#DOJ vs Google

[amandigitalmarketer]

Google Under Fire: DOJ's Fight to Break the Ad Monopoly

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has launched a landmark legal battle against Google, accusing the tech giant of monopolizing the digital advertising market. This high-stakes lawsuit, which could reshape the landscape of the online ad industry, seeks to dismantle Google’s alleged stranglehold on the advertising ecosystem.

At the heart of the DOJ's case is the assertion that Google has abused its dominance to stifle competition, control pricing, and limit the options available to advertisers and publishers. The government claims that Google’s ownership of key components of the ad tech stack—including its ad exchange, ad-buying tools, and publisher-side ad server—gives it an unfair advantage. By controlling these essential elements, Google is accused of directing more ad revenue toward its own platforms, while squeezing out competitors and forcing publishers to use its services.

The DOJ’s lawsuit aims to break up parts of Google’s ad tech business, arguing that such a move would restore competition and foster a healthier, more transparent advertising ecosystem. Legal experts believe that if successful, this case could have far-reaching consequences, not only for Google but for the broader tech industry. Other tech giants like Meta and Amazon, which also wield considerable influence in the ad space, could face increased scrutiny.

Google, however, has strongly denied these allegations, arguing that its advertising technology promotes efficiency and benefits consumers, publishers, and advertisers alike. The company contends that breaking up its ad business would lead to higher costs for businesses and a less effective advertising system overall. It frames the DOJ's intervention as misguided and claims it faces significant competition from rivals like Meta, Amazon, and other ad tech firms.

This case marks one of the most significant antitrust challenges brought against a major tech company in recent history. It echoes the government’s past attempts to regulate monopolistic behavior in industries like telecommunications and railroads. For regulators, it’s a crucial test of their ability to rein in Big Tech’s power and restore competitive balance in the rapidly evolving digital economy.

As the trial unfolds, industry stakeholders are closely watching for its potential impact on digital advertising practices, innovation, and the overall balance of power within the tech sector. A decision in favor of the DOJ could set a precedent for future antitrust actions, signaling a more aggressive regulatory stance toward the dominance of tech giants.

To Read Full Article Click Here

[latestnews-now]

The US Department of Justice has proposed groundbreaking remedies in its antitrust case against Google, including selling Chrome and barring browser market re-entry. Could this end Google’s search monopoly? Learn more in this video! 🔴 Key Topics Covered: -Google’s antitrust ruling explained -DOJ’s proposed remedies -Google’s response and what’s next

[artemistartarus]

��In January, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that the company acted in violation of the Sherman Act, an antitrust law that outlawed monopolistic practices. The act helps ensure that no single company or firm has control of a particular market. 

In the case of United States v. Google, the Justice Department argues that Google has unjustly monopolized control of the “ad tech stack,” which is used by advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads.

The Justice Department argues that these sort of practices prevent other search engine companies from having a real chance to compete in the industry.”

DON'T LET THIS GO OUT OF CIRCULATION. ADD MORE ONTO IT. QUEUE IT. DON'T LET THIS SITE FUCKING FORGET. THIS TRIAL COULD HAVE MASSIVE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE WHOLE INTERNET.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[loonatic-moon]

Not to be a pushy evangelist but I think everyone who uses the internet should be listening to the Better Offline podcast episodes about the google ads vs US DOJ anti-trust trial going on currently

[darkmaga-returns]

Notable News Stories Reported by Corporate Media (19 November 2024)

National Insurance Changes: UK’s biggest retailers warn that changes to National Insurance could result in job losses and shop closures.

UK Farmers Rally Against Reeves’ Inheritance Tax Changes: Thousands of farmers have turned out in Westminster to protest a proposed new inheritance tax policy. Jeremy Clarkson clashed with BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire at the farmers’ protest and then made a speech unleashing a ferocious attack on the BBC as a “mouthpiece of this infernal government.” Watch his speech in full on ITV HERE.

US Department of Justice vs Google Anti-Trust Battle: DOJ plans to ask Judge Amit Mehta to force Google to sell Chrome browser, which controls 67% of global market share, following August ruling that deemed Google an illegal search monopoly.  The forced sale could reshape online search and advertising markets, marking the most aggressive tech antitrust action since Microsoft case two decades ago, with final ruling expected by August 2025.

Crime USA: A hacker has stolen documents from a file server used in a civil case connected to former Rep. Matt Gaetz, including unredacted depositions from a woman who testified to the House Ethics Committee.

Pro-Democracy Activists Sentenced: A Hong Kong court sentenced 45 pro-democracy activists to prison terms ranging from 4 to 10 years under the National Security Law, with a legal scholar receiving the maximum.  The landmark case marks the largest crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy movement since the 2020 security law, affecting prominent activists and silencing opposition voices.

Russia/Ukraine War:  Ukraine has used US-made ATACMS missiles to strike Russian territory for the first time, according to Moscow, in a major escalation on the war’s 1,000th day. There are also rising tensions between the UK and Russia. Questions are being asked whether the UK will also allow long-range missiles to be fired by Ukraine deep inside Russia.

China’s Tech Expansion: China’s biggest tech groups are building artificial intelligence teams in Silicon Valley, aiming to hire top US talent

[companyknowledgenews]

DOJ vs. Google: The arguments for and against the defendant’s (alleged) ad market monopoly - Notice Today Internet https://www.merchant-business.com/doj-vs-google-the-arguments-for-and-against-the-defendants-alleged-ad-market-monopoly/?feed_id=193838&_unique_id=66deb46c2cf68 #GLOBAL - BLOGGER BLOGGER Google and the Justice Department are poised to lock horns in an era-defining antitrust case that’s been 15 years in the making. The outcome will profoundly impact the 300,000-plus workers in the U.S. advertising sector, plus countless more globally. And yes, that includes you; below are some key legal and technical arguments that will be debated in a courtroom, overseen by Judge Leonie Brinkema, in the coming weeks. These arguments will decide your future during the next four to six weeks. The DOJ’s antitrust case against Google, filed in January 2023, focuses on its tech operations. It alleges monopolistic practices that harm competition in the $600 billion online digital advertising sector. The DOJ alleges that Google maintains monopolistic control over the entire online display advertising sector, using an ad tech stack equipped with tools used by advertisers, publishers and third-party ad tech companies, such as ad exchanges, etc.Per its arguments, this control stifles competition, as Google’s dominance forces advertisers and publishers to use products, such as its ad server, that impact ad prices, and ultimately result in consumer harm.The DOJ claims Google’s role as a broker, auctioneer, and participant in ad auctions — via its specific tools in Google Ad Manager (GAM), that are commonly known as “DFP,” “AdX,” and “DBM” by industry aficionados. This scenario leads to conflicts of interest, enabling it to favor its services at the expense of rivals.In trial documentation, the DOJ notes how smaller players in the publisher ad server market, such as Kevel, OpenX and Xandr (née AppNexus) have had to effectively exit the market because DFP had better access to Google demand. “Even technology giants like Meta have been unable to gain scale to compete with Google’s publisher ad server [DFP],” according to the filing, citing DFP as a “barrier to entry.”  In its assessment, the DOJ claims this results in less innovation, reduced choices for advertisers and publishers, and inflated costs for consumers. Google’s defense team would (of course) differ in its assessment and could argue that the U.S. government’s market definition is gerrymandered with a myopic focus on display advertising.  Instead, Google’s defense team is likely to raise attention to the broader advertising ecosystem, especially emerging sectors such as CTV or retail media/commerce media, where similar household names such as Amazon, Meta, and Netflix (to name but a few) have emerged as rivals for media spending in recent years. In the coming weeks, observers will likely hear how the DOJ’s arguments are stuck in a world that is pre-smartphone, pre-social media, and pre-streaming or that the concept of “open web display advertising” was invented by the government for the purposes of the case, and simply no longer a thing.    2. Anticompetitive acquisitionsThe government accuses Google of acquiring competitors to maintain this dominance, with the DOJ’s documentation citing how it systematically acquired companies such as DoubleClick (2008) and AdMeld (2011), which were crucial in shaping its dominance in the digital advertising space. In Digiday’s 2023 series, an Oral History of Ad Tech, former DoubleClick (and subsequently Google) executive Ari Papro claimed the launch of DoubleClick’s ad exchange played a key part in the $3.1 billion purchase, albeit rival Big Tech names of the day were making similar moves.  These acquisitions allowed Google to integrate vertically across the ad stack, controlling key parts of the ecosystem from demand-side platforms (DSPs) to publisher-facing ad servers. Per the DOJ’s filings, “The acquisition provided Google with a pool of captive

publishers that now had fewer alternatives and faced substantial switching costs associated with changing to another publisher ad server.” The DOJ claims these moves were intended to neutralize threats from innovative competitors and protect Google’s ability to collect vast amounts of data, which further entrenched its market power. Acording to the DOJ, these acquisitions distorted competition and limited consumer choice in the digital advertising landscape, but that’s not the only way of looking at things. Google’s defense team is likely to point to how acquiring such assets enabled it to construct a more efficient ecosystem that benefits multiple parties on each side of a media transaction. Additionally, the defense team is likely to point out that Google’s consolidated offering offers consumers better data security, per its own assessment. 3. Exclusionary tacticsElsewhere in the filings, Google is also accused of employing exclusionary tactics to hinder competitors’ growth, but the defendant is likely to point to how its tools are interoperable with rival ad tech. The DOJ asserts that Google used its dominant position to limit the interoperability of its ad tools with rival systems, making it difficult for advertisers and publishers to use third-party ad tech solutions. By controlling access to valuable ad data and limiting rivals’ ability to serve ads on its platforms, Google allegedly forced many in the industry to depend on its services.According to items admitted into evidence in the case, “Google has configured the ad server to work in a more integrated manner with its own ad exchange AdX… this has the unintended effect of preventing, technologically, the creation of a trnly [sic] open RTB marketplace with 3rd party [sic] exchanges.”Such practice reduced transparency in the ad-buying process and restricted alternatives for advertisers, leading to higher ad prices, according to Google’s accusers, who would add such conduct has blocked innovation from smaller competitors who couldn’t gain a foothold.Albeit, Google contends that the cost of ads is reducing — as evidenced by the serial revenue declines produced by its Google Network business, a business unit widely recognized to represent the entity formerly known as DoubleClick — as further evidence of a robust ad tech market. The DOJ contends that Google unfairly preferences its own ad exchange in auctions, disadvantaging rival exchanges and advertisers, and it’s in this passage of debate, where the court will hear some of the most esoteric ad tech terms in existence: “header bidding.”By manipulating ad auctions, Google allegedly steers business toward its ad exchange at the expense of competing exchanges through its (alleged) earlier “first look” and “last look” advantage. This self-preferencing practice distorts auction outcomes, leading to higher prices for advertisers and reduced revenue for publishers. It resulted in rivals introducing a workaround: the aforementioned “header bidding.” According to the DOJ, Google subsequently moved to hamstring the rise of header bidding with the 2019 adjustment to how it aucitoned-off ad inventory. In this regard, Google’s unilateral decision-making harmed the overall digital advertising ecosystem by creating an uneven playing field that stifled competition and innovation. In this passage of proceedings, those paying attention are also likely to be treated to some of the more obscure names of Google projects, with names such as “Project Bernanke” and “Jedi Blue” to be debated in court.  Albeit, Google’s defense team is likely to argue that “ad tech hacks” such as header bidding bloated the consumer experience with the number of ad calls it involved, thus further decreasing the security of consumer data.   Additionally, Google is likely to maintain that dynamic pricing in the online advertising market helps monetize otherwise remnant inventory — that would otherwise be unsold — and that comparisons to two-sided markets where there is “an intrinsic value” (or standard price) of a commodity are not apt.

 5. Data dominanceFinally, the DOJ alleges that Google’s control over vast amounts of user data gives it an unfair advantage in digital advertising, as argued in the separate case of the DOJ vs. Google, where the defendant’s arguments were lost.By collecting data across its multiple services — search, YouTube, Android, and more — Google can offer superior targeting for advertisers, which rivals cannot match. This data dominance reinforces its monopoly, as competitors are unable to compete on a level playing field without access to similar data sets. The DOJ argues that this data asymmetry distorts competition, preventing rivals from delivering effective advertising solutions. Google’s dominant position in data collection also raises privacy concerns, as the DOJ claims it can exploit user information without meaningful accountability, further entrenching its position.Similar arguments were made in the earlier DOJ successful case making allegations against Google’s search ad business — it’s worth pointing out that the defendant plans to appeal this ruling — but what’s clear is that the fate of the ad industries likely to be decided in a courtroom in the Eastern District of Virginia in the coming weeks.“The future of the $600 billion online ad industry will be shaped in the coming weeks. Here are the arguments that will decide your future…”Source Link: https://digiday.com/media-buying/doj-vs-google-the-arguments-for-and-against-the-defendants-alleged-ad-market-monopoly/?utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=general-rss http://109.70.148.72/~merchant29/6network/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/pexels-photo-18816860.jpeg Google and the Justice Department are poised to lock horns in an era-defining antitrust case that’s been 15 years in the making. The outcome will profoundly impact the 300,000-plus workers in the U.S. advertising sector, plus countless more globally.  And yes, that includes you; below are some key legal and technical arguments that will be … Read More

[technologycompanynews]

DOJ vs. Google: The arguments for and against the defendant’s (alleged) ad market monopoly - Notice Today Internet - BLOGGER https://www.merchant-business.com/doj-vs-google-the-arguments-for-and-against-the-defendants-alleged-ad-market-monopoly/?feed_id=193835&_unique_id=66deb467889f4 Google and the Justice Department are poised to lock horns in an era-defining antitrust case that’s been 15 years in the making. The outcome will profoundly impact the 300,000-plus workers in the U.S. advertising sector, plus countless more globally. And yes, that includes you; below are some key legal and technical arguments that will be debated in a courtroom, overseen by Judge Leonie Brinkema, in the coming weeks. These arguments will decide your future during the next four to six weeks. The DOJ’s antitrust case against Google, filed in January 2023, focuses on its tech operations. It alleges monopolistic practices that harm competition in the $600 billion online digital advertising sector. The DOJ alleges that Google maintains monopolistic control over the entire online display advertising sector, using an ad tech stack equipped with tools used by advertisers, publishers and third-party ad tech companies, such as ad exchanges, etc.Per its arguments, this control stifles competition, as Google’s dominance forces advertisers and publishers to use products, such as its ad server, that impact ad prices, and ultimately result in consumer harm.The DOJ claims Google’s role as a broker, auctioneer, and participant in ad auctions — via its specific tools in Google Ad Manager (GAM), that are commonly known as “DFP,” “AdX,” and “DBM” by industry aficionados. This scenario leads to conflicts of interest, enabling it to favor its services at the expense of rivals.In trial documentation, the DOJ notes how smaller players in the publisher ad server market, such as Kevel, OpenX and Xandr (née AppNexus) have had to effectively exit the market because DFP had better access to Google demand. “Even technology giants like Meta have been unable to gain scale to compete with Google’s publisher ad server [DFP],” according to the filing, citing DFP as a “barrier to entry.”  In its assessment, the DOJ claims this results in less innovation, reduced choices for advertisers and publishers, and inflated costs for consumers. Google’s defense team would (of course) differ in its assessment and could argue that the U.S. government’s market definition is gerrymandered with a myopic focus on display advertising.  Instead, Google’s defense team is likely to raise attention to the broader advertising ecosystem, especially emerging sectors such as CTV or retail media/commerce media, where similar household names such as Amazon, Meta, and Netflix (to name but a few) have emerged as rivals for media spending in recent years. In the coming weeks, observers will likely hear how the DOJ’s arguments are stuck in a world that is pre-smartphone, pre-social media, and pre-streaming or that the concept of “open web display advertising” was invented by the government for the purposes of the case, and simply no longer a thing.    2. Anticompetitive acquisitionsThe government accuses Google of acquiring competitors to maintain this dominance, with the DOJ’s documentation citing how it systematically acquired companies such as DoubleClick (2008) and AdMeld (2011), which were crucial in shaping its dominance in the digital advertising space. In Digiday’s 2023 series, an Oral History of Ad Tech, former DoubleClick (and subsequently Google) executive Ari Papro claimed the launch of DoubleClick’s ad exchange played a key part in the $3.1 billion purchase, albeit rival Big Tech names of the day were making similar moves.  These acquisitions allowed Google to integrate vertically across the ad stack, controlling key parts of the ecosystem from demand-side platforms (DSPs) to publisher-facing ad servers. Per the DOJ’s filings, “The acquisition provided Google with a pool of captive publishers that

now had fewer alternatives and faced substantial switching costs associated with changing to another publisher ad server.” The DOJ claims these moves were intended to neutralize threats from innovative competitors and protect Google’s ability to collect vast amounts of data, which further entrenched its market power. Acording to the DOJ, these acquisitions distorted competition and limited consumer choice in the digital advertising landscape, but that’s not the only way of looking at things. Google’s defense team is likely to point to how acquiring such assets enabled it to construct a more efficient ecosystem that benefits multiple parties on each side of a media transaction. Additionally, the defense team is likely to point out that Google’s consolidated offering offers consumers better data security, per its own assessment. 3. Exclusionary tacticsElsewhere in the filings, Google is also accused of employing exclusionary tactics to hinder competitors’ growth, but the defendant is likely to point to how its tools are interoperable with rival ad tech. The DOJ asserts that Google used its dominant position to limit the interoperability of its ad tools with rival systems, making it difficult for advertisers and publishers to use third-party ad tech solutions. By controlling access to valuable ad data and limiting rivals’ ability to serve ads on its platforms, Google allegedly forced many in the industry to depend on its services.According to items admitted into evidence in the case, “Google has configured the ad server to work in a more integrated manner with its own ad exchange AdX… this has the unintended effect of preventing, technologically, the creation of a trnly [sic] open RTB marketplace with 3rd party [sic] exchanges.”Such practice reduced transparency in the ad-buying process and restricted alternatives for advertisers, leading to higher ad prices, according to Google’s accusers, who would add such conduct has blocked innovation from smaller competitors who couldn’t gain a foothold.Albeit, Google contends that the cost of ads is reducing — as evidenced by the serial revenue declines produced by its Google Network business, a business unit widely recognized to represent the entity formerly known as DoubleClick — as further evidence of a robust ad tech market. The DOJ contends that Google unfairly preferences its own ad exchange in auctions, disadvantaging rival exchanges and advertisers, and it’s in this passage of debate, where the court will hear some of the most esoteric ad tech terms in existence: “header bidding.”By manipulating ad auctions, Google allegedly steers business toward its ad exchange at the expense of competing exchanges through its (alleged) earlier “first look” and “last look” advantage. This self-preferencing practice distorts auction outcomes, leading to higher prices for advertisers and reduced revenue for publishers. It resulted in rivals introducing a workaround: the aforementioned “header bidding.” According to the DOJ, Google subsequently moved to hamstring the rise of header bidding with the 2019 adjustment to how it aucitoned-off ad inventory. In this regard, Google’s unilateral decision-making harmed the overall digital advertising ecosystem by creating an uneven playing field that stifled competition and innovation. In this passage of proceedings, those paying attention are also likely to be treated to some of the more obscure names of Google projects, with names such as “Project Bernanke” and “Jedi Blue” to be debated in court.  Albeit, Google’s defense team is likely to argue that “ad tech hacks” such as header bidding bloated the consumer experience with the number of ad calls it involved, thus further decreasing the security of consumer data.   Additionally, Google is likely to maintain that dynamic pricing in the online advertising market helps monetize otherwise remnant inventory — that would otherwise be unsold — and that comparisons to two-sided markets where there is “an intrinsic value” (or standard price) of a commodity are not apt.

 5. Data dominanceFinally, the DOJ alleges that Google’s control over vast amounts of user data gives it an unfair advantage in digital advertising, as argued in the separate case of the DOJ vs. Google, where the defendant’s arguments were lost.By collecting data across its multiple services — search, YouTube, Android, and more — Google can offer superior targeting for advertisers, which rivals cannot match. This data dominance reinforces its monopoly, as competitors are unable to compete on a level playing field without access to similar data sets. The DOJ argues that this data asymmetry distorts competition, preventing rivals from delivering effective advertising solutions. Google’s dominant position in data collection also raises privacy concerns, as the DOJ claims it can exploit user information without meaningful accountability, further entrenching its position.Similar arguments were made in the earlier DOJ successful case making allegations against Google’s search ad business — it’s worth pointing out that the defendant plans to appeal this ruling — but what’s clear is that the fate of the ad industries likely to be decided in a courtroom in the Eastern District of Virginia in the coming weeks.“The future of the $600 billion online ad industry will be shaped in the coming weeks. Here are the arguments that will decide your future…”Source Link: https://digiday.com/media-buying/doj-vs-google-the-arguments-for-and-against-the-defendants-alleged-ad-market-monopoly/?utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=general-rss http://109.70.148.72/~merchant29/6network/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/pexels-photo-18816860.jpeg BLOGGER - #GLOBAL Google and the Justice Department are poised to lock horns in an era-defining antitrust case that’s been 15 years in the making. The outcome will profoundly impact the 300,000-plus workers in the U.S. advertising sector, plus countless more globally.  And yes, that includes you; below are some key legal and technical arguments that will be … Read More

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

#20yrsago Bradbury goes nuts over Fahrenheit 9/11 title https://web.archive.org/web/20051219090823/https://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38776

#15yrsago Ryanair serious about charging to use toilets in-flight, may charge extra “breathing fee” for inhaling during flight https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/jun/02/ryanair-airline-oleary-toilet-charge

#15yrsago Jo Walton on THE SPACE MERCHANTS https://web.archive.org/web/20090612060824/http://www.tor.com/index.php

#15yrsago Roald Dahl on vaccinating your kids https://web.archive.org/web/20090606123639/http://www.childalert.co.uk/absolutenm/templates/newstemplate.asp?articleid=291&zoneid=2

#15yrsago Canadian copyright lobbyists leaned on “independent” researchers to change report on file-sharing https://web.archive.org/web/20090605230056/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4025/125/

#10yrsago Russia’s army of paid astroturfers message-bomb western coverage of Ukraine https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/maxseddon/documents-show-how-russias-troll-army-hit-america

#10yrsago A scarf woven from Jay Lake’s genome https://fishwrapper.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/jays-genome-project-part-3/

#10yrsago Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives”: photos of NYC slumlife in the Gilded Age https://web.archive.org/web/20140625121238/http://www.authentichistory.com/1898-1913/2-progressivism/2-riis/index.html

#10yrsago The more your job helps people, the less you’re paid (and vice-versa) https://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/

#10yrsago It’s not Net Neutrality that’s at stake, it’s Cable Company Fuckery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU

#10yrsago Critical thinking vs education: Teaching kids math without “correct” answers https://powersfulmath.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/who-or-what-broke-my-kids/

#10yrsago Piketty’s methods: parsing wealth inequality data and its critique https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/30/pikettys-errors-arent-mistakes-theyre-questions-and-he-answered-them/

#5yrsago That woman who got fired for comparing Michelle Obama to an ape is now going to jail for defrauding FEMA https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/woman-who-called-michelle-obama-ape-sentenced-jail-defrauding-fema-n1012936

#5yrsago The army of contractor-linguists who power Google Assistant say they had their wages stolen https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/a-white-collar-sweatshop-google-assistant-contractors-allege-wage-theft

#5yrsago Rumor: DoJ is going to investigate Google for antitrust violations https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/31/doj-preparing-antitrust-probe-of-google---dow-jones.html

#5yrsago Stop saying “robots are coming for your job”; start saying “Your boss wants to replace you with a robot” https://gizmodo.com/robots-are-not-coming-for-your-job-management-is-1835127820

#5yrsago Ted Chiang’s “Op Ed From the Future”: socialized transhumanism vs American oligarchy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/opinion/ted-chiang-future-genetic-engineering.html

#5yrsago Report from the Fed reveals that “economic growth” is a highly localized phenomena, masking widespread financial desperation https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/06/st-louis-fed-study-shows-rising-level-of-financial-desperation-among-the-poor-hidden-by-aggregates.html

#5yrsago All weekend, California Democrats booed neoliberal would-be presidents who talked down the Green New Deal and Medicare for All https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/03/all-weekend-california-democrats-booed-neoliberal-would-be-presidents-who-talked-down-the-green-new-deal-and-medicare-for-all/

#5yrsago Speech Police: vital, critical look at the drive to force Big Tech to control who may speak and what they may say https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/03/speech-police-vital-critical-look-at-the-drive-to-force-big-tech-to-control-who-may-speak-and-what-they-may-say/

#1yrago Washington State's capital gains tax proves we can have nice things https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

[leprivatebanker]

Google vs DoJ: Who wins?

[hackernewsrobot]

U.S. vs. Google: As landmark monopoly trial closes, here's what to look for

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/02/1248152695/google-doj-monopoly-trial-antitrust-closing-arguments

[blogynews]

"Breaking News: David vs Goliath! Google Braces for Showdown with DOJ in Historic Tech Monopoly Trial"

The trial for the biggest tech monopoly case since the Department of Justice challenged Microsoft over 20 years ago is set to begin on Tuesday in the U.S. This trial will mark a new chapter in anti-monopoly enforcement in the country. The Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general will present their case to a D.C. District Court judge, accusing Google of violating anti-monopoly…

[blogynewz]

"Breaking News: David vs Goliath! Google Braces for Showdown with DOJ in Historic Tech Monopoly Trial"

The trial for the biggest tech monopoly case since the Department of Justice challenged Microsoft over 20 years ago is set to begin on Tuesday in the U.S. This trial will mark a new chapter in anti-monopoly enforcement in the country. The Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general will present their case to a D.C. District Court judge, accusing Google of violating anti-monopoly…

[blogynewsz]

"Breaking News: David vs Goliath! Google Braces for Showdown with DOJ in Historic Tech Monopoly Trial"

The trial for the biggest tech monopoly case since the Department of Justice challenged Microsoft over 20 years ago is set to begin on Tuesday in the U.S. This trial will mark a new chapter in anti-monopoly enforcement in the country. The Department of Justice and a group of state attorneys general will present their case to a D.C. District Court judge, accusing Google of violating anti-monopoly…

[undisputedseo]

ICYMI: 8 States vs. Google: A Closer Look At The DOJ’s Antitrust Lawsuit via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson https://www.searchenginejournal.com/states-vs-google-a-closer-look-at-the-dojs-antitrust-lawsuit/477212/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[girlboss-enthusiast]

Is femicide a hate crime in the United States?

Short answer: No. In fact, femicide—the murder of women and girls because they’re female—is not even considered a crime separate from murder in the United States, despite a dramatic disparity in the homicide rates disaggregated by sex. Nearly 78% of femicide offenders are male intimate partners or family members, while only 9.5% of femicide offenders are female intimate partners. 80-86% of male-male homicides are committed by friends or strangers (Fox & Fridel).

Definition of Femicide

As stated above, femicide is the murder of women and girls due to their female sex. This includes murder by intimate partners (the best-documented so far), honor killings, the systemic rape and murder of women during war, and sometimes the selective abortion of female fetuses (WHO).

Femicide in the U.S.

I’m focusing on the U.S. because that’s where most of the data come from, although even then, accurate reporting is sketchy due to missing data regarding motivation.

Congress undertook its first attempt to legislate against hate crimes in 1985, advised by many civil rights advocacy groups. In 1989, the Congressional committee deliberately chose to exclude gender (sex) from the hate crime legislation, and refused to work with women’s rights groups afterward (McPhail p. 128).

Their rationale? Classifying sex-based violence as a hate crime would be too cumbersome due to the prevalence of violence against women, and would diminish the perceived severity of other hate crimes in comparison (McPhail).

This opinion is so entrenched that in 2021, 32 years later, it is still cited as a reason against including sex/gender as a hate crime on the federal level (Davidson).

Despite future attempts to address femicide and related crimes in the Violence Against Woman Act, violence based on sex is not considered a hate crime on the federal level (Cornell Law, 34 U.S. Code). See United States vs Morrison (Cornell Law) and Constitution Annotated in source list.

Hate crime laws vary by state; sex is a protected category in only 36 states (DoJ).

12 states do not consider domestic violence a criminal act, making it incredibly difficult to prosecute femicide specifically (NCSL).

“Heat of passion” is still considered a valid defense for murder, and usually causes a charge to drop from murder to manslaughter (Cornell Law, Heat of passion). This is despite mountains of evidence that heat of passion is an inherently sexist defense that excuses male violence against women (Gruber).

I think we can agree that sex-based violence, from domestic violence to femicide, is a very real problem, and an extremely neglected one in the United States. I’d also like to note that none of this addresses the intersection of sex and race; women of color, particularly Black and indigenous women, are much more likely to be victims of violent crime, including femicide.

Other facts about femicide

This part has a global scope, and is included because I, personally, found a couple of these findings surprising.

In general, when [gender inequality] decreases, so does [femicide] (Corradi).

However, in some places, violence against women is higher when gender equality rises (Corradi, McElrath & Selmini).

The World Health Organization suggests that women’s empowerment on an individual level increases the risk of femicide and sex-based violence, while political and legal reforms addressing the status of women as a collective decreases it (WHO).

Multiple-bias hate crimes, where a person is targeted for due to intersections of marginalization, does not include misogyny-driven crimes and thus disregards the gendered aspects of murders of women that include racial, religious, and sexual motivations. This elides how often women specifically are victimized to “get back” at the other marginalized group(s) they are a part of (McElrath & Selmini).

This is information I discovered after about an hour on Google. There could be (and probably is) much more data with which to draw clearer conclusions, but I’m not familiar enough with criminology to find it now.

Sources

Becaues it got cumbersome re-linking the same articles multiple times. These are either direct links, or links to articles that can be found on sci-hub or with a free JSTOR account.

Constitution Annotated, Laws Held Unconstitutional by the Supreme Court

Cornell Law, 34 U.S. Code § 12361

Cornell Law, Heat of passion

Cornell Law, United States v Morrison

Corradi, “Femicide, its causes, and recent trends”

Davidson, “Now Should We Speak Femicide?”

Department of Justice (DoJ), Bias Categories by State

Fox & Fridel, Gender Differences in Patterns & Trends in U.S. Homicide

Gruber, “A Provacative Defense”

McElrath & Selmini, Violent Female Victimization Trends

McPhail, Gender-Bias Hate Crimes

National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), Domestic Violence

World Health Organization (WHO), Understanding & Addressing Violence Against Women

@buzzcutbulldyke You asked to be tagged in this post, and here it is.