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Unredacted Antitrust Complaint Shows Google’s Ad Biz Even Scummier Than Imagined
- redleggedfrog 5y agoSure feels like those "Don't be evil" days are long gone.
- coldcode 5y agoI think they just removed the n't. When your business depends almost entirely on ads, you have to do anything you can to keep from losing revenue from ads and that results in screwing anyone and everyone and hoping your size makes it impossible to lose if it gets out.
- marcosdumay 5y agoIf you go maximizing short term revenue at any cost, you will get evil. It doesn't matter what market you are on. It's not because of the ads. Plenty of business relied on ads for very long times in the past without going evil. They are evil because they want the profits.
- xtracto 5y agoNot long ago, a debate of two Mexican "influencers" [1] was doing the rounds in Mexican networks where one guy was debating another about how Marketing in itself is an evil/bad career: That people who go into the Marketing field basically learn how to deceive and lie to people for the sake of profit. I agree with that that assertion. I think the current marketing trends are very exploitative and highly misused. Marketing tools like Google, Facebook and Twitter (marketing tools in that their main goal is to take Ads to certain demographics) give advertisers incentives for bad behavior . [1] https://youtu.be/dOMJF1_bJCo?t=456 https://youtu.be/dOMJF1_bJCo?t=456 (you can turn on CC auto translate into English.
- thedevelopnik 5y agoMy Bachelor’s is in marketing and the main thing I learned from it is I didn’t have the stomach/moral flexibility for marketing.
- clairity 5y agobusiness is marketing, not some separable element. if you work, you're working for a marketer. as with any facet of socioeconomic life, the problem isn't marketing so much as it is the perceived prevalence and acceptability of exploitation and dishonesty, and how that influences our individual and collective behaviors. marketing, at its core, is bringing to market a useful product or service and exchanging it with others who find it more valuable than the cost. this core is net-positive, but on top of that is plenty of leeway to create net-negatives. we have norms and shared ethics for a reason (to rein in negatives & benefit from positives).
- jacquesm 5y agoI suspect they never really were. It was just marketing.
- vgeek 5y agoI've wondered this same thing. Were they always the same, but with more effort (as a ratio) towards PR and image, or did the Ruth Porat era signify a cultural shift? Maybe the influx of "tech as a high paying job" type people versus "tech as an inherent interest/tech to solve problems" crowd?
- mandmandam 5y agoIt's easier to not be evil when you're small. I saw someone here put it in the context of a life cycle, and that rhymes with reality to me.
- thanatos519 5y agoIf only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- tremon 5y agoIt's a nice aphorism, but it's too defeatist to be of any use. Yes, you have acknowledged human nature. Now what? The simple truth is that most people do not pursue evil as a goal, but are opportunistic: they take the easiest solution that won't harm them personally. If we're serious about building a better world, reducing opportunities to be evil is what we should be focusing on. Not raising our hands and acting like there's nothing to be done about it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jvanderbot 5y agoYou provide incentives that make the good part win out, in proportion to the temptation and reproductions of being evil. Is that so hard? We do it with pets, children, even ourselves, (ice cream after work). But writ large we just say "Nope, they're evil, let's <extreme action>"
- jvanderbot 5y ago*repercussions not reproductions
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoAs has been noted elsewhere, if a group has to say "Don't be X" it is because they are X. By definition, a company whose slogan is "Don't be evil" is evil. Imagine if their motto was "Don't cut the testicles off our male employees." Like, er, sure, obviously. Wait, what? Was that a possibility?
- olliej 5y agoI went to work for google for a while, and “don’t be evil” is nowhere in any onboarding documents, or anywhere else I encountered while working there.
- pwthornton 5y agoThe allegations here are astonishing. If true, how is this possibly allowed to continue on like this? This is some real mob shit.
- arbitrage 5y agoHow is this allowed to continue? Parasitic capitalism. The regulatory bodies have been in a captured state for a very long time in the U.S.
- puffoflogic 5y agoThis is why 'regulatory bodies' are fundamentally a scam. Tort law remains the worst way to prevent these kind of abuses, except for all the others that have been tried. But the same scam artists (lobbyists, politicians) who convince the public that what we need is just a little more regulation also engage in "tort reform" and it's no coincidence that means removing private causes of action.
- pessimizer 5y ago"Tort reform" people are also "less regulation" people in every case I can think of. What they usually claim they're for is "better enforcement" while also defunding and reducing the scope and powers of regulatory agencies.
- danaris 5y agoBecause of millions of people on HN and elsewhere who think that as long as you can get away with it, anything you do to make yourself or your shareholders more money is just fine.
- DamnYuppie 5y agoThat maybe true but in my opinion is a lesser evil compared to the corruption of government officials who are complicit in allowing this to happen. What is the point of government agencies if all they do is bow to those with the most money?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hahamrfunnyguy 5y agoI find it somewhat ironic that the blog is running Google Ads.
- soared 5y agoEven worse, the sponsored native ad has the same text styling (bright orange title) as the rest of the actual content, so even I struggled to tell where the article continued. This ad actually goes against google policies.
- ianai 5y agoYep, confused me too! Doesn’t help that I skip over most social media call outs and ads. Way to confuse your reader. As a reader, I’m here to read your work, not expend mental energy on figuring out where your content is.
- gruez 5y agoTurns out pandering to anti-capitalist sentiment can be profitable.
- ornornor 5y agoAdblocks to the rescue! Nextdns if you can’t root your Phone or have an iPhone. I haven’t seen an ad in close to a decade by now.
- soared 5y agoThe author analyzed one section of the pdf which amounts to a competitor creating a product, and so google creates their own competitive product. That sounds like a normal business practice. It’s kind of silly to write a short article with an outlandish title, and then your only justification for the title is “just read the table of contents”. That pdf probably has tons of supporting information, but this blog post provides none of it. (The embedded Twitter thread did not load on my initial read through, and it does provide actual content. But again.. embedded Twitter content when you have a brand new pdf filled with info?)
- JaimeThompson 5y agoIt appears that when google says "All participants in the unified auction, including Authorized Buyers and third-party yield partners, compete equally for each impression on a net basis" they aren't exactly being honest. Am I misinterpreting?
- mathteddybear 5y agois "on a net basis" the same as "auction winners are selected based on highest bid after fees"?
- stefan_ 5y agoAnd then competitors meet up to make a contract with each other - oops, was this part of the Smith playbook?
- pessimizer 5y agoIf the point you're making isn't "why mention anything unless you're willing to personally write a book on it" I don't understand it. You mention that adequate links are provided, so I'm confused.
- olliej 5y agoGoogle making a competing product is not the problem. The problem is when google uses its monopoly presence in other parts of the industry to artificially penalize the product they’re competing with.
- ianai 5y agoI really think this piece could be better written. Give us an executive summary or even bullet points of the activity. It went too fast into the details for me to see the overall trend.
- pyrale 5y ago* Jedi blue: cartel activity * Project Bernanke: market manipulation, fraud, frontrunning * AMP: monopoly abuse It is not clear whether Google has fiduciary duty wrt their clients, but if they do and the accusations are proven, they basically looked up every way they could violate it, and did it. It's not simply corporate responsibility; this is Enron levels of bad. In any decently regulated activity, executives would risk jail for that.
- shkkmo 5y ago> In any decently regulated activity, executives would risk jail for that. In the US, executives never go to jail. They negotiate "settlements" where the company doesn't even have to admit wrongdoing and the companies are fined slightly more than they made from the wrong doing. I would love to to see the executives face jail time, both neither major party political party has any interest in changing things.
- michael1999 5y agoThe comment you reply to mentioned Enron, which is famous for sending people to actual Jail. Jeffrey Skilling spent 12 years in prison - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling I'll grant that post-9/11 priorities have defunded white collar prosecution, but people go to jail in the US. If you really want a criminal-consequence-free jurisdiction, come to Canada. We really don't send people to jail for corporate fraud. The Vancouver exchange is a free-for-all, and Montréal boiler-rooms are a movie cliche.
- specialist 5y agoWhen investors are the victims, white collar criminals go to jail. We'll soon (re)learn if mere customers have that kind of juice. IANAL, but I'd guess they best they can expect is be party to some class action settlement and the criminals get some token fines.
- frankjr 5y agoWhen reading things like this (and assuming it's true), I always wonder how it works in practice. I mean somebody has to actually implement the trickery in the codebase, right? Does that mean that one day there was a ticket that could be summarized as "Implement scam"? Or was there an attempt to hide the true purpose of the requested changes? Were the programmers not bothered by it? Were they in on it too? Are the implemented changes kept in Google's monorepo for everybody to see? Is it hidden somewhere else? Is it hot patched?
- pyrale 5y agoI can't help but think that some people compensated so highly to do code don't just sell their technical skills.
- monkeybutton 5y agoI imagine it would be implemented as mundane looking levers and configurations. Especially easy to do in ML powered systems with lots parameters and moving parts.
- IX-103 5y agoExcept for the part where certain accounts would need to be hardcoded instead of dependent on the advertiser. Moving money is probably the most audited part of any code base and something like that would be a big red flag.
- gherkinnn 5y agoThe people in charge are too far removed to care and the grunts implementing it can be compartmentalised. Optimise for the right KPIs. Throw diffusion of responsibility and you're golden.
- pessimizer 5y agoA DBA I know very well was charged with modeling the accounts for an intentional illegal financial trick (in the 80s for Service Merchandise iirc) that would shift the proceeds from the trick into regular accounts after the statute of limitations ran out. The way it was explained to them was that if they were busted on it they would immediately apologize for the "oversight" and pay up. They did it because they enjoyed being employed.
- lern_too_spel 5y agoThe reporter appears to be confused. > At the same time, Google would charge advertisers the price of the second-highest bid and pocket the difference If my third highest bid is less than the second highest bid, there is no way to charge me the second highest bid. This is nonsensical.
- pyrale 5y ago> This is nonsensical. No, it's just fraud. It makes plenty if sense for the person taking the money.
- aesh2Xa1 5y agoYou’re right. The description on this report is faulty, but I think the gist is pretty apparent. Google tells the website owner that the winning bid was smaller in value than what it really was, thus paying the owner less money. Google tells the advertisement auction that the winning bid was higher (than what the agreement required), but they only pay the website owner the smaller value. They are paid by the higher bidder and they (Google) keep the difference. Google can use that excess money however they choose. In this case, they seem to be using it to pump up the value of the second-highest bids (it’s an auction), so that they can receive an even greater difference in the next auction.
- pixl97 5y agoHeh, if this pans out it will be one of the larger fraud cases ever.
- mathteddybear 5y agoWIRED 3 days ago reported on it in a less confusing manner. Also it included a comment from Google > In a statement, Google said, “AG Paxton’s latest allegation—that we generated a ‘third price auction’ or manipulated our ad exchange—is entirely inaccurate. As of September 2019, we have been running a first price auction, but at the time to which AG Paxton is referring, AdX absolutely was a second price auction.”
- bjterry 5y ago
- michael1999 5y agoPeople think Google bought Doubleclick. But no: Doubleclick bought Google with their own money. This is exactly the sort of thing Doubleclick would have done.
- rendall 5y agoThe GDPR pop-up on this blog is among the scummiest, sad to say; the kind that requires you to uncheck 10s of 3rd party trackers.
- acqbu 5y agoGoogle is possibly the most evil company that has ever existed. Avoid like the plague and degoogle everything.
- denton-scratch 5y agoI can see how anti-trust comes into it, if they're abusing their market power. But isn't this also straight fraud? I mean, running an exchange, and then lying to both advertisers and publishers about the price that was struck? If antitrust is hard to prosecute because of the vagueness of "market power", why don't they just throw them in the slammer for fraud?
- mathteddybear 5y agoI guess not really. The ad exchange is sort of an auction of auctions; for bare efficiency, every participating network submits only their top two candidates. This is communicated to ad networks; I guess, there is no obligation that the networks pass the bids of their advertisers unchanged. Google has some secret sausage there. To Google Ads advertisers, Google says "you participate in a second-price auction, competing with other Google Ads advertisers and other networks; if you win you will pay the bid of the runner-up, which is the second highest bid from the Google Ads unless another network submits a bid in between" and that holds true. To publishers, Google says "the price is determined in a second-price auction, every ad network submits up to two bids" IANAL but it may be considered as an anti-trust, because it is the owner of the ad exchange who could decide if that obligation exists (regardless of whether it could be plausibly enforced).