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The lawsuit isn't asking a court to destroy Google's algorithms. It's demanding a competitive ad market that isn't monopolized by Google, so that content creato

The lawsuit isn't asking a court to destroy Google's algorithms. It's demanding a competitive ad market that isn't monopolized by Google, so that content creators get a larger share of the revenue they are ultimately responsible for.

judge2020 3y ago
It's only a monopoly on Google's side because site owners use Adsense, so companies running ads go to Adwords to advertise on these sites. What remains to be seen is if Google is actually pulling any anti-competitive tactics to prevent people from leaving adsense or keep ad companies running on Adwords.
- rafaelturk 3y ago
  Thats the core of the case. It will be more political than actually technical.
- civilized 3y ago
  I agree there needs to be more evidence of anticompetitive practices. I'm hoping this will be a great opportunity to learn about the digital ad market. I just googled "alternatives to adsense" and it seems like there are many. I have no really informed idea why Google dominates with its products. I assume it ultimately goes back to the search engine, somehow. EDIT: I found an interesting article https://law.stanford.edu/publications/why-google-dominates-advertising-markets/ https://law.stanford.edu/publications/why-google-dominates-a... Abstract: Approximately 86% of online display advertising space in the U.S. is boughtand sold in real-time on electronic trading venues, which the industry calls “advertising exchanges.” With intermediaries that route buy and sell orders, the structure of the ad market is similar to the structure of electronically traded financial markets. In advertising, a single company, Alphabet (“Google”), simultaneously operates the leading trading venue, as well as the leading intermediaries that buyers and sellers go through to trade. At the same time, Google itself is one of the largest sellers of ad space globally. This Article explains how Google dominates advertising markets by engaging in conduct that lawmakers prohibit in other electronic trading markets: Google’s exchange shares superior trading information and speed with the Google-owned intermediaries, Google steers buy and sell orders to its exchange and websites (Search & YouTube), and Google abuses its access to inside information. In the market for electronically traded equities, we require exchanges to provide traders with fair access to data and speed, we identify and manage intermediary conflicts of interest, and we requiretrading disclosures to help police the market. Because ads now trade on electronic trading venues too, should we borrow these three competition principles to protect the integrity of advertising?
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    > I have no really informed idea why Google dominates with its products. Mostly because they actually are the best for most advertisers, both in terms of raw offering (publisher portfolio i.e. "reach" and the tools to understand how your ad campaign is doing and tune it) and the third-party ecosystem of tools that have grown up to manage an ad account. Possibly not the best for publishers (see horror stories of failing to cash out in other threads on this story), but when most of the ads you want to run are in one network, you'll go there. Plus, for all its flaws and the failures that occur from it being a high-value target, for a publisher Google still somehow tends to be the automated ad-matching house least likely to match your readers to scamware that will make them unlikely to come back to your site. Turns out the problem of automatically matching ads to publishers to human eyeballs is legit-hard and only a few companies have the technical competency to do it well at scale.
- pyrale 3y ago
  > What remains to be seen is if Google is actually pulling any anti-competitive tactics to prevent people from leaving adsense or keep ad companies running on Adwords. That's already public information at this point, following Google's 2020 antitrust case. [1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2021/01/19/jedi-blue-a-scandal-that-highlights-yet-again-the-need-to-regulate-bigtech/?sh=1c7bd44f270d https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2021/01/19/jedi-blu... [2]https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke-revealed-in-texas-antitrust-case-11618097760 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke...
rafaelturk 3y ago
well Yes and No. Again: Google only serves a lot of ads because has a lot traffic, only has traffic because is better at user experience. Otherwise is a tricky case to win.. It wil be extremely hard to prove on court that newspapers don't have any other ad alternatives other than google, hence the case for anti-trust or similar. It will be an interesting case to watch, more political than technical.
version_five 3y ago
> ultimately responsible for I don't buy that, just like I don't buy ageed with the concerns over AI training on public data. Not that I don't understand why people are mad to see others generating revenue off of what they gave away. And all the more so when their business model gets disrupted, but I think it's misplaced. I still don't think anybody is owed a business model though. They can stop publishing online if they don't belive they can do it properly, as can all "creators".
- civilized 3y ago
  And if you don't like the Bell monopoly you can simply not use a telephone. But courts haven't agreed with this argument in the past.

judge2020 3y ago

It's only a monopoly on Google's side because site owners use Adsense, so companies running ads go to Adwords to advertise on these sites. What remains to be seen is if Google is actually pulling any anti-competitive tactics to prevent people from leaving adsense or keep ad companies running on Adwords.

rafaelturk 3y ago
Thats the core of the case. It will be more political than actually technical.
civilized 3y ago
I agree there needs to be more evidence of anticompetitive practices. I'm hoping this will be a great opportunity to learn about the digital ad market. I just googled "alternatives to adsense" and it seems like there are many. I have no really informed idea why Google dominates with its products. I assume it ultimately goes back to the search engine, somehow. EDIT: I found an interesting article https://law.stanford.edu/publications/why-google-dominates-advertising-markets/ https://law.stanford.edu/publications/why-google-dominates-a... Abstract: Approximately 86% of online display advertising space in the U.S. is boughtand sold in real-time on electronic trading venues, which the industry calls “advertising exchanges.” With intermediaries that route buy and sell orders, the structure of the ad market is similar to the structure of electronically traded financial markets. In advertising, a single company, Alphabet (“Google”), simultaneously operates the leading trading venue, as well as the leading intermediaries that buyers and sellers go through to trade. At the same time, Google itself is one of the largest sellers of ad space globally. This Article explains how Google dominates advertising markets by engaging in conduct that lawmakers prohibit in other electronic trading markets: Google’s exchange shares superior trading information and speed with the Google-owned intermediaries, Google steers buy and sell orders to its exchange and websites (Search & YouTube), and Google abuses its access to inside information. In the market for electronically traded equities, we require exchanges to provide traders with fair access to data and speed, we identify and manage intermediary conflicts of interest, and we requiretrading disclosures to help police the market. Because ads now trade on electronic trading venues too, should we borrow these three competition principles to protect the integrity of advertising?
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  > I have no really informed idea why Google dominates with its products. Mostly because they actually are the best for most advertisers, both in terms of raw offering (publisher portfolio i.e. "reach" and the tools to understand how your ad campaign is doing and tune it) and the third-party ecosystem of tools that have grown up to manage an ad account. Possibly not the best for publishers (see horror stories of failing to cash out in other threads on this story), but when most of the ads you want to run are in one network, you'll go there. Plus, for all its flaws and the failures that occur from it being a high-value target, for a publisher Google still somehow tends to be the automated ad-matching house least likely to match your readers to scamware that will make them unlikely to come back to your site. Turns out the problem of automatically matching ads to publishers to human eyeballs is legit-hard and only a few companies have the technical competency to do it well at scale.
pyrale 3y ago
> What remains to be seen is if Google is actually pulling any anti-competitive tactics to prevent people from leaving adsense or keep ad companies running on Adwords. That's already public information at this point, following Google's 2020 antitrust case. [1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2021/01/19/jedi-blue-a-scandal-that-highlights-yet-again-the-need-to-regulate-bigtech/?sh=1c7bd44f270d https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2021/01/19/jedi-blu... [2]https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke-revealed-in-texas-antitrust-case-11618097760 https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke...

rafaelturk 3y ago

well Yes and No. Again: Google only serves a lot of ads because has a lot traffic, only has traffic because is better at user experience. Otherwise is a tricky case to win.. It wil be extremely hard to prove on court that newspapers don't have any other ad alternatives other than google, hence the case for anti-trust or similar. It will be an interesting case to watch, more political than technical.

version_five 3y ago

> ultimately responsible for I don't buy that, just like I don't buy ageed with the concerns over AI training on public data. Not that I don't understand why people are mad to see others generating revenue off of what they gave away. And all the more so when their business model gets disrupted, but I think it's misplaced. I still don't think anybody is owed a business model though. They can stop publishing online if they don't belive they can do it properly, as can all "creators".

civilized 3y ago
And if you don't like the Bell monopoly you can simply not use a telephone. But courts haven't agreed with this argument in the past.