Federal Judge Declares Google's Digital Ad Network Is an Illegal Monopoly (apnews.com) 47
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from the Associated Press: Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time for illegally exploiting some of its online marketing technology to boost the profits fueling an internet empire currently worth $1.8 trillion. The ruling issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes on the heels of a separate decision in August that concluded Google's namesake search engine has been illegally leveraging its dominance to stifle competition and innovation. [...] The next step in the latest case is a penalty phase that will likely begin late this year or early next year. The same so-called remedy hearings in the search monopoly case are scheduled to begin Monday in Washington D.C., where Justice Department lawyers will try to convince U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to impose a sweeping punishment that includes a proposed requirement for Google to sell its Chrome web browser.
Brinkema's 115-page decision centers on the marketing machine that Google has spent the past 17 years building around its search engine and other widely used products and services, including its Chrome browser, YouTube video site and digital maps. The system was largely built around a series of acquisitions that started with Google's $3.2 billion purchase of online ad specialist DoubleClick in 2008. U.S. regulators approved the deals at the time they were made before realizing that they had given the Mountain View, California, company a platform to manipulate the prices in an ecosystem that a wide range of websites depend on for revenue and provides a vital marketing connection to consumers.
The Justice Department lawyers argued that Google built and maintained dominant market positions in a technology trifecta used by website publishers to sell ad space on their webpages, as well as the technology that advertisers use to get their ads in front of consumers, and the ad exchanges that conduct automated auctions in fractions of a second to match buyer and seller. After evaluating the evidence presented during a lengthy trial that concluded just before Thanksgiving last year, Brinkema reached a decision that rejected the Justice Department's assertions that Google has been mistreating advertisers while concluding the company has been abusing its power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers forced to rely on its network for revenue.
"For over a decade, Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets." Brinkema wrote. "Google further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive policies on its customers and eliminating desirable product features." Despite that rebuke, Brinkema also concluded that Google didn't break the law when it snapped Doubleclick nor when it followed up that deal a few years later by buying another service, Admeld. The Justice Department "failed to show that the DoubleClick and Admeld acquisitions were anticompetitive," Brinkema wrote. "Although these acquisitions helped Google gain monopoly power in two adjacent ad tech markets, they are insufficient, when viewed in isolation, to prove that Google acquired or maintained this monopoly power through exclusionary practices." That finding may help Google fight off any attempt to force it to sell its advertising technology to stop its monopolistic behavior.
Brinkema's 115-page decision centers on the marketing machine that Google has spent the past 17 years building around its search engine and other widely used products and services, including its Chrome browser, YouTube video site and digital maps. The system was largely built around a series of acquisitions that started with Google's $3.2 billion purchase of online ad specialist DoubleClick in 2008. U.S. regulators approved the deals at the time they were made before realizing that they had given the Mountain View, California, company a platform to manipulate the prices in an ecosystem that a wide range of websites depend on for revenue and provides a vital marketing connection to consumers.
The Justice Department lawyers argued that Google built and maintained dominant market positions in a technology trifecta used by website publishers to sell ad space on their webpages, as well as the technology that advertisers use to get their ads in front of consumers, and the ad exchanges that conduct automated auctions in fractions of a second to match buyer and seller. After evaluating the evidence presented during a lengthy trial that concluded just before Thanksgiving last year, Brinkema reached a decision that rejected the Justice Department's assertions that Google has been mistreating advertisers while concluding the company has been abusing its power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers forced to rely on its network for revenue.
"For over a decade, Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets." Brinkema wrote. "Google further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive policies on its customers and eliminating desirable product features." Despite that rebuke, Brinkema also concluded that Google didn't break the law when it snapped Doubleclick nor when it followed up that deal a few years later by buying another service, Admeld. The Justice Department "failed to show that the DoubleClick and Admeld acquisitions were anticompetitive," Brinkema wrote. "Although these acquisitions helped Google gain monopoly power in two adjacent ad tech markets, they are insufficient, when viewed in isolation, to prove that Google acquired or maintained this monopoly power through exclusionary practices." That finding may help Google fight off any attempt to force it to sell its advertising technology to stop its monopolistic behavior.
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of people, Microsoft in particular.
The value is in controlling the default search, and replacing all the features behind a Google login with features behind your own login.
Re: (Score:2)
The value is in controlling the default search, and replacing all the features behind a Google login with features behind your own login.
Or selling those rights back to Google if you don't have your own.
Re: (Score:2)
"Hello my name is Bergey Snrin [youtube.com] and my new startup 'Ghughle' would like to buy your Chrome browser"
Re: (Score:1)
People log into chrome? Good god. Why?
Re: (Score:2)
I assume most users don't do it on purpose. They log in to Gmail or whatever and Chrome (by default) grabs that and logs the browser in along with it.
Some users probably like being able to sync browsing sessions from one device to another. I found it more annoying than helpful. Also creepy, so that was about the time I stopped daily-driving vanilla Chrome on my personal devices.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Sell it to whom? It's provided free to customers. Who the fuck would want to buy it? And why?
Any company currently involved in or interested in joining the data aggregator game for a start. And that's a *LOT* of potential data scraping. A *LOT*. Like, enough to make Meta/Microsoft/OpenAI/Amazon/every other AI company soak their pants at the thought of getting ahold of it.
Chrome MUST be divested (Score:1)
We'd just be trapped in next company's monopoly (Score:2)
What's the point?
nationalize monopolies (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Google is creepy, but I don't think I would ever want the Trump administration to be in charge of Chrome. Even if one were to wait out this administration, would you really want to give the government that level of access? I don't like that a company like Google has it, but at least they seem mostly doing it to make money. Political control can and would be used to stifle dissent. You might trust the current administration (I know there are people who do), but would you trust the next one?
Re: nationalize monopolies (Score:2)
Since his tenure as CEO, Google seems to be less willing to squelch dissent, but it could just be better PR. Given the legal framework of America, domestic espionage is still more efficient when outsourced to private industry and the
We were almost freed at one point (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We were almost freed at one point (Score:5, Interesting)
then Chrome came along and ruined everything.
It was Firefox's to lose. Chrome didn't ruin anything. Chrome provided a better browser and the market latched onto it.
While Chrome was building in speed and rendering capabilities Firefox was slowing everything down with Pocket and other nonsense. Firefox is still a sluggish shadow of Chrome. And, that says a lot since Chrome tabs can eat memory faster than anything I've seen besides AutoCAD.
A Bit of History (Score:4, Insightful)
Chrome provided a better browser and the market latched onto it.
No. Google played dirty.
Every Google service threw pop-ups and warnings in your facing trying to get you to accidentally install Chrome which would then become your default browser. Few users knew what happened nor how to change it back. They just went "Ugh, computers suck. Why did they move things around again?" and went back to trying to complete their tasks.
That type of strategy works extremely well. Mozilla has no platform for them to trick users into installing their software thus their decline. This was all before Mozilla made a bunch of mistakes and shed even more users (who stupidity jumped to a thing they hated in order to spite someone they felt wronged them, thus only hurting themselves even more in the long run...).
Firefox bought Pocket in 2017. Chrome was released in 2008. Google Maps came out in 2005 and they were the first assholes to push "Works Best In XYZ" ads. There's a whole story about how their developers snuck around their legal team to put those recommendations in. You can thank those guys for the massive acceleration in annoying advertisements. Chances are their legal team would have blocked it. But nope. Instead Chrome rose quickly and everyone else with a platform had to follow suit with similar anti-user features else they'd be left behind.
Re: (Score:2)
Every Google service threw pop-ups and warnings in your facing trying to get you to accidentally install Chrome which would then become your default browser.
It's interesting to note that Google still does this, so it's not like they've repented and turned a leaf here either. As well, Microsoft has encouraged me to use Edge for things a whole bunch of times. I personally know which browser I want when, for what, and why, so I find it distractingly irritating.
Re: (Score:2)
No, Firefox did a lot of the losing themselves.
They decided to scrap their plugin extensions a couple of times. They switched UIs a couple of times as well. The first time it wasn't too bad, as they provided an extension to give you the old UI back (Firefox Classic Restore). Then they switched and completely trashed all their plugins and started from scratch. This got rid of many useful extensions which no longer ran under the new system and many extensions no longer supported by the developers but still wo
Re: (Score:2)
I thought that all happened after they started hemorrhaging users. Those changes were their complete failure at attempting to slow the loss by 'improving' their browser to be more like Chrome. Tossing out their core "everything's a plugin" value most people enjoyed.
I was on MyIE2 back then so I'm not 100% sure.
Re:We were almost freed at one point (Score:5, Interesting)
Quoting from here: [whatwg.org]
We've been here before. In the late 90s both Microsoft and Netscape, but mainly Microsoft, extended the HTML standards to be whatever they wanted their own browser, IE, to do. Through bundling with Windows installations, they had the market share to influence the standard and cause other browsers to be always incompatible with "the standard" because it was continually evolving. This eventually caused those browsers to lose market share (because they would never "just work" for the masses, unlike IE)
Microsoft was rightly accused of monopolistic behaviour and slowed down. This allowed a proper web standard to be agreed, and many browsers were able to satisfy the requirements, bringing choice to the user base over the next 10 years.
Chrome benefited from these standards too, but Google's business is advertising, which requires code to run in browsers and on HTML servers simultaneously. Fifteen years later we are back to the 90s: the web standard is whatever the Chrome developers want their browser engine to do, and no other browsers can complete long term because they are always playing catch-up.
It's important for the HTML standard to be independent of the browser companies. That's the only way the needs of the users can be safeguarded, and it's the best way to level the playing field by having clear rules for the browser makers.
Above all, standards should be published at predictable, spaced out intervals, to allow everyone a few years to target them, before moving to the next version. This idea that you have to refresh the web page of the WHATWG every day and check the timestamp to find out if something has changed is bullshit.
Re: (Score:2)
Fifteen years later we are back to the 90s: the web standard is whatever the Chrome developers want their browser engine to do, and no other browsers can complete long term because they are always playing catch-up.
They did it intentionally as well, because they had a path to not doing it that was working fine: Gears [wikipedia.org]. They could have kept their stuff in there and still done all the snooping and whatnot, instead they decided they could take over this poky little browser engine and... you know.
Re: We were almost freed at one point (Score:2)
And now weâ(TM)re stuck with an OS that canâ(TM)t even scroll smoothly without a bunch of graphical tricks because it was originally designed to rip off blackberry and their keyboard input. The slowdown you get in android phones as they age shows how bloated and inefficient the software is.
And then apple has zero competition so they let their OS become a performance hog as well. Although at least it still scrolls pixel perfect.
advertising on the internet (Score:4)
Re: (Score:1)
How is advertising ruining the internet?
Re: (Score:3)
It's the animating force behind the algorithms that push people on social media to yell at each other about dumb, irrelevant shit.
There was already a tendency for people to do that, but the advertisement metrics require that sort of "engagement" to be actively cultivated.
So advertising is a much more direct harm online than it is, for example, on TV networks. When an advertiser wants to tweak the content shown on TV, there is some amount of back-and-forth with the content producers, and the process can't be
Re: (Score:1)
Interesting perspective. Thank you.
Personally, I just ignore the ads. Much like I ignore social media.
Re: (Score:2)
Look at the stories and headlines on this place. It used to be a place for obsessives to discuss technology issues of the day. Now the owners are more concerned with getting revennue stream out of it than they are in running an effective website, it is full of clickbait-based headlines and stories about US politics.
They do this because they know it gets eyeballs, and so gets ad-revenue. The ads set the incentive and the website follows.
Whether you watch the ads or not, almost everything on the web gets drag
Re: (Score:1)
Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
Re: (Score:2)
If the advertisement uses a Get to another site, and that site serves up malware, you might be in for a Bad Time (TM).
I'll assume the malware site is smart enough to send non-malware to everyone they *aren't* targeting, to prevent easy detection.
Re: (Score:2)
Tracking is the problem, not the ads. Kill the tracking and everything else will level out.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately, you're looking at only one side of the coin.
Without advertising, much of the internet wouldn't exist--at all. That includes both a lot of sites you don't consider important, but also a lot of sites that are crucial.
Advertising has powered--and ruined--media since the invention of the newspaper. Radio and TV followed the same pattern, now the internet.
SOMEBODY has to pay for it. Advertising provides a mechanism to pay for all those "free" services we use. If you don't like that, choose to use
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed to some extent. It is pretty clear that people on the whole wont pay subscritions for the websites they frequently use, and so without the ad revenue a lot of these sites wouldn't exist (at lot, not in the way they do).
I suppose I disgaree with you in seeing this as a bad thing. 90% of the internet has given over to the clickbait incentives of advertising, and there is so little of genuine interest out there. Advertising allows popular sites to scale, but I'm not sure why that's good (they just get t
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, I don't say that the 90% of garbage on the internet is a good thing. It's kind of like how 90% of the postal mail you get, is nothing but advertising crap. Yet, that's not a flaw in the postal mail system, it's an unhappy reality that we accept, that comes with the freedom to send legitimate packages or letters. In regards to the internet, the scum is an unhappy reality that comes with the freedom to create useful websites.
Re: (Score:2)
SOMEBODY has to pay for it.
Pay a business to Host your own site. Then share your cat videos. :-)
"The Internet" doesn't need to be expensive.
Re: (Score:2)
How many non-technical friends do you have, who know how to host their own website? Your solution only works for people who have the technical skill and knowledge to roll their own. It's kind of like suggesting that the only people who should drive cars, are people who can build their own. That's silly.
You want to host your own? Fine, and that's great. I have my own too. But 99% of people will never do that, they simply don't have the ability.
Google is very successful, because... (Score:2)
I used to work in advertising, and I saw Google as the personification of "moral hazard" (which see). Other things? Way nicer.
Re: (Score:2)
Out of interest, how is it a "moral hazard" issue?
It might be monopolistic, and possibly corrupt, but I don't see the moral hazard (there's no third party either implicitely or explicitly insuring a participant in the process against the risks of their decisions).
Re: (Score:2)
Moral Hazard [wikipedia.org] as a concept, is not limited to insurance. Economist Paul Krugman described moral hazard as "any situation in which one person makes the decision about how much risk to take, while someone else bears the cost if things go badly." Real life example: a loan officer who receives a $3000 bonus for every mortgage she originates, yet owes nothing if the mortgagor doesn't repay the loan.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree completely with the definition. I guess reading back I was using the term insurance quite losely, and in a way that muddied the definition.
It doesn't make it any more clear to me how the original example of Google owning the whole advertising stack is a moral hazard issue.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll assume from the OP, that Google (Alphabet) is in a position to lie about views and auction prices to the content creators, the advertisers, the stock holders, etc. And that Alphabet can use these lies to maximize its own profits (or profits of some employees) with minimal chances of getting caught or punished.