill header bidding (because data is shared and profits are earned outside of Google's ecosystem), not their own RTB products.
- secondcoming 5y ago
  There are caveats. From Google's protobuf file itself [0] // If the bid won the auction, this is the price paid in your account // currency. If the bid participated in the auction but was out-bid, this // is the CPM that should have been exceeded in order to win. This is not // set if the bid was filtered prior to the auction, if the publisher or // winning bidder has opted out of price feedback or if your account has // opted out of sharing winning prices with other bidders. For first-price // auctions, minimum_bid_to_win is populated instead of this field. optional int64 cpm_micros = 4; I don't know if Google's bidder will populate this field. Even if they do send this data, there's no way you can tell if it's faked or not. They could also maybe get around this by setting up a PMP for Google's own inventory thereby allowing them to accept bids that are lower than Open Market bids. [0] https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/downloads/realtime-bidding-proto.txt https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/download...

If there was even a single instance of that, a bidder would know... Every losing bidder gets information about the winning bid. Nobody is saying "I bid $1.00, yet the winning bid was $0.90". You could almost argue that the auction time limits lead to this case "I would have bid a dollar, but you finished the auction before I could say that!". But the time limits are 100 milliseconds plus, which in computer terms is an age. If you can't get your bid in in that time, it's just badly written software that hasn't precomputed the bid ahead of time.

p49k 5y ago
You only have access to non-Google bids, which makes it impossible to have enough information to know if the auction is unfair. Google is the final arbiter of what ad gets shown, Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner, and you have to trust Google that it did not improperly advantage itself in the auction (which the complaint reveals that it did in fact advantage itself).
- londons_explore 5y ago
  > Google does not disclose its own bid if it's the winner Citation needed. See https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/downloads/realtime-bidding-proto https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/download... The "minimum_bid_to_win" field of the BidResponse message contains this info for all first price auctions.
  - p49k 5y ago
    This protobuf spec is in no way relevant to the situation outlined in the anti-competitive behavior complaint. The protobuf spec is related to using the Authorized Buyers RTB protocol within AdX. That's an ecosystem that lives entirely within Google itself, so there's no reason Google would want to disadvantage anyone since people using this are already essentially paying Google for the privilege. What the lawsuit is referring to is header-bidding, where an auction occurs client-side (or server-side using an O/O server endpoint) and the result is passed to GAM for competition via Dynamic Allocation. Google is being accused of trying to kill header bidding (because data is shared and profits are earned outside of Google's ecosystem), not their own RTB products.
secondcoming 5y ago
There are caveats. From Google's protobuf file itself [0] // If the bid won the auction, this is the price paid in your account // currency. If the bid participated in the auction but was out-bid, this // is the CPM that should have been exceeded in order to win. This is not // set if the bid was filtered prior to the auction, if the publisher or // winning bidder has opted out of price feedback or if your account has // opted out of sharing winning prices with other bidders. For first-price // auctions, minimum_bid_to_win is populated instead of this field. optional int64 cpm_micros = 4; I don't know if Google's bidder will populate this field. Even if they do send this data, there's no way you can tell if it's faked or not. They could also maybe get around this by setting up a PMP for Google's own inventory thereby allowing them to accept bids that are lower than Open Market bids. [0] https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/downloads/realtime-bidding-proto.txt https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/download...