5 ms·

> Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago Why?

inquirerGeneral 6mo ago
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bigyabai 6mo ago
AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.
- SilverElfin 6mo ago
  They forbid those websites from using competitors? Isn’t that blatantly illegal? I guess it’s not actually illegal until they lose a court case for antitrust.
- streptomycin 6mo ago
  But in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.
echelon 6mo ago
Google owns 92% of all "URL bars". They turned this into "search". Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market. It's downright evil. Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get. The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is. They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.
- Aerroon 6mo ago
  >The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is. That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers. Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time. Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.
  - echelon 6mo ago
    > Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time. That's false. There are hundreds of free offerings in this and many other spaces offered by lots of other companies. There does not have to be one monopoly controlling all of it for the freemium model and advertising to work.
    - Aerroon 6mo ago
      What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then? There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy. Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla). Google search and translate do have alternatives, especially these days with LLMs doing a lot of the latter. What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them. Are the free Maps alternatives good?
majormajor 6mo ago
"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several? I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?

[dead]

AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.

SilverElfin 6mo ago
They forbid those websites from using competitors? Isn’t that blatantly illegal? I guess it’s not actually illegal until they lose a court case for antitrust.
streptomycin 6mo ago
But in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.

echelon 6mo ago

Google owns 92% of all "URL bars". They turned this into "search". Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market. It's downright evil. Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get. The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is. They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.

Aerroon 6mo ago
>The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is. That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers. Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time. Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.
- echelon 6mo ago
  > Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time. That's false. There are hundreds of free offerings in this and many other spaces offered by lots of other companies. There does not have to be one monopoly controlling all of it for the freemium model and advertising to work.
  - Aerroon 6mo ago
    What are the great phone OSes that aren't Android based? Can you run Android-specific apps on then? There definitely isn't a YouTube replacement. You might say that there are video sites and that's true, but there aren't any that also offer 55% of the revenue to the creator, let alone that being enough to really have a creator economy. Most browsers these days are Chromium based or are essentially funded by these big tech companies (eg Mozilla). Google search and translate do have alternatives, especially these days with LLMs doing a lot of the latter. What are some of the free email providers? I'm genuinely curious, because I know some exist, but I'm unfamiliar with most of them. Are the free Maps alternatives good?

majormajor 6mo ago

"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several? I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?