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> On Sunday, Google posted a blog warning that any attempt to break up its ad business could rattle customers who choose to use Google's ad tech because it "is

> On Sunday, Google posted a blog warning that any attempt to break up its ad business could rattle customers who choose to use Google's ad tech because it "is simple, affordable, and effective." Has that ever been true? Every instance I know of monopolies being broken up has been good for customers.

benoau 2y ago
One time Google accidentally forgot to refund $70 million they thought they had refunded for ad fraud, and they only found out when they were sued for a $500k piece of it someone definitely knew they had not received. This was back when they were in the tres commas club so I'm sure consumers will benefit immensely from smaller companies with smaller responsibilities. In a way it's like having a single one-million-line file vs a clean separation between API, UI, etc etc. https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/13/google_click_fraud_lawsuit/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/13/google_click_fraud_la... (I think it was this one but search results are saturated with other litigation and antitrust since)
Spivak 2y ago
The best-faith argument I can make of it is that Google/Meta really are the lifeline for a lot of businesses who have zero chance of being able to leverage large-scale advertising blasts that big companies use. The customers using mega-scale digital ad exchanges get the benefit of being able to buy 0.001% of a billboard the moment someone actually interested in their product walks past. If you want to increase competition and stop the market from consolidating into a few players it's not immediately obvious that breaking up these ad exchanges goes that direction because it deprives reach from everyone except already large companies.
- LeonB 2y ago
  > being able to buy 0.001% of a billboard ^^ this is possible because the ads are delivered digitally, not because of any magic power google has. Even if every website was its own independent advertising space (an extreme opposite), they could all still be open to advertising companies big and small by using “open standards”. The innovations are all technological.
  - Spivak 2y ago
    Okay so you have group A who has ads they want to put in front of potential customers and group B who has digital billboards and wants to sell them. Group A doesn't know where to advertise and can't identify customers, and Group B knows about their users but doesn't know what kinds of buyers might be interested in them. I genuinely don't know how this doesn't precipitate a market-maker who can match up the two groups and who naturally becomes huge because the best matchmakers will be the ones with the largest populations of both groups. The bigger they are the more and better matches that can exist and everyone (theoretically at least) gets better prices because buyers and sellers are in competition in a larger pool.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > don't know how this doesn't precipitate a market-maker who can match up the two groups In finance lingo, Google is the exchange, the market makers, the brokers on both sides and a good fraction of the listed companies to boot.
      - Spivak 2y ago
        This is incredibly fair. Where would you make the incisions? Google's own billboards, their own ads, and the brokers seem easy to cut but the rest is real messy.
        kshacker 2y ago
        If a device company can be forced to deploy browsers or search engines from competitors, Can a search company be forced to allow users to choose their as network? Show me whatever results but I want facebook's ads, or bing's ads and so on. Pretty sure google's going to ask for 30% of what Facebook makes I guess but that's fine, let's start building a business model on that. Assumption is that search is a monopoly and that's why they will be saddled with regulations. Frame any other constraints and market solutions can be figured.
        2y ago
troupo 2y ago
> Every instance I know of monopolies being broken up has been good for customers. Sometimes breaking government monopolies may lead to worse outcomes. In Europe breaking transportation monopolies (especially rail transport) lead to decades-long worsening of services in some countries. Because instead of one company managing everything you now have one company owning moving stock, one company owning rails, one company offering repair services, one company... And all of them delegating and re-assigning blame. But these situations are more of an exception
- chii 2y ago
  > Sometimes breaking government monopolies may lead to worse outcomes. if the gov't monopoly was receiving tax payer subsidy, then breaking it up means the taxpayer gets back the cost of the subsidy, and the service being provided returned to private funding model. If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad - after all, cost was raised. But you have to also consider the savings in the subsidy that is no longer paid. It's not black and white. Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad - after all, cost was raised. But you have to also consider the savings in the subsidy that is no longer paid. You've got to consider other costs as well - higher road use means direct costs, direct deaths, and pollution. Some things simply aren't easy to isolate the effects of and bill an individual for; some things are natural monopolies, some things are economic lighthouses, and we shouldn't be afraid of administrating things via governments in the many cases where a true free market simply isn't a viable option.
  - troupo 2y ago
    > the service being provided returned to private funding model. They never do. They keep receiving substantial government subsidies. > If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad No. I view it as "prices went up, service levels have gone down: delays, breakdowns, staff shortages have increased" > Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most. Then there would be no public transport, as its costs are prohibitive
paulgerhardt 2y ago
It’s a spectrum not a binary. 1970’s Airline breakups were very beneficial to customers with lower prices and more routes popping up virtually overnight (though read “Hard Landing” if you want a more nuanced take), 1980’s AT&T breakup was somewhat beneficial in that long distance and cell rates went down but local rates went up (see “The Deal of the Century”), 1990’s California Energy breakups were basically a net negative for customers allowing energy market speculation and manipulation (“Smartest Guys in the Room”), and in a handful of examples like the Soviet Union or South Africa, deregulation lead to outright collapse of essential sectors in banking, agriculture, and energy and set society/customers back decades (“Sale of the Century”/“After the Party”).
- maeil 2y ago
  That sounds exactly like a binary, as hinted at by a sibling comment: Breakup of a company monopoly (always good for the consumer) vs. Breakup of a government monopoly (potentially bad for the consumer)
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    No, because of the part on how local phone rates went up when AT&T was broken up. There's no "always" here, the world is not that simple. Breaking up a large company is often going to be good for some sets of customers, bad for others.
    - luma 2y ago
      In that case, it mostly just created local monopolies. You still didn’t have a choice for local service unless you moved several hundred miles away. From the consumer’s perspective, we just replaced one monopoly with another.
    - josefx 2y ago
      > because of the part on how local phone rates went up when AT&T was broken up. Isn't that caused by the "last mile" problem? Even with the split there was always only one company in control of local infrastructure and from what I understand they could even block newcomers from installing their own, citing concerns over possible service interuptions and various kinds of interference. I think Google Fibre even went through several experimental ways to get its infrastructure in place just so it could avoid dealing with any of that.
arebop 2y ago
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/02/17/more-than-money-antitrust-monopolies-are-defined-from-bork-to-khan https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/02/17/more-than-money-anti... addresses the consumer welfare standard that guided the FTC for 40 years and the recent (~2 years) shift away from that standard.
tomjen3 2y ago
Depends on how you slice it. Without Googles ad money, Firefox will probably die. Without Googles ad money, so will Chrome - and then consumers are left with what exactly? Safari for those on Apple devices, sure, but thats about it. If Android is made to stand up on its own, can it? And even if it does, is it competitive with iOS? And for how long? If each major manufactor ends up forking it, even that is a net loss for consumers. You can split up ma bell, large airlines, and Standard Oil. But a modern high tech business? That is a lot harder.
- cbsks 2y ago
  > Without Googles ad money, Firefox will probably die. Correction: Mozilla will probably die. Firefox, or a fork of it, will undoubtedly live on.
  - tomjen3 2y ago
    In what form?
    - bitwize 2y ago
      Something with a name like Iceweasel
      - dyauspitr 2y ago
        “Open source and maintained by volunteers”
      - Ferret7446 2y ago
        How much development does Iceweasel do? Changing a logo doesn't actually help sustain a browser long term; they were effectively "leaching" off of Firefox development and by extension Google ad money.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
    I wish I could speed up that death with a letter to the court.
lucumo 2y ago
> because it "is simple, affordable, and effective." Hahaha. Maybe if you compare it to getting a master's in marketing... I'm a user of parts of their ad tech, and I've tried to be a user of more of their ad tech. It may be affordable. I don't know, because there's not much left to compare it with. It's probably somewhat effective for loads of people, since it's everywhere. But it's decidedly NOT "simple". It's a monstrosity. If you come from no ad skills you will have to spend days digging through overly verbose documentation just to figure out which boxes to check. And probably a few hundred to a few thousand to "experiment" and find what's working. This is absolutely NOT a "spend hundred bucks, get a few interested visitors" solution. Even at the other end it's getting more complicated. It used to be: here's some HTML, slap it where you want the ad. Now you have to be constantly vigilant that they aren't destroying your site by sneakily enabling Auto Ads or showing interstitials. When I started this back in '08, there were many of those providers. We could rotate through them to get some variety and get good payouts. ALL of them are now out of business, except Google, who started to magically payout less after competition declined. As someone who uses them a lot, appreciates their technical ecosystem, who has his bills paid in part by their ad ecosystem, who is generally pro-business and thinks it's fundamentally unfair to punish successful companies for their success, I'll say this: Fuck Google. Break 'm up.
- spacebacon 2y ago
  Very true, few people know how to keep ads profitable when you have a high volume of traffic. The rotation scheme used to help. In a way publishers have to have their own private ad tech to integrate with commercial ad tech to game it in some way in order to not be completely milked in a never ended reduction of value of one’s traffic as a user base grows unresponsive. Representing the broker, the publisher and the house is efficient and is how google can spend your ad budget and deliver absolutely nothing in return. It takes expertise (more money) and a long runway to even break even with todays google “ad tech”.
squigz 2y ago
The blog post in question https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/google-ad-tech-sept-2024/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/googl...

benoau 2y ago

One time Google accidentally forgot to refund $70 million they thought they had refunded for ad fraud, and they only found out when they were sued for a $500k piece of it someone definitely knew they had not received. This was back when they were in the tres commas club so I'm sure consumers will benefit immensely from smaller companies with smaller responsibilities. In a way it's like having a single one-million-line file vs a clean separation between API, UI, etc etc. https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/13/google_click_fraud_lawsuit/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/13/google_click_fraud_la... (I think it was this one but search results are saturated with other litigation and antitrust since)

Spivak 2y ago

The best-faith argument I can make of it is that Google/Meta really are the lifeline for a lot of businesses who have zero chance of being able to leverage large-scale advertising blasts that big companies use. The customers using mega-scale digital ad exchanges get the benefit of being able to buy 0.001% of a billboard the moment someone actually interested in their product walks past. If you want to increase competition and stop the market from consolidating into a few players it's not immediately obvious that breaking up these ad exchanges goes that direction because it deprives reach from everyone except already large companies.

LeonB 2y ago
> being able to buy 0.001% of a billboard ^^ this is possible because the ads are delivered digitally, not because of any magic power google has. Even if every website was its own independent advertising space (an extreme opposite), they could all still be open to advertising companies big and small by using “open standards”. The innovations are all technological.
- Spivak 2y ago
  Okay so you have group A who has ads they want to put in front of potential customers and group B who has digital billboards and wants to sell them. Group A doesn't know where to advertise and can't identify customers, and Group B knows about their users but doesn't know what kinds of buyers might be interested in them. I genuinely don't know how this doesn't precipitate a market-maker who can match up the two groups and who naturally becomes huge because the best matchmakers will be the ones with the largest populations of both groups. The bigger they are the more and better matches that can exist and everyone (theoretically at least) gets better prices because buyers and sellers are in competition in a larger pool.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > don't know how this doesn't precipitate a market-maker who can match up the two groups In finance lingo, Google is the exchange, the market makers, the brokers on both sides and a good fraction of the listed companies to boot.
    - Spivak 2y ago
      This is incredibly fair. Where would you make the incisions? Google's own billboards, their own ads, and the brokers seem easy to cut but the rest is real messy.
      - kshacker 2y ago
        If a device company can be forced to deploy browsers or search engines from competitors, Can a search company be forced to allow users to choose their as network? Show me whatever results but I want facebook's ads, or bing's ads and so on. Pretty sure google's going to ask for 30% of what Facebook makes I guess but that's fine, let's start building a business model on that. Assumption is that search is a monopoly and that's why they will be saddled with regulations. Frame any other constraints and market solutions can be figured.
        2y ago

troupo 2y ago

> Every instance I know of monopolies being broken up has been good for customers. Sometimes breaking government monopolies may lead to worse outcomes. In Europe breaking transportation monopolies (especially rail transport) lead to decades-long worsening of services in some countries. Because instead of one company managing everything you now have one company owning moving stock, one company owning rails, one company offering repair services, one company... And all of them delegating and re-assigning blame. But these situations are more of an exception

chii 2y ago
> Sometimes breaking government monopolies may lead to worse outcomes. if the gov't monopoly was receiving tax payer subsidy, then breaking it up means the taxpayer gets back the cost of the subsidy, and the service being provided returned to private funding model. If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad - after all, cost was raised. But you have to also consider the savings in the subsidy that is no longer paid. It's not black and white. Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most.
- lmm 2y ago
  > If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad - after all, cost was raised. But you have to also consider the savings in the subsidy that is no longer paid. You've got to consider other costs as well - higher road use means direct costs, direct deaths, and pollution. Some things simply aren't easy to isolate the effects of and bill an individual for; some things are natural monopolies, some things are economic lighthouses, and we shouldn't be afraid of administrating things via governments in the many cases where a true free market simply isn't a viable option.
- troupo 2y ago
  > the service being provided returned to private funding model. They never do. They keep receiving substantial government subsidies. > If you only consider the outcome as the cost paid for service by the end user, then this looks bad No. I view it as "prices went up, service levels have gone down: delays, breakdowns, staff shortages have increased" > Personally, i would prefer a model of "user pays", as it aligns incentives the most. Then there would be no public transport, as its costs are prohibitive

paulgerhardt 2y ago

It’s a spectrum not a binary. 1970’s Airline breakups were very beneficial to customers with lower prices and more routes popping up virtually overnight (though read “Hard Landing” if you want a more nuanced take), 1980’s AT&T breakup was somewhat beneficial in that long distance and cell rates went down but local rates went up (see “The Deal of the Century”), 1990’s California Energy breakups were basically a net negative for customers allowing energy market speculation and manipulation (“Smartest Guys in the Room”), and in a handful of examples like the Soviet Union or South Africa, deregulation lead to outright collapse of essential sectors in banking, agriculture, and energy and set society/customers back decades (“Sale of the Century”/“After the Party”).

maeil 2y ago
That sounds exactly like a binary, as hinted at by a sibling comment: Breakup of a company monopoly (always good for the consumer) vs. Breakup of a government monopoly (potentially bad for the consumer)
- crazygringo 2y ago
  No, because of the part on how local phone rates went up when AT&T was broken up. There's no "always" here, the world is not that simple. Breaking up a large company is often going to be good for some sets of customers, bad for others.
  - luma 2y ago
    In that case, it mostly just created local monopolies. You still didn’t have a choice for local service unless you moved several hundred miles away. From the consumer’s perspective, we just replaced one monopoly with another.
  - josefx 2y ago
    > because of the part on how local phone rates went up when AT&T was broken up. Isn't that caused by the "last mile" problem? Even with the split there was always only one company in control of local infrastructure and from what I understand they could even block newcomers from installing their own, citing concerns over possible service interuptions and various kinds of interference. I think Google Fibre even went through several experimental ways to get its infrastructure in place just so it could avoid dealing with any of that.

arebop 2y ago

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/02/17/more-than-money-antitrust-monopolies-are-defined-from-bork-to-khan https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/02/17/more-than-money-anti... addresses the consumer welfare standard that guided the FTC for 40 years and the recent (~2 years) shift away from that standard.

tomjen3 2y ago

Depends on how you slice it. Without Googles ad money, Firefox will probably die. Without Googles ad money, so will Chrome - and then consumers are left with what exactly? Safari for those on Apple devices, sure, but thats about it. If Android is made to stand up on its own, can it? And even if it does, is it competitive with iOS? And for how long? If each major manufactor ends up forking it, even that is a net loss for consumers. You can split up ma bell, large airlines, and Standard Oil. But a modern high tech business? That is a lot harder.

cbsks 2y ago
> Without Googles ad money, Firefox will probably die. Correction: Mozilla will probably die. Firefox, or a fork of it, will undoubtedly live on.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  In what form?
  - bitwize 2y ago
    Something with a name like Iceweasel
    - dyauspitr 2y ago
      “Open source and maintained by volunteers”
    - Ferret7446 2y ago
      How much development does Iceweasel do? Changing a logo doesn't actually help sustain a browser long term; they were effectively "leaching" off of Firefox development and by extension Google ad money.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  I wish I could speed up that death with a letter to the court.

lucumo 2y ago

> because it "is simple, affordable, and effective." Hahaha. Maybe if you compare it to getting a master's in marketing... I'm a user of parts of their ad tech, and I've tried to be a user of more of their ad tech. It may be affordable. I don't know, because there's not much left to compare it with. It's probably somewhat effective for loads of people, since it's everywhere. But it's decidedly NOT "simple". It's a monstrosity. If you come from no ad skills you will have to spend days digging through overly verbose documentation just to figure out which boxes to check. And probably a few hundred to a few thousand to "experiment" and find what's working. This is absolutely NOT a "spend hundred bucks, get a few interested visitors" solution. Even at the other end it's getting more complicated. It used to be: here's some HTML, slap it where you want the ad. Now you have to be constantly vigilant that they aren't destroying your site by sneakily enabling Auto Ads or showing interstitials. When I started this back in '08, there were many of those providers. We could rotate through them to get some variety and get good payouts. ALL of them are now out of business, except Google, who started to magically payout less after competition declined. As someone who uses them a lot, appreciates their technical ecosystem, who has his bills paid in part by their ad ecosystem, who is generally pro-business and thinks it's fundamentally unfair to punish successful companies for their success, I'll say this: Fuck Google. Break 'm up.

spacebacon 2y ago
Very true, few people know how to keep ads profitable when you have a high volume of traffic. The rotation scheme used to help. In a way publishers have to have their own private ad tech to integrate with commercial ad tech to game it in some way in order to not be completely milked in a never ended reduction of value of one’s traffic as a user base grows unresponsive. Representing the broker, the publisher and the house is efficient and is how google can spend your ad budget and deliver absolutely nothing in return. It takes expertise (more money) and a long runway to even break even with todays google “ad tech”.

squigz 2y ago

The blog post in question https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/google-ad-tech-sept-2024/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/googl...