The Google ad exchange favored its own platforms, limiting the ability of other exchanges to compete fairly in bidding for ad inventory. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-26/closing-arguments-giv...

Google engaged in bid rigging where competitors agree on who will win a bid, again to inflate prices. https://www.justice.gov/atr/preventing-and-detecting-bid-rig...

Google entered market allocation agreements to create an unfair playing field. https://www.winston.com/en/insights-news/avoiding-antitrust-...

Advertising is an intentionally complex system so that companies can clip the ticket at multiple stages throughout the process. Google should be broken up, but the whole ad tech system needs to go into the bin if these problems are going to ever get fixed.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/02/15/how-muc...

Bloomberg Radio April 17 2025: https://www.youtube.com/live/iEpJwprxDdk?si=9WaFIJENUwyIJvpk

https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/google-is-found-guilty...

its about Display Ads business, which is 10% of Google revenue as per article. So, everything there can be broken up without destroying Google.

Google does search ads mostly, has competition with say, bing, amazon, chatgpt now.

On video ads they have competition with tiktok, netflix (even if they don't do ads I guess), and tv.

Maybe there's specific criteria that have legal precedent or sources, but I don't see it.

https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2023/01/6371209cd0cce428b526...

Which part of this diagram is responsible for displaying ads of blue sweatshirt when I say "blue sweatshirt" in a room next to the room where my smartphone is?

Not "is it strictly necessary for them to be broken up to prevent them from reoffending"?

100% I would expect them to reoffend. No question whatsoever.

https://reddit.com/r/ppc

Recently someone even posted a timeline of google starting to hide the keywords advertisers are buying and the increase in Google's ad revenue. Eye opening.

That entire industry is a horrifying shitshow of sociopathy, at the expense of absolutely everyone else, both viewers (supply side) and advertisers (demand side).

Was looking over my mom's shoulder last week to see what site she was reading out some information from. It was "google.com" but looked like a third party website, probably this AMP thing? Google really is hijacking everything

Laws, otoh, are not magic. Making a law doesn’t solve the problem. Laws require people with guns to go enforce them. The government has no incentive to use force against the people lining their pockets, and so laws tend to be enforced primarily on the poor and the working class. Only when the majority of the votes of the public could be swayed will government attack the donor class.

That’s what so remarkable: we have a robust system of antitrust laws in this country, they just haven’t been enforced in decades. Thank god the Biden admin started trying to use them again, and that Trump hasn’t stopped these cases in their tracks.

An example from the case would be: Google bought Admeld. Then it disabled it's real time bidding feature. This created short term losses for them but gave them long term advantage in market control.

> Even if they play games with the auctions to keep the price up

Then it should be noticed, competitors should form, and the market should move away from this provider. Yet this has not happened because Google keeps buying those competitors.

> and it's not as if anyone is forced to use them.

Technically? Yes. Practically? No.

> that the app store isn't a monopoly, but Google ads are.

Our federal courts are separated into districts. Not all of them use the same precedents and market logic when deciding cases. This is probably why congress passed a law that prevents large companies from removing cases to the district of their choice and instead forces them to hold the case where the prosecutor decides.

The latter point is one reason why this case ended up differently.

> There's other ad companies

Loss leading, exclusive contracts, and price fixing are all crimes that can be committed in that environment. The bar for anti trust isn't "100% market domination." It's actually pretty nuanced. That's a good thing.

There is no other way to get an ad on sites that use Google Ads, just as there's no other way to get an app on iOS. These seem to be perfectly parallel to me: in either case you can pay a company to get access to their user base or you can choose to not pay that company to get access to their users. But if you make that choice, in either case you're locked out of a large market.

I agree with you that there's a strong argument to be made that the cases should have been decided the same way, but I also think they made the right call with Apple, so that leaves me reevaluating my gut instinct on this one.

Specifically, part of the case found google liable for “unlawfully [tying] its publisher ad server and ad exchange” in violation of the Sherman antitrust act. Basically, google has locked down both the supply side (sites with space the sell for ads) and demand side (market of advertisers bidding on that space) so it can play both sides - and (crucially!) it has integrated them so as to lock in both advertisers and publishers. That’s how you unfairly build a monopoly.

And funny that you use the App Store as an example. Two years ago google lost an antitrust case brought by epic games about their android store practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Google?wprov=sft...

I manage to keep them mostly out of it by paying for worthy games and deleting the rest.

However I would in fact happily welcome _some_ ads. Ones that would simply inform me of existence of masterpieces like Tiny Bubbles or Monument Valley rather than peddle anything. This idea of a tiny ad network with curated content comes up in my head often. Sure it won't make any money it would do some good.

Convincing all of these sites that Google, Meta, or other services, are "superior" for ads genuinely seems like incredible marketing. They've siphoned up enormous amounts of money and in return put in place a miserable user experience while making media companies wholly reliant on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful

It never managed more than modest success and never expanded far outside its initial sphere. It shut down in 2018 because it was unable to compete with all the monopolist walled garden ad spaces.

There are various small projects that could claim to be successors to that ethos -- but (to a rounding error) no one has heard of them because, contrary to your claim, the revealed "premium" that users place on "quality ads" is dwarfed by the premium that advertisers place on aggressive attention vampires (and the latter are the ones actually paying)

Aside from that:

> now AI is taking over, which will further weaken their grip.

Maybe you've missed that they're pulling ahead of OpenAI on the AI front?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...

You think a court hasn't considered that angle?

Companies become monopolies often through doing their job the best. Companies stay the best because they're monopolies.

As someone who runs a large platform in the music niche, every independent interesting webapp in the kpop community besides me has been killed by Google's ceaseless enshittification and I'd be thrilled if everyone who worked there had their stock options reduced to 0 to atone for what they've done to the internet.

(NYT really ought to add “illegal” to their title.)

Google bought Doubleclick for $3 Billion. Today it is worth $22 Billion. When Google got into ad-tech, they drifted away from their core market: users. And started to endorse the other side that turned users into products.

Everything else. Cloud provider, operating systems, browsers, hosting business apps, phone licenser, Internet provider, smart home manufacturer, and various moonshots. Their ad company is a monopoly because of those other services.

Google as an ad company that can't leverage those other lines of business to gain an advantage over other ad companies still has a viable ad business. They can compete on the basis of that lone company's strengths.

("If you're nothing without this suit, then you shouldn't have it")

> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

Kind of funny how they basically predicted Google's degradation years in advance.

If you want to see more, get Lina Khan to be chair again!

In what way? They all just re-consolidated back into monopolies. I have one choice of telecom provider in my location: if I don’t like Xfinity, I get to eat shit. At least Ma Bell had to get the government’s permission to raise prices; frankly, I’d prefer having that back.

This probably calls for even stronger consumer protections, since the natural limit of human scalability created something of a limitation as to how large and dominant a company could be.

you mean, before monopolies?

Aren’t they? It doesn’t sound like those two interpretations are mutually exclusive.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...

They are not doing well with certain areas like social, GCP, messaging, enterprise etc. But it's not an existential threat.

I think the only real risk is that Google could just buy Trump out on the matter, now that we live in Russia of the West, resolving a dispute like this can just be lining someone's pockets enough.

From a purely idealistic view, I'm disappointed in how many people and organizations have "obeyed in advance" to try to curry favor with Trump.

But idealism aside, its also just weird to me how oblivious they all are to the fact that historically it ends badly because it will always be an entirely one-sided and fully transactional relationship where absolute loyalty is demanded of them but zero loyalty is returned to them. And they will be thrown under the bus as soon as it is expedient.

Its almost comical how badly being a Trump ally has worked out for so many people (eg. Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, etc)

This is the classic sign of a company that has achieved monopoly.

They don't serve their customers any more because they don't have to.

The economy moved away from being founded on Marx's C-M-C to firmly being fixated on M-C-M' which in plain English, means "We now use Money to make more Money, leveraging Commodities as an intermediate step. The Money is all that matters, not the social benefit/harm" -- IMO, that helps explain why, even though many people are suffering financially, the market is at an ATH.

What's this referring to? It seems to me they've stayed out of the culture war stuff (compared to Meta who is wading in it, for example).

Also, what censorship are you referring to? Them complying with the new regime in advance and removing pride month from the calendar? Or are you playing into the conservative fantasy of being supposedly censored online despite evidence of the contrary [2] ?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/google-calen...

[2] https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/publication/false-accusation-the-u...

Likewise Google is obviously an online advertising tech monopoly, depending on your definition of "monopoly".

There might be legal or technical rationals for why these statements are not true. But practically speaking, they are obviously true and that's what should matter.

I would argue that monster.com and craiglist, which collectively removed the majority of newpaper revenue, were probably the nail in the coffin. You can see some of the decline pre-internet in this 1999 take: https://niemanreports.org/newspapers-arrive-at-economic-cros... ... which already laments the decline of journalism.

Pre-internet, editorial boards were fundamentally gatekeepers of knowledge. They were certainly not unbiased, but for the most part they had a level of integrity. Now, one can find (or have pushed) any "narrative" one chooses, whether or not it bears any resemblance to reality. While Google does make it easier to find any/all of this content, I would argue that the intrinsic incentives of social media platforms for more engagement are probably the high order bit.

The fact that we actually were enforcing antitrust at the time absolutely prevented MS from getting a strangehold on the consumer internet as it was taking off. It's the reason you're posting on this forum in the first place, as it was essential to the success of tech startups in the first dot-com era.

Then we stopped enforcing antitrust laws, and after about 10 years or so the new market leaders had developed the stifling set of monopolies we're all dealing with today.

Breaking up Google (which seems inevitable, this is the third distinct recent case where they've been proven to be a monopoly) is likely to be good for literally everyone, including even Google shareholders.

That trial found Microsoft guilty of antitrust practices and ordered the company to be broken up. What caused it to be a waste of time was that Microsoft appealed the decision, which bought them enough time that the 2000 election happened and the Bush DoJ decided to give them a slap on the wrist instead of continuing to pursue a breakup.

Actually it helped the telecom industry prosper because of independent innovation. The innovators became separate from the utilizers. This allowed both sides of the industry to mature into full three-part businesses.

I will give you that it killed other shiny unprofitable technologies. But imagine if that same thing happened with IBM? Where would IBM be today? How many old tech would be shown the door? How many companies would be buying the latest and greatest innovations?

You're ignoring the reverse causality. Antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the 1990s/2000s put them on edge, and made them think twice about strong-arming their competition. Back when Google was starting to make a name for themselves, MS strongly considered adding a warning on Internet Explorer, telling people to "beware" of any results they see on Google. MS eventually decided against it, because of the antitrust magnifying glass they were under. Having a level playing field allowed Google to grow exponentially, and eventually rendered MS' monopoly irrelevant.

Monopolies use anticompetitive tactics to preserve their moat, and continue being monopolies. When antitrust legislation works effectively, this moat disappears, and the monopolist is eventually overrun and becomes irrelevant.

That's an interesting take that I've never heard before. Do you have any source that goes into detail?

Especially this:

> the AT&T break up set American technology back by decades and killed our domestic chip production.

We can't to any P2P shit on the internet, instead everything goes through a middle man who will take your money or flood you with ads.

We have bandwidth limitations on every connection, even though bandwidth is cheaper than it's ever been.

The only universal communications system is still... Regular-ass phone calls and e-mail, which is like 100+ and 50 years old respectively. Everything else is proprietary and doesn't work with other systems.

We have to launch tens of thousands of satellites and beam data into outer fucking space in order to get internet to people.

Most of the "internet" all runs in 1 of 3 cloud providers.

We are forced to use Chrome on Windows, or use a Phone to browse the web or deal with endless captchas and having to prove that we are humans.

Search engines are all fucked and barely work. Everything is full of junk and trash. Now we need that chip production to run massive data centers to train some AI on how to sift through all the trash.

I don't know who else to blame but the tech industry itself.

Are we gonna pretend W<Intel> never happened?