Unredacted Antitrust Complaint Shows Google’s Ad Biz Even Scummier Than Imagined(nakedcapitalism.com) |
Unredacted Antitrust Complaint Shows Google’s Ad Biz Even Scummier Than Imagined(nakedcapitalism.com) |
(1) BidManipulation is only used in some testing/market simulation environment.
(2) only used in cases where some pricing bug/weird legal issue happened that needs some tweaking to be corrected.
(3) only used in some weird markets where it is legal.
(4) implement many weird obscure features for "next generation ad experience marketplace stuff" and push them to production leaving it to higher ups to configure which combination of them are being used at which market.
(5) empower engineers to come up with additional "whacky ideas" and keep a culture where it is assumed that almost all of them are not passing legal review but they could be enabled at any time.
Not a recommendation.
This would set alarms off for me. In my opinion, legality != morality. Just because something is legal doesn't make it ethical and vice versa.
If someone tells me something is okay and the only reason they can conjure is 'but its legal!' I'm gonna nope right out of there if it smells funny
Not just that, when the whole product is broken down into features, managed by Feature Managers (aka product manager), that is wrapped up in business speak, and there are whole hierarchies of [Engineering, Product, Project] managers, there are very few people, if any, who understand the whole thing and various side effects and so on.
So in end, in many cases people don’t even realize the nefarious nature of what they’re working on.
On top of that one is surrounded in the echo chamber of fellow employees all looking at the rising stock price and resulting bank balance.
It sounds a lot like someone is upset that Google values ads on their site lower than ads on other sites and is upset that Google consistently bids less on their site than for other sites for the same ad (again no shock there as Superbowl advertising costs more than daytime television).
To artificially increase the competitiveness of advertisers who use Google's ad tools, as said in the article.
Google's custom in-house version control software has an extremely elaborate system of access controls governing who can see which pieces of the monorepo.
This is exactly the sort of thing Doubleclick would have done.
* 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.
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.
I'm really curious to see where the government acquired their evidence (and what solid evidence do they have), and whether it ends up holding up in court.
Ahh the poor naivete of scholars...
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.
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?
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.”
* Bidder A - Bids $100
* Bidder B - Bids $90
* Bidder C - Bids $80
Under a true second-price auction, the publisher receives $90, and Bidder A pays $90. The article is alleging that Google changed it so that in this scenario, Bidder A pays $90, but the publisher receives $80.
No, it's just fraud. It makes plenty if sense for the person taking the money.
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?)
The problem is when google uses its monopoly presence in other parts of the industry to artificially penalize the product they’re competing with.
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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.
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.
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 (you can turn on CC auto translate into English.
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.
Imagine if their motto was "Don't cut the testicles off our male employees." Like, er, sure, obviously. Wait, what? Was that a possibility?
I saw someone here put it in the context of a life cycle, and that rhymes with reality to me.
The monetary difference between second and third place bids? Google pockets that plus the fee they take for 'brokering' the ad sale.
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.
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>"
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).
It's certainly true that there are problems with the current implementation of the mechanics of our government, but the idea that throwing them out entirely would leave us with something better just doesn't pass the sniff test.
To legitimize the transfer of wealth upward, and protect the system. "Sure didn't we all vote for Trump/Biden". "If you're not voting you can't complain". Etc.
From housing to banking to the environment to food and drugs; from healthcare to the military, there is no shortage of examples of revolving doors, veneers, and gaslighting to choose from.
The fact that Obama promoted GS people to positions all over his cabinet after the '08 bailouts should have clued in anyone with more than 8 brain cells. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/henhouse-meet-f...