Sherman Act: "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony."
People do go to prison for Sherman Act violations. Here are some older Department of Justice statistics.[1]
"Yeah, one of those days, I was smoking a joint after leaving my shift as a janitor in a hospital and the police took me. If I hadn't called my friends Buffet and Elison to help me, probably I would be still stuck in jail."
- Nobody, ever.
Being poor and poorly connected, in the real world, are basically the same thing.
>"Yeah, one of those days, I was smoking a joint after leaving my shift as a janitor in a hospital and the police took me. If I hadn't called my cousin Billy in the <next town over> police department and had him vouch for my good character I would be out bail money and a fat fine" - tons of people with LEO connections
The fact that this wasn't obvious says a lot about HN's interactions with government.
This sounds exactly like the LIBOR rigging scam, various commodity market scandals. People rightfully go to jail for this stuff -- meanwhile we see the big tech companies bid rig
It was a fake rate anyway and they only moved it around a little, what Jedi Blue did was far more criminal and egregious. The ad networks act with impunity, for example, they know when a user has installed an app with no connection to them and then they serve that user ads for the app and then attribute the install to themselves! out and out fraud but they'll just claim the algo is really complex and our ML/AI doesn't have intent.
“Give us lots of money or you will lose your business” is basically they argument. It obviously works in some cases but I seriously suspect most advertising money is wasted.
What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do?
Individually we can use browsers like firefox or brave and probably donate time or money to them, but I think it's not enough.
I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses, but probably the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market.
Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
Incentivize the economy to not overproduce bullshit ad nauseam. Vote with your wallet, and push for it culturally, or spiritually - offer alternative experiences and goals to consumerism. Stop working for companies producing products nobody asked for, which are made for “economic growth” as a goal in it self. (If your factual constraints allow for it.)
As long as there is this enormous pressure to sell you ever more things, nothing will change for the better… just change: More influencers, more product placements and sponsor guided “content“, more MLM type bullshit all around. Someone will figure out how to recruit your friends and family to explicitly advertise the next innovation in problem creation inside your last domain of unquestioned trust and honesty - mark my words! How about a gamified “hit” on your friends? Getting big-data intelligence briefings and some psychological guidance on someone you used to care about, and some shitty internet points as reward for their conversion: “Agent 1337biz, your next target is your colleague John Doe. The file is transmitted as we speak. Further our influence, your loyalty will be rewarded! Hail, Hydra”.
You aren't addressing the question. The poster asked what specifically tech workers could do. You are giving examples of things _anyone_ could so to help fix the situation, aside from "just stop working for them".
"Vote with your wallet" is crony capitalist-speak for don't complain to the government to protect your consumer rights and / or create a fair market for small businesses too.
> Stop working for companies producing products nobody asked for
What is this in reference to? Nobody asked for Google to create their ad marketplace? No, there is huge demand for and complicity with targeted ads among millions of small businesses.
Working for Google and Facebook has other ethical implications…. but that’s not what I was referring to.
> huge demand
That’s my point.
Stop working for those small and big businesses in need of pushing solutions to problems they invented.
Tho, you seem to imply an ideological/apologetical take on the economy, which isn’t exactly helpful, in any case. The tautology “it exists because it exists” can comfortably offer absolution for anything and anyone, because no one is in control, no one has responsibility. I get the appeal for coping, but it’s a self-fulfilling-prophecy at best, religious glorification of apathy at worst. It is not, however, the inherent nature of things.
> Stop working for those small and big businesses in need of pushing solutions to problems they invented.
I've been trying to think of examples, but it's difficult.
Google originally thrived because its Search engine pushed a solution for a well-established problem. It's ad business solved a problem for advertisers - and site operators who wanted things simplified. Even Facebook offered a way for people to keep in touch using a medium more convenient than e-mail.
Landfills rapidly filling with last year’s “innovation“ and people getting increasingly dissatisfied with their jobs, because they lost touch with the actual product they are allegedly working on, should be an indication on a larger scale…
Apart from all those wonders of petrol-chemistry, like fast-fashion: Short smartphone cycles with minuscule improvements; Uber and food delivery services offering nothing, but minor convenience in exchange for a race to the bottom in worker exploitation (very genius. such innovation.); e-scooter sharing services disposing LiPo batteries in every larger city’s water bodies; X as a service; everyone having advice for sale; every fart commercially exploited…
Sorry, I really don’t believe you, if you tell me you haven’t noticed the economy getting high on its own supply. C’mon, whole sectors are “content creation” and engagement manufacturing for the sake of selling ads, or creating yet another f2p mobile game optimized for getting the kidz addicted.
I mean, just turn off adblock and see for yourself. Someone made all that shit!
We agree that much of what Google does is bad, but your solution both doesn't seem like it gets to the core of the issue, and moreover I can't actually think of a company that meets your threshold - it would be stupid for a company to produce a product that nobody wants.
I disagree. Production is cheap, more so for digital services, you can very well make shit nobody wants and then use advertising and marketing to produce demand.
And of course ‘wanting’ is ambiguous. There is a difference between impulsive desire and a cold-headed need. Heroin users also “want” the drug; gambling addicts “want” the gems in the f2p game’s store; people “want” the fantasy of beauty and success on social media, or fast-fashion’s first impression. People “want” sugar, love, attention, pleasure and safety/security in a way that’s disconnected to their modern actual needs. We are wired a certain way, adapted to natural scarcity and threat, and marketing and sales know this.
The abstraction of rational actors and beneficial, self-regulatory markets are evidently wrong for the most part, as we do know today. Everyone who says otherwise is driven by dogma and ideology, not scientific insights and recognition of our past’s experiments. Advertisement itself should make people question their ideas about the economy.
What is useful / useless can be subjective, but remember big companies are trying to manipulate to get people addicted to their stuff be it sugary foods, internet gambling (inc. crypto), tech gadgets, alcohol or whatever.
If no one bought useless shit (again what is that?) and just got say long lasting furniture, decent food, shelter etc, you’d have a situation where everyone could live based on fewer hours of work most likely. What to do with the time? If bored then volunteer? Talk to your family and friends? Hobbies?
There is plenty of economy outside of useless shit. I don’t see how we can get around needing police/fire/hospitals/defence/research/science etc.
I tell everyone about Firefox and uBlock Origin. Blocking YouTube ads is enough of an argument to convince anyone to at least try it out. I've never seen someone who didn't love the ad-free web experience. It's actually safe to just install this software on random computers: people's quality of life will be invisibly yet thoroughly improved, they will notice that things are just better even if they can't explain why. They'll be a lot safer from malware too.
The objective is to reduce the return on investment of advertisers as much as possible. This will only happen in significant enough numbers once a significant portion of the population is blocking ads. It's our moral imperative to spread ad blocking technology far and wide.
> It's actually safe to just install this software on random computers
+1, i actually did this a couple times on some friends computer when i noticed they hadn't any blocker installed (although i did tell them afterwards).
Let's run a crowdfunding to rent some maleware on shady forum to install ublock origin without consent :)
Related to the last bit: I was somewhat surprised DuckDuckGo is not a total scam because for years it got installed on my pc packaged with other software if I wasn’t paying attention (or the installer was especially crappy and didn’t let me opt out)
Huh, I think it's really critical to understand that the ad blocker is there, so you can turn it off sometimes. I run across forms all the time that silently fail to submit until I turn off the ad blocker.
Really? I can think of maybe once in the past ~year. I run into more sites broken by just using Firefox or by ads themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if ublock fixes more sites than it breaks.
There might be something wrong on your system. I switched a long time ago but sometimes run chrome to compare performance, and it's on a par.
If you come across a site where the performance is noticeably worse than in Chrome, it may be worth notifying the owner. The alternative is to live in a Google-controlled dystopia.
... the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market.
The alternative business model is so simple and is already in place --- simply advertise based on expressed interest.
This is what DuckDuckGo is doing very effectively. Show ads based on search words. No global, privacy invading network required. Amazon is doing the same quite effectively. Their ad business is growing by leaps and bounds simply by showing ads based on search terms.
Agreed. I have recruiters reaching out to me on one of my older spam email addresses (in addition to my personal address). They are clearly doing some sort tracking/correlation.
That's how Google used to do things back in the day! I still don't get how in the hell could personalized ads be more profitable. All I've heard is the "we'll keep showing you ads for toasters after you bought one because you'd buy another if the first one breaks" meme but where's the hard evidence on personalized ads getting more clicks?! Contextual at least intuitively seems to make way more sense.
> I still don't get how in the hell could personalized ads be more profitable.
It's because it creates a new profitable business model for BigTech.
Personalized ads require that the network collect as much data about you as possible. The idea is to use this data by trying to create some behaviour model to determine how and when a user purchases stuff. (Currently this doesn't really work as advertised, as you guessed).
But the US government, with PRISM, created a new revenue stream for BigTech - buying the raw data of the users directly. As with any government contract, this is actually way more profitable than serving ads to cheapskate internet users. Seeing how easily and successfully BigTech is able to get this data, the US has effectively decided to privatise spying (partially) to the BigTech. To sabotage the creation of regulation and privacy laws that may prevent such data harvesting, and to create an even more profitable market for the BigTech, they have also started to rope in other countries too. (See Five Eyes (FVEY) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes ).
I think more whistleblowers and legal ramifications for C-level execs (prison time preferably since they can happily pay any fine thrown at them) is the only real way to do it at this point.
The few experiences I had with whistleblowers is that it's way too sensitive and may never be handled officially by any system/government. They would have done it already :).
How would anyone compete with a scam business model? Ad buyers don't care if it's effective. Or rather they need convincing-looking gibberish to convince their bosses that they're worthwhile. Bosses don't want to seem stupid and are afraid of missing out, so they let it continue.
I suppose a free-speech distributed search service could make a difference if it was actually better than google. Imagine with distributed hosting similar to mail/dns-servers, where ISP:s could redirect their traffic to local mirrors.
Really slick alternatives to walled-garden apps as interfaces to standard protocol services like imap/matrix/etc, and make sure the servers are reliable and painless to set up.
Others spend a million dollars a month on whatever stupid idea a team of Account Managers in $6000 suits/outfits with $500 haircuts pitch to them. And then congratulate themselves when the Analytics Department produces graphs of whatever meaningless metrics they can find or make up that go "up and to the right" for each month. And the Regional Ad Buyer and the Digital Agency will convince themselves that attributing every single sale to that advertising spend is valid and acceptable accounting practice, when most of the client's product practically sells itself. And they'll do this for a decade or more, until Global Head Office notice, then they'll pull the plug with 3 or 4 months outstanding unpaid, leading to ~100 people getting laid off with zero notice and tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid monthly salary and entitlements.
At least, that's how it happened last time I got burnt by it...
Then why are Internet ads so terrible? Ever more annoying ways to present ads might make people accidentally click on an ad, but seem like a bad way of getting people to buy the product. Even video ads are generally terrible, many of them fail to even tell me the name of the thing I am supposed to buy before that 'Skip'-timer has run out.
The Internet would offer so many different and better ways to keep consumers informative about new products.
stop working at those companies. but a good number of people around these parts have already decided going through fb/google hazing is worth it for the paycheck. screw ethics. you already know, once a company reaches monopoly position, a lot of corners have been cut and it has been unethical. that's a discussion HN at large is not ready to have atm.
"You can’t buy ethics offsets for the terrible things you do at your day job."
and:
"But here’s the thing. You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. We need you to work ethically during that day job much more than we need you working with that non-profit."
> a business model that could win with them in the free market.
The entire point here is that the market is not, at least in this particular instance, "free". When a market is very explicitly being manipulated by a cartel who jointly hold a monopoly position over said market... they are in a position to prevent effective competition permanently.
> What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do?
Nothing. This can't be fixed. Where there is power, there will be abuse. This is an unfixable trait of humanity. What can be done is reducing the impact of abuse and regularly investigate and educate about them. Transparency is important here, and regulating individual power.
> I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses,
Those already exist. Just support them. Or do you mean specific cases like misusages in the ad-market?
> Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
History is a constant battle of powers about abuse. Those problems are neither new, nor special. Abuse will always exist, and it's the daily struggle of humanity to find the balance between the benefits and losses for all the different groups around the world.
>What can we as people in top 1% with 1) information about big tech abuses 2) skills to fix this do?
support politicians and lobbyists with your money / influence that are in favor of bringing robust anti-trust legislation to bear on the companies in question. The free market mythology is just one of the reasons we are in this situation to begin with.
If you browse HN from 10 years ago, you'll see exactly the same advice, except instead of "replace Chrome with Firefox" it was "replace IE with Chrome".
That combination works but it doesn't solve the issue for apps and smart devices. At that point your only real options are PiHole or a VPN with builtin ad filtration.
individually we need to stop working for unethical companies
we are the ones building these tools, reading these articles / comments sections, and talking with our colleagues and friends working on developing these products
we just have to accept that our takehome might not be as large at the end of the pay-cycle. feels better spending it tho :)
Individually it doesn't work. Unethical behavior is generally profitable, more so then the ethical behavior it is 'out competing'. The Unethical groups then use this profit to buy out and corner the market.
and on a larger scale, a different social model with less consumerism, thus less ads and less big corps trying to ensure more profits by any means. The more we delegate the less we see. I don't like to transfer web to real world but a more peer to peer life could help. Sorry for the fuzzy comment but with the advent of advanced robotics and ubiquitous computing, we'll probably have no choice but to rethink daily lives.
"individually we need to stop working for unethical companies"
Has there been a single case in history where this worked? has this been an issue for drug gangs, mafia, loan sharks, tobacco, alcohol or gun companies or any kind of evil organisation, ever? If not, maybe we should stop parroting it?
I am very much interested in furthering this discussion. Every so often there is something big like this in the news, we talk about it for a few days and then forget about it. Nothing substantially changes. No big consequences for the guilty. How do we fix this?
Stop using their junk. Delete your facebook, switch to fastmail or protonmail. Join patreaon and support content creators directly. There are plenty of things you can do you just have to start doing them.
Me, and I am sure, several other people on here do several of these things. It makes a difference, but it's not enough. We need some action at a much bigger scale.
Can a campaign like Mozilla did to promote firefox when ie6 was a monopoly work?
Promote a different browser when someone uses chrome with the possibility to get explanations about it. Contacting admins of sites that only works in chrome, this kind of thing.
Could this information be used to try to push chromium based browser like brave and edge to switch to another engine, lowering the influence of google on the web?
This will not adress the whole google service spectrum but chrome is the trojan horse for a lot of google strategies.
It's extremely hard to out-campaign Chrome's campaign of being pushed via google.com and youtube.com, unfortunately.
Though I'd like to see Mozilla try more promotion channels like video sponsorships, maybe go heavier in regions where Google is not as dominant as in the US…
Why should the burden be on common people ? It’s the government and policy makers job to enforce the law and make appropriate policies and legislation. Common people pay taxes (a lot of it) for them to do their job. Why do commoners have to wade into politics and then get exploited by the politicians to fight brother against brothers?
Maybe the people leaving ad-tech are the people you should hire? FB and Google pay top compensation, so anyone who doesn't work there anymore probably decided to eschew money for some other purpose.
E.g. I didn't know how gross ad-tech was until I saw how the sausage was made.
Because it can influence the behavior of people who might be going into adtech. If working for adtech becomes known for coming with a cost of harming future career prospects outside of adtech, it becomes far less attractive even without having to adjust compensation. This is also the kind of thing can get associated with moral failings, which can create significant social costs to joining adtech as well.
None of this occurs if you just sit back and encourage people to get out of adtech and make it nice and easy. People will just decide to do it for "just a few years" so they can "make some money."
On top of all that, this sort of change doesn't happen instantly. It'll start slowing and the momentum will grow. People current in adtech will have a chance to see the writing on the wall and jump ship before it's more than a minor annoyance.
This movement is called open source. We should educate people about importance of privacy and show them open source, privacy respecting, self hosted alternatives to closed source, tracking, proprietary services. If all of us converted only one person, this would make a legion of conscious people.
Median net worth in my state is ~$800,000. I'm worth quite a fair bit less than that, so I'm apparently not even in the upper half. (I'm a SWE, I've worked, at times, for large tech companies, include one in FAANG, who paid in line with about what I'm earning now, adjusted for experience.)
(Nationally, the median net worth is $121,000 (!) — so I'm upper half there, but still not 1%, since 20M Californias are worth far more.)
Reminds me that one of these days I should work out the day I became net-worth positive… (since, like many Americans, I started with a fair bit of college debt…)
"business model that could win with them in the free market"
Does "free market" mean there are no laws? Is so, start kidnapping their executives.
No, we have laws? Well then perhaps police and courts should do their jobs, but I guess harassing everyday joe is easier than holding megacorps to account.
The solution to the technopolies is decentralized technologies. I used to write full explanations of how that would work, but my comments about it always get buried. So I don't bother really explaining anymore.
Data intermediaries - our data is placed there, like our cash in a bank - and Fuckerberg and Co have to pay us for access. Like the banks pay us interest for giving them cash. Point being Google, FB, Twitter et al pay out more and get less and therefore are less exploitative douchebags whose activities and unintended consequences at scale are also less.
Poison pill. You're assuming and entrenching the practice of gathering such heaps of data and tracking behavior are okay to do in the first place. Remember, the money is a symptom of the root problem. A microcosm of humanity has built a surveillance infrastructure to monitor the rest with no consent. That's the problem.
The swindle with FLOC was pretty obviously tied in this, but people still went in circles discussing whether it's private or not, and downvoting those who said FLOC is a trap.
Let's consult the plan, nothing is even secret about this:
- Google disables third-party cookies, crippling competitors to its Analytics, and thus their data for ads.
- Google throws them the FLOC bone to avoid being sued, dressing it up as a privacy measure. Meanwhile FLOC is controlled by Google's code in the browser.
- Google itself continues to vacuum up users' stats for all sites through the browser, never needing the cookies or FLOC.
So, if this is not a case of Google using its monopoly on web services (email and video) and the monopoly on the browser to prop up its monopoly on web ads, then I don't know what is.
The baffling part, really, is: with Goog already being ahead of the rest of the planet by having surveillance in The Browser, why don't they chill the hell out and stop right there. It's almost like someone inside decided to set up a multibillion-dollar morality performance and demonstrate what happens when a company is being too greedy.
Also, we probably need to remember that even if Goog is told off and has to dial its appetites back, it still sits on a database of surveillance data on people through the web, the browser, the services and Android. Which database, for example, is used by the US police for location->people requests, of which folks by definition only some are potential subjects of investigation (see e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/technology/google-sensorv...).
Everyone reading this on Chrome should switch their browser today. Get off of Gmail while you're at it. There is no perfect alternative, but all those reasons why you think you can't switch don't add up to anything a fraction as bad as what Google is doing.
Seriously. Anyone who cares at all about privacy should never have touched Chrome in the first place. The reasons for its existence were obvious from the outset.
I have been using Fastmail for many years. My wife also switched a couple of years ago. The web interface is fast, they have great IMAP support, contribute to open standards (JMAP). They can also be the DNS server for your domain.
When I contacted support a few years ago about a keyboard shortcut issue in their webmail, they were very friendly and rolled out a fixed to their beta version very quickly.
I use Fastmail and have been very happy with them. They have been trying to deal with a DDoS attack from around the time this story broke. I initially didn't think anything of the timing, but given that this story is _literally about potentially criminal conspiracy_ it tickles the part of my brain that wants to indulge in other conspiracy theories -- e.g. someone connected to Google thinking "quick, we'd better make it look like a bad idea to try moving off GMail".
Personally I liked disroot, not only does their email fits me well (most of the time), but so does their calendar. For some reason though, sometimes some emails take a bit longer to reach you, but that's quite rare.
I use Gmail but never use the web interface (or log in with it at all for the most part). I just use the built in mail clients for iOS/macOS but any app will do. They can still see your mail but can't do much with it as I use DDG for the most part and am logged into a different account for stuff like YouTube.
Their spam detection is true garbage. One year in I had zero actual spams blocked and hundreds of false positives.
Unsolicited mail from a direct mailer in India for an SEO webinar, straight to the inbox. Every message from your bank, straight to the spam folder.
Am I sure it didn't catch some spam and age it out before I saw it? Yes, because I had to go in every 2-3 weeks to pull my banking messages and other false positives out. A process which invariably went "Open Junk folder, Look for spam, Find none, Check All, Move to Inbox."
Here's the kicker, there's no option to even turn spam filtering off. It took me five cycles with the support team to get them to offer an inscrutable sieve filter that would disable filtering if I pasted it exactly right in an unvalidated free text field.
(The second-to-last agent told me there is a way to do it with sieve filters and then closed the ticket without saying how, so I had to open another ticket asking if they would kindly share the solution they coyly hinted at.)
Gmail was behaving exactly like that for me for a couple of months. There was a huge HN thread of people with the same issue and that might have made someone at Google to fix finally the issue.
I'm very happy with gandi.net, $16.49 per year for a .com domain name and two email accounts (accessible via web, imap, etc), plus aliases. Been around for twenty years. They have a "no bullshit" promise.
Not saying it’s a good alternative, but if you believe Apple’s marketing about privacy, they now allow you to use your own custom domain for family emails.
I've done my research just yesterday and decided upon mailbox.org. I fully switched over in less than 4 hours.
It's hosted in Germany (GDPR regulations and reasonable privacy), supports custom domains, provides cloud storage and office suite and supports full inbox encryption with your own public key - the service provider allegedly can't even read your email after they encrypt it.
To move your existing email from GMail, first remove large junk/spam/ads emails and then download everything with Thunderbird over IMAP, then slowly copy emails to mailbox.org folder.
It also provides cloud storage (which I intend to use in addition to Syncthing) and cloud office suite.
>I have close to 15 years of emails stored in Gmail.
>Is there an easy way to download that or move it to another provider?
You can set up pop3 access[0] to your gmail account, download your emails (with any of a variety of clients[1]) and have the client delete them from your google account.
Gmail still offers IMAP, right? Use your favorite mail client (if you don't have one, Thunderbird is FLOSS and pretty good) that has an archiving feature.
They have a service called Takeout which will generate mbox file of your Gmail account. You can then import to Thunderbird or elsewhere to do as you like.
Frankly, I'm not sure about the current state of things, seeing as it likely has changed several times in the past few years. However, a) I'm not sure why Goog would want to bother with browser accounts otherwise, and b) my use of Chrome ceased soonish after I had the following experience in the early 2010s:
- set up a new empty site, listed absolutely nowhere, on quite dedicated hosting.
- open it in Chrome.
- a couple minutes later, observe Googlebot appearing in the visitor logs of the site.
Lastly, if you go to the ‘My activity’ settings on Google, you can see: “Include Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services”, which I guess can still be dissected further. And I have some website visits from 2016 listed there: including Wikipedia, which doesn't seem to use Google Analytics currently (not sure about 2016)—though these could be visits through Google search.
Also, text in the linked tweet directly says that Google tracks users on third-party sites through Chrome.
It is far more likely that Google found the new site from telemetry from Chrome than it is a random bot, owned by Google scanned the site within seconds.
Google also runs their own public DNS servers which afaik Chrome defaults to. They can just sit server side waiting for DNS lookups of domains they've never seen before and queue them up for the Google bot. No browser telemetry needed.
> Google also runs their own public DNS servers which afaik Chrome defaults to.
The statement that Chrome does not honour the networking stack's DNS settings does not agree with my observational data. I run pi-hole DNS and Chrome absolutely fails to load domains blacklisted there.
Because they see their solution as more secure. Intranet sites still work because Chrome only prefers their DNS first, it will still use your system settings if it doesn't work.
Seems testable by setting up randomized subdomains hosting http and visiting with different browsers. Also, make sure you aren't using Google's DNS services to resolve or managing your domain's DNS through their registrar.
Yes, whois is public but not all TLDs publish a list all domains and those lists of are usually updated only once per day. On the other hand it is very possible that they used the TLS transparency logs from the CA.
Yes, and claims still require evidence. I'm quite anti-Google but I'm not going to just start believing in random theorizing of evil things they could conceivably be doing without evidence.
Otoh, why even bother with Chrome, when you have Firefox, Brave and others to choose from? It's not like there is any substantial difference between them. At this point we don't need (extra) evidence of wrongdoing, the incentives mismatch is enough to not trust them.
tl;dr If logged in to Chrome, your Google Account can be used as an "identity signal" in place of a first-party cookie. This allows cross-domain and cross-device tracking.
Or they only let you turn off tracking for google products, because those track you internally anyway and it makes no difference, while there's no way to turn off 3rd party tracking...
Last time I checked, they also removed the "identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" flag that controlled automatically signing into Chrome if you signed into a Google service like YouTube. It is no longer possible to turn it off.
Yes, they also probably have also an AI collecting what makes your activity a unique profile even if you are not logged in. Thanks to google search, map, analytics, android, dns, amp, google fonts and the like, you almost always load something from a google server if you browse the web.
The baffling part is 99.9% of the internet inclusive but not limited to HN were sold as they "Do No Evil". Even after they drop it.
None of these is new. The strategic thinking of Google has been clear since Day 1. And now revealed in multiple email shown in court, both in terms of Chrome browser during Firefox era and Ads. ( And possibly Google Earth ? )
While it is nice to see sentiment finally changing after nearly 20 years. For some strange reason I just feel rather sad about it.
> The swindle with FLOC was pretty obviously tied in this, but people still went in circles discussing whether it's private or not, and downvoting those who said FLOC is a trap.
The brigading on HN in particular seems extremely obvious when it comes to Google related articles.
Personally, i don't think there's anything wrong with holding a monopoly as long as it stems from merit.
However, we are proven time after time that power corrupts. Unless there's a regulatory body to watch their every move it seems they'll abuse their dominance to maximize profits.
Even if a monopoly were achieved on merit (I don't necessarily agree that it was in this case), the incentive to maintain that merit disappears once the power is obtained. Even if that weren't true (i.e. if power didn't corrupt) they could simply degrade naturally while the bar for entry would remain too high due to economies of scale and other reasons. And don't forget the incentives against downsizing: layoffs hurt labor, reduced consumption hurts suppliers while withdrawal of products and services hurts customers and the brand simultaneously. People have made better arguments than I have but my point is even a moments thought should make you reconsider your position.
The big tech companies (and more) act as a cartel, doing things for each other to kick out smaller rivals or just censor and deplatform people and groups they don't like. This is just evidence that it's more than wink-and-nod deals, which I think most of us suspected anyway.
Social media, search, payment processors, hosting sites... they all work in lockstep for the benefit of the cartel. We lose privacy, opportunity, and freedom and these companies gain more power.
There needs to be a bigger crackdown on the power that these companies hold, and not just when some documents happen to leak. America is in the best position to do this theoretically, but neither head of the American uniparty even pretends like they're going to do anything about it.
This is a list of accusations, right? This is all pre-trial, so a journalist would want to put the word "alleged" in front of this rather than writing it up as though they'd discovered the undisputed truth? Just checking, I know it's not going to make a difference. Not a fan of Google at all, but I do like to pretend there's a process.
Only a journalist who is worried about the possibility of being sued for defamation really needs to consider using alleged in reporting. The truth is an absolute defense to defamation. If you are confident in your reporting, and especially if you have good lawyers, then you don't need to hedge. (Source: was a lawyer who used to do some of this work at one time in my life)
Edit: If you are just reporting second-hand on someone else's work and haven't done the investigating yourself, then you might indeed want to say alleged whatevers.
"Presumed innocent" refers to the government not being supposed to punish an unconvicted defendant beyond what's practically necessary for safety (though reading up on pre-trial detention is... illuminating). It does not mean if we look at Jason Voorhees covered in blood that we all have to say "well, he's not yet gone to trial, so it's really only an allegation of murder."
Innocent until proven guilty is more of a criminal trials thing. Balance of probabilities applies for libel.
I'm not in the US, but suspect it is similar to the UK where reporters will use "alleged" if they're using the legal defence of "qualified privilege" - which allows them to repeat potentially libellous allegations without themselves being sued for libel. In the case of reporting on documents (especially those made public in legal filings) the documents themselves are subject to privilege, so the journalists don't need to use qualified privilege.
Thank you for explaining this in an easy to understand way, my understanding all this time up until now (I'm also in the UK) was that until allegations get proven in court, they are only allegations! I guess there are different standards for criminal and libel trials
Burden of proof is not identical between a journalist and a judge (or a jury of your peers). A journalist who has verified something to be true to the best of their ability is within their remit to report it as fact.
in this case, the journalist is reporting on the contents of a lawsuit. the journalist is not making any claim to have verified the truth of the allegations, only the existence of the allegations.
They are reporting on documents released in the course of the lawsuit. Unless the authenticity of the documents themselves is in doubt, that's no different than documents obtained from a source within the company.
Oh it does matter. I hope the cops and judges will follow it, I think it's good for democracy. But if they didn't I would not bat an eye in this case. Why spend energy for that ? It's like seing a duchbag slipping on a banana. There is pleasure in watching.
Well I imagine so. But it still means google management decided to fund (relatively expensive) top notch research just to act as a front for their criminal operation.
People think all the time that whatever turns out to be bad for them (or the society) has been planned from the beginning. Despite that you basically never see it happening around yourself.
A lot more likely explanation is that they did setup the research lab with 100% honest intentions (i.e. they expected that it would produce value to them) but then it turned out that the results didn't meet their expectations and/or they slowly figured out that they don't have to adhere to all the rules and principles they set out for themselves earlier.
One might want top-notch research, in case it reveals to you some way to maximize your own revenue that doesn't have the legal risk (which this very Twitter thread is related to). So they might have a true interest in the research, even if that's not how they're running things right now.
Also, many large corporations are best thought of as multiple personalities, with different parts of the organization acting in different ways.
I tend to doubt that a team of top-notch economics researchers is entirely unable to notice that the market they are studying is being manipulated (even if they are in the dark about specifics of the manipulation)
If everyone asks them to do everything in their power to investigate the the illegal activities and prosecute all parties involved, we might have a chance at one biting.
Sending a message beyond an offensively small fine is crucial.
If you are in the EU or other locations please post similar information so it can be a global effort.
I think the goal of this lawsuit is probably more than just a fine. There will be a push to break up the companies into independent silos so google can’t frontrun its own ad exchange.
Man, as much as I'd like to see it, it really cracks me up when people think this has a snowball's chance in hell of happening. Google and FB are _required_ to win elections now, have been since 2012. This golden population control goose will not be killed. Instead it'll be taken care of and fattened up.
Does anyone else wonder if Page and Brin feel any pangs of guilt over how their company went from "Don't be evil" to such corrupt practises? It really is a classic case study in the journey from apparent idealism to a complete moral vacuum.
That's the thing though. They don't need more money. So why not try to make the world a better place for once? I know they donate to charity but they're uniquely well positioned to influence one of the biggest, and most dangerous, tech company on the planet.
I wonder. Do they care? Do they have personal problems that makes the rest seem insignificant? Or do they believe they're truly making the world better?
They think they'd decide what the money should be spent on better than you. So being corrupt and taking huge amounts of money in and then spending it on their chosen causes is a net good. It's narcissism
This seems to be common once a company goes public and finds success. New execs inside the company and investors outside the company are all incentivized to have the company make as much as possible. Probably hard to fight the inertia even if they wanted to.
No, they don’t care. If they did, their relatively paltry donations to charity would be closer to 95% of their net worth at any given moment. They are wholly incapable of spending their current ~$100b, growing at insane rates YoY, in their lifetimes.
Based on my experiences with sociopaths, they are more than happy to Lie. "Don't be evil" is the sort of motto you'd expect a batman villan to have for their front organization.
Please don't do internet psychiatric diagnosis on HN or glibly call names like sociopath. That's already one circle of internet hell and it points deeper in. We want the opposite vector here.
That’s not quite true. The specific lawsuit from which these documents originate (related to ad tech) was filed by Republican states but the Justice Department’s antitrust division, led by a Biden appointment attorney, is involved and is preparing a second lawsuit. One of Biden’s stated goals is to tighten antitrust violations in tech.
There is also the other antitrust lawsuit related to the Playstore that were filed by blue and red states.
Specifically, activist GOP states; some of the most corrupt politicians on the planet. I’m sure there’s actionable antitrust against Google, but this particular lawsuit is probably hot air.
Is it nonsense? For a tech company to tell the news press that it isn’t allowed to talk about a pres candidate’s crackhead son two weeks before an election? When crackhead son mysteriously had a 400k/yr job from a foreign corporation? When there’s video of said pres candidate bragging about getting a prosecutor fired in that country where his crackhead son is paid 400k/yr?
What’s your definition of nonsense?
Perhaps it’s just nonsense that the supposed news press rolled over and played along because they didn’t want to lose their friends in the DoD and CIA?
Funny how we learned precisely none of this from that so-called "Facebook whistleblower" two weeks ago. Looking at her Twitter, she doesn't seem to have anything to say about it. How strange! Instead, she's just shilling against encryption:
The timing on her coming forward and the media pushing her right after Facebook went down was impeccable. Remember, the the engineers couldn't even get into the data center. Just a way to try to convince the public that we need more surveillance.
When can we send the leadership to federal prison instead of slapping them on the wrist with paltry fines?
This has been used to inflate and extort advertising dollars. It has utterly trashed the web, gutted Mozilla, created a corporate tech monoculture controlled by platform giants, and led our social media engagement crisis.
Break up these companies and send the leaders that approved of this to jail.
Fines are good but don't work that well, even if they're large, because of agency conflict of interest. It's mostly the shareholders who are paying the price. The execs already saw their call option paid off with their 10 years of comp while they were running this scam (among others).
I agree, even a hefty personal financial fine which pushes people to the verge of bankruptcy will not impress these people.
They will get a new high paying job eventually.
The only adequate punishment is a long prison sentence and it would deter other people from doing the same.
Btw, also send the "reports" IE management who enforces the project straight to prison with the bosses.
Sounds radical, maybe, but all the other laissez-faire and self regulation approaches have not worked.
A prison sentence also means not employable in the same salary segment ever again.
These people hide behind large legal teams and always remind everyone about their large responsibilities.
But when it comes to be responsible and liable to bad things, nothing much happens.
Just prison, not like in china, where some executives have simply been executed.
Agreed, and you'd only have to put a small handful of execs in prison to create a massive deterrence effect. Social climbers and the managerial class are a paranoid, highly socially ovservent, news attentive and risk averse bunch, petrified of reputational ruin.
The shareholders reaped a lot of benefit along the way. It doesn’t seem outrageous to have the company (the shareholders in aggregate) pay fines related to the behavior.
The challenge historically was in making fines actually large enough to disincentivize doing it in the future. If G made $100 billion because of this, would the gov’t be successful in getting a $200 billion fine? What if they got $100 billion in revenue, but an additional $400 billion in market cap? Is a $800 billion fine doable?
Historically, it seems like the answers to those are solid no’s, and after lawyers have argued it for a decade, the fines look more like $1 billion. Which skews things a lot.
Small fines probably even help them in the long run since they tame popular anger. I'd almost prefer no fines (in contrast to small fines) so people can transparently see how unaccountable they are. Ideally we can get big fines, though.
That's part of the reason why I said fines were good. They're good both because it recovers some of the ill-gotten gains of shareholders (your point), but also because it incentives better governance.
But due to agency problems, jail should be also be added on top for the most egregious violations. As an example, the HSBC execs that banked cartels should have gotten jail sentences.
Isn’t this price fixing? That’s a criminal federal offense. The US Government would have to bring the criminal charges, although you (and likely the FTC) could bring charges for damages.
I sometimes wonder, what if there was a universal governing principle, that was simple to enforce, obvious, formulated in few words, so that everyone understands it.
All those priveleges which every of theese corporations enjoy, some simple, like not publishing schematic for 1000$+ device, some complex, like making backroom deals harming millions of people in a some insignificant and obscure way daily, like showing certain ads to certain people. Some other evade taxes using laws in ways laws were never intended to be used.
To enumerate and prevent every abuse possible is not optimal spending of time.
What if there were no hard rules, but instead the whole playing filed was in favour of little men. What would be the the main idea behind such system? Maybe some kind of radical transparency?
This idea, principle should apply to every company and reward those who play not only by the rules, but to the common end: sustainable, transparent, non-abusive, respecting sosiety.
If only existed some simple rule that reward this behaviour.
Just remember, good needs to thwart rules too. Freedom is fought with blood, sweat, and tears. Evil creates rules, even those who mean well create rules that perpetuate evil. "Forgive them for they know not what they do." :-)
Currently, companies have to put the needs of shareholders first above all else.
It could be changed through legislation that companies need to put the needs of all *stake*holders first.
This would mean chemical companies would have to take into account pollution past what is allowed by regulation, this would mean that Google would have to at least consider the well-being of web users as a whole when making decisions.
And, I believe, this would give people the basis on which to sue a company if they didn't take all stakeholders' interests into account, like creating a program like Jedi Blue.
>It could be changed through legislation that companies need to put the needs of all stakeholders first.
The problem is that it's the shareholders who sign off on the CEO, upper management, and their salaries and bonuses. I don't see how you can incentivize people to not put the needs of those who control their paychecks above all else under this model.
You make those same shareholders liable for the crimes of their "employees". It could be as simple as "executing" companies, i.e., nationalizing/simply erasing companies for abusive behaviors, or it could be a more complicated weakening of the limited liability of corporations.
in reality the "needs of shareholders" can be interpreted pretty flexibly. leaving a lot of money on the table in the short term to avoid a substantial loss of trust in the long term is not a breach of fiduciary duty.
Establish a category theory based foundation of human needs, which will necessarily include the environment and its needs, and all legislation must show how it meets the fundamental needs and all of their compositions, (eg. every need composes with the need for learning to result in the need to learn how to identify and meet any given need).
I need my privacy to be respected.
Google et al. would beg to differ.
A certain debit card company needs people to overdraft and pay back their accounts to take profit.
The overdrafter's need the card issuer to not lock them out or overpenalize so they can try to get out of dire financial straits.
The U.S. wants a fair, just legal system. Prosecutors and law enforcement need the slack to focus on only pursuing "the worst cases".
The needs of these organizations are not needs of human beings, but of systems created by humans. If they don't serve the needs of all, then they don't follow the principle. What you're describing is what I refer to as strategies, not needs.
Of course this exists, it is called socialism. But our society is so deep into consumerist propaganda that it has lost the ways to evaluate anything that doesn't presume capitalism.
I suspect that worshiping "The Rule of Law" as an unadulterated good is responsible for a lot of the corporate overreach we observe in the past few decades. When we construct a social fiction that state is just one among many actors, and must be bound by rigid rules and justify its actions, that Bermuda is basically an equal partner to the US, it just naturally leads other entities to malignant behavior
Of course the corporations will reverse engineer the legal code to get away with as much as they can. Of course they will evade taxes. Of course there will be a slow creep, where previously borderline illegal behavior is now the best practice adopted by everyone, and therefore unenforceable
If there's a sovereign on top of the hierarchy that doesn't have to answer to anyone, the corporations are way more docile, as seen in China or FDR-era USA, and proactively align their goals with the goals of the society
While I appreciate the point you're making, and don't completely disagree, I think you make a faulty assumption about our collective ability to find a suitable sovereign and that person's ability to resist the very same forces that lead to the inevitablity of corporate overreach. Having a single person with that much power was the core reason historic Americans revolted from the crown, and I don't think they were wrong
Again, I appreciate your statement of the problem. But I'm scared of your hypothetical solution.
Meritocracy sounds pretty good in principle, until you realize that 'merit' is usually defined by whoever happens to be in power, and thus often ends up entrenching and perpetuating existing power structures.
It is convenient to be thought of as having attained your position by merit, and also to be able to define the criteria by which others must seek to displace or succeed you.
Wow I just saw a headline to a far less interesting article about Google and Facebook conspiring together to bypass some restrictions of the Apple App Store... I thought this 'Jedi Blue' was the same thing so I almost did not click it... But this is a whole different beast. If they're willing to distract people with fake whistleblowers and boring articles in order to suppress this much more interesting information, it must be very bad. Will be interesting to see how deep it goes. Google or Facebook ads never seemed to work for me, I wonder if this is because of the manipulation. If this is true, it is outright fraud. They have defrauded millions of paying customers over decades.
Also, I believe some Facebook marketing directors resigned not long ago... I wonder if this is related? This has the hallmarks of a news story which keeps on giving...
Yes, but also, I'm talking about the thing as a whole, not so much the codename. The codename just makes it even worse, like calling a frontend developer a ninja makes the fact that you're wasting the best years of your life building forms and brochures even more depressing
Using the median page load time is one of the best tools for analyzing effective load speedups. Sounds legit to me, and they're just trying to speak to the jury.
In my subjective perception, most of the improvements from AMP came from the fact that all the abusive technology that publishers had amassed on their primary web sites over the past decade or so got temporarily dropped in the forced rewrite.
A non-AMP site could be just as fast as an AMP site (minus the initial prefetching) or even faster by not requiring all the AMP-specific stuff, but in practice, the AMP sites were a minimal rewrite of the full site, leaving behind the popups, autoplaying videos, 40 different trackers, ads from 5 different companies, etc.
AMP overcame the inertia of just leaving all the crap in and incrementally adding more by forcing the rewrite. Over time, as the publishers had more time to crappify the AMP versions too, they became worse.
Welp, it's time to de-google my networks then. Facebook traffic is already blocked, now I wonder how much Web content I will lose when I block all google traffic.
So, they (juries, sanators, others busy with wrong things peoples) will finlly do something or we can just discuss it for next 8-9 years and on 10 + 1 day all goes to history ?
My guess: this wends through the system long enough that the details end up getting forgotten and confused in the retelling, finally ending in some trivial (relative to these companies' profits) being issued, and the public forgets about it in another year or two.
In other words, this is likely to be the Experian data breach all over again. You remember, right? When the credit files of virtually every working adult in America got released and... nothing happened?
Yeah and apparently UFO's are real too, and Edward Snowden was right, nobody cares man, nobody cares. If we cared we'd smash our phones and bake our neighbors cookies, but instead house after house settles in for the fear fest blasting right into our face from inches away. Begging for more. Just more.
Hello advertisers. You are being manipulated and abused just like the consumers you are targeting.
There is very little evidence to show that invasive digital advertising is actually effective. When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase?
Bad for consumers and bad for advertisers. Why continue with this opaque, profit sucking charade that mainly enriches those selling the ads?
> When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase?
Also how often are the metrics inflated by people who were going to purchase anyway? I was booking a holiday yesterday and knew the company I wanted to book from - I typed in their name and clicked on the top result as that was the company I wanted.
When I clicked back I noticed that they had the top two results - the first was an ad and the second was the organic link.
I wonder if things like this really inflate the calculations companies do on how many acquisitions they get through the ad and their spend on the ad. I went back and clicked on the organic link instead and then checked out - but still wonder if somehow that counted as a “sale” from an “advert” in google analytics rather than me just wanting to find the company and book through them.
I read a lot of companies buy advertising specifically for their own name, because if they don't, a competitor will, and will appear first when someone googles the company name.
You are right - That’s another practice is morally dubious (And imo should be outlawed!)
(Not on the purchasing companies side, but on google selling keywords for someone’s brandname which effectively forces companies into bidding for their own name)
Another interesting policy is that Google's Ad policy says "We don’t investigate or restrict trademarks as keywords.", however they will protect against ads on their own product search terms and trademarks.
I work for a company where our competitors are paying for ads over our brandname, but try to do that for Google...
> Another interesting policy is that Google's Ad policy says "We don’t investigate or restrict trademarks as keywords.", however they will protect against ads on their own product search terms and trademarks.
That would be classed as a descriptive mark and is unlikely to be granted registration.
> Descriptive marks are a type of trademark that are usually composed of a word or words that merely describe a product or that identify the characteristics of a product and are generally considered weak marks. In other words, these are descriptions that could be attributed to the goods or services offered by a business. Generally, such marks are unlikely to be granted registration or protection under trademark law. However, descriptive words may be registered and protected by the law if they acquire “secondary meaning.” This happens when the original or primary meaning of the descriptive words becomes exclusively associated with a particular business.
Eh, I see it as different to a billboard - a lot of people use google as the only way to find your site where they type in a brand name to find your business (ie lots of people don’t use urls).
This is putting a step inbetween someone trying to access your website where they HAVE to read about a competitor (because they have to read to see if it’s your site or not). Your competitor can even choose the wording of their link and description, while you are stuck with something google has arbitrarily chosen.
It’s more akin to hiring people to stand outside the entrance of your competitors store, and when they see people going in they go up and try to convince the people to your store rather than the competitors.
There was a freakanomics podcast 2-part episode on advertising which discussed this, and many other things.
At least in one case (eBay?) they discovered this kind of brand advertising had essentially zero effect. Turns out if people search for eBay, they are going to click the result for eBay, whether it is first or not.
You're tricked if you think so yourself, all the small businesses measure it and that is why FB and Google are so rich. Its like saying you're been tricked to think computers are useful for your productivity, it's insanity. You can argue if big corps spending just to keep coca cola on in front of your eyes is useful or not. To what extent but that's entirely different conversation.
When was the last time you died? Death still exists.
Agree completely. The sentiment that this is all a shell game and advertisers are being completely manipulated always seems to come from people who don’t have much domain expertise.
I’d be quick to throw digital advertising to the wolves but the reality is that it’s extremely effective. Is there a level of opacity? Yes. Are there tranches of junk traffic and ineffective tools put forth by the ad networks? Absolutely. But these are problems at the margins, and don’t invalidate the fact that advertising on Google and Facebook in particular are very effective, and measurable to enough of an extent that it makes sense to keep doing it and growing your level of investment.
The majority of advertisers both large and small get that they can’t let the quest for perfection in advertising attribution be the enemy of progress.
> You are being manipulated and abused just like the consumers you are targeting
Their first sentence was more correct: consumers are also getting value and the question is more whether the true cost is worth the benefit. For some people it definitely is, especially those who are skeptical and thus learn/measure/etc themselves. For others they give away far more than they get. For society/humanity as a whole it’s an open question, even more so once you start to include the second-order effects (in both directions, good and bad).
No one is saying "advertising doesn't work". We're saying that massively targeted invasive advertising is not significantly more effective than content based advertising. There's plenty of evidence for this assertion.
What we found at a previous employer through extensive testing: advertising on Facebook works pretty well, but the highest return on ad spend was to not use any of the demographic tools at all. Also, weirdly, having an attractive product and displaying it well in photo and video ads did very well. Almost as if there is no real magic trick of effectiveness at all.
For us google ads was insane. I d encourage Google to keep record on everyone and everything after having seen how incredible their client to business matching is: as a small company, in a niche b2b product (waste management software), we got big name random calls days after starting to pay Google.
In another company we spent millions on Facebook and got relatively little out of it (predatory lending marketing), we had again more success just reducing friction, simplifying the message and putting it on Google with massive keyword spam. The least we protected users, the more they paid us.
I dipped my toes to google ads the first time a few months ago. I am definitely not sure I understood it correctly, but I gave up very quickly as I got following impression[1]:
1. Google seems to define what are "relevant ads" for a given search term and if they are not deemed relevant, you are pretty much out of luck.
2. Google defines a minimum price for the auction, and won't show your ads below that even if there are no other ads shown
3. Google very aggressively pushes for me letting them define my bids for the ads. Like... What? Who and why in their right minds would let them do that? Like me going to buy a phone and the sales clerk told me that okay, give me your wallet, I'll tell you afterwards what you want to buy and how much you want to pay for it.
[1]Also I admit, online ads were not that important for the business case, it was more curiosity than real need
Google only wants to show ads that people will want to click on and are relevant, or they are wasting their own revenue by wasting the display slot.
And one (but definitely not the most important one per your point #1) is how much someone is willing to pay for the slot.
If you’re paying $100/click, but no one ever clicks on it because it isn’t relevant (like trying to sell real estate to someone trying to find used computer parts or whatever), they’ll still not show the ad.
> 2. Google defines a minimum price for the auction, and won't show your ads below that even if there are no other ads shown
This is the most frustrating one for me. It’s like if eBay enforced a minimum bid and wouldn’t list items.
It’s not a true auction because of these minimum prices. It just doesn’t seem fair and transparent.
Of course, it’s Google’s site so they can choose what they like. Unless they start breaking laws.
For now, it’s just the annoyance of them not using “digital principles” by sticking to real world rules that they can make more money by adding friction rather than having an automated auction.
Advertising effectiveness is often vague, but it also works well in many circumstances.
It takes a certain kind of hubris to suggest that all these companies spending $500B on advertising have no idea what they are doing, and that if only they listened to HN/Reddit they could save so much money and make the world a better place.
The issue here is to what extent G has manipulated their own auctions for their own benefit, and what kind of anti-competitive actions the relationship with FB amounts to.
Please show evidence that Google's global privacy invading data collection network justifies their 3-4X premium in advertising cost over simple non-invasive alternatives. "Problematically naive" is assuming the cost is justified without any such evidence.
Amazon's ad business is currently growing at a 70% annual rate by simply displaying ads based on search words --- probably because searching on their site is an overt expression of interest in making a purchase.
> Please show evidence that Google's global privacy invading data collection network justifies their 3-4X premium in advertising cost over simple non-invasive alternatives
It really isn't. You can (maybe) justify a 2X premium on th basis of higher ad effectiveness due to superior performance. The rest of that margin comes from having the largest (by far) marketplace, which forces more buyers to bid against each other (raising ad costs), and more sellers to undercut each other (lowering publishers' ad revenues), in order to participate.
I happen to to agree with you, but this demand for proof is untenable and doesn’t promote good discussion. Any such proof would be guaranteed insufficient, as macroeconomics are by definition reductive and summary in nature, and the last thing we need is to nitpick econ to death in this thread.
Oh gosh, please understand that none of this is new to anyone who works in the industry.
Everyone knows how fuzzy it is. Everyone knows the scheming from the VP Marketing, to the Agencies, to the Exchanges etc..
But we also know when it works, and when it works well. The more experienced marketers have an intuition for how all the various different marketing activities combine to form a synergy. And how it gets disproportionaly harder to do in a low cost way, to the extent that large, fat, profits exist that can be extracted.
But that's no different than any other part of a company. P&G could drop 1/2 of their White Collar workers and probably figure out how to get along just as well. Union workers in Auto Plants have benefits that put them way ahead of what they'd have otherwise, but they have the power to extract it. Governments pay out to 'no bid contracts' - and especially lawyers - considerably more than they have to.
Every sector of every industry is making sausage, the issue is to highlight the actually illegal stuff, and put some legal parameters around it.
Google bidding on it's own auctions is a problem.
Google's control over adjacent parts of the value chain is a problem.
Google's metrics, if they were fabricated, that's a problem.
But bad marketers that spend too much on ineffective campaigns, that's not a legal problem.
In every discussion about advertising you typically get a comment similar near the top that tells us that advertising never actually works.
For a lot of us working in a related field, we know it to be false, there’s plenty of online business that rely on online ads and are profitable.
Yes they are invasive to your privacy. Yes some of them fake their effectiveness. Yes to all of that. But saying that advertising online doesn’t work at all and we all bought into a giant scam is just not rooted in reality.
I don't know, I dabbled in ecommerce and while it wasn't a roaring success, people definitely did click the ads and buy the product, and I made a tiny bit of money. My guess is if someone actually knew a few more things than me they could make it work properly.
I'm pretty sure that most previous methods have had their effectiveness significantly reduced by how our society works nowadays.
Most non-IT workers still don't use an AdBlocker, so you're actually getting your ads in front of the majority of the population.
If you did the same with TV or even worse magazine ads you'd reach only a tiny segment of people, as the quantity of people consuming this kind of content has been drastically reduced.
While technically you’re right that most people don’t use as blockers, I was surprised to see that it’s as high as 42.7% that this link seems to claim - https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
> 42.7% of internet users worldwide (16-64 years old) use ad blocking tools at least once a month.
That statistic is incredibly misleading. The amount of page views without adblocks is much higher then the insinuated 58%, because they're counting everyone as "using AdBlock" if they've used any device with an AdBlocker installed at any time within a month
And a lot use AdBlock Plus, which also sells your usage statistics and only blocks ads from corps that didn't pay them.
Did you, by chance, mistake ad blocking for AdBlock - the browser extension?
42.7% of users globally use ad blockers while Adblock has 65 million users. Surely, 42.7% of users is > than 65 million.
Also, I don’t understand why you compared page views to users. It’s probably very uncommon for a user to install an ad blocker but also choose to enable or disable it on specific page views.
no, i didn't. nor can i comprehend how you got that idea.
we were talking about how many people see internet adverts. you then linked a statistic implying that 42.7% of people wouldn't be reached because they're using adblockers.
this is false, because most of these people will still be reached, as they're only occasionally using adblockers
I don’t think this is a common way people use adblockers. Do you have any way to back this up?
> nor can I comprehend
In your first comment, you mentioned AdBlock, the extension, in the context of 42.7% users using ad blocking technology. To me, it read like you thought that the backlinko url was saying 42.7% of internet users use AdBlock specifically.
you only have one internet-capable device you use each month?
i got a phone, two tablets, two laptops, a desktop and a TV.
my phone uses Blockada and firefox with ublock origin, they both block some ads, but some still get through.
one of the tablets is an ipad, which only has the buildin adblock. a lot of ads go through that.
the other is a kindle paperwhite, thankfully without any ads.
the laptops and desktop pc are all using chrome/firefox with ublock origin. most ads are blocked, but some go through just as with my phone.
the TV has several devices connected to it:
- xbox series x: unblockable ads
- nintendo switch: unblockable ads
- nvidia shield: unblockable ads.
for a while i tried to use Pihole for DNS-level adblocking, but it didn't really decrease the amount of ads i saw per day, so i eventually gave up on that.
so yes, i do everything i can to remove adverts from my life, and am nonetheless unable to remove them entirely.
as such internet adverts will still influence me and few people invest as much time into blocking them as i do, which makes them generally more effective.
the reason i pointed out AdBlock Plus specifically was because of how many people use it. most of these people still see ads, because that specific adblocker only blocks advertisements from advertisers which haven't paid eyeo (the corp behind that extension) money.
Last I heard, Nvidia Shield may have hardcoded DNS endpoints embedded via raw IP address. Your conventional PiHole setup won't work. You'll have to blackhole the ad DNS traffic entirely by blocking the Nvidia Shield's IP traffic to anywhere outside your network. Honestly, it's pretty sad the lengths we're having to go to for privacy, but... There it is.
Having done this before? It is clearly, measurably more effective for most types of businesses (but not all).
It’s easy to spend massive amounts of money on print and other ads with literally zero actual sales coming from it, and everyone you talk to on the print side knows it - but won’t tell you and will happily take your money.
At least with online ads you can test, tune, get your own data, which while not perfect is miles and miles better than you’ll get from other types of ads.
For a lot of small businesses starting out in digital advertising, the only previous method they had experience with was buying a website or Shopify store and waiting/hoping. We shouldn’t discount “this is a lot easier and actually reaches people” as being valueless.
What previous methods do you mean? As for data, I guess I can't really see it all, it's inside Facebook. But spending money on the wrong target groups seems to not work, according to my experience. So it does seem like FB collects useful data for targeting ads.
> There is very little evidence to show that invasive digital advertising is actually effective.
Ignoring the "invasive" (being a matter of definition) there is an absolute mountain of irrefutable evidence for google-type digital advertising being "effective", in the sense that an advertiser can spend 1$ to make 2$, measurably.
> When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase?
The answer is: It doesn't matter. Ads being clicked and thus stuff being sold is not a matter of personal opinion or observation. Spending and tracking online ad money works. Of course, on an individual level you can still lose money while advertising for a myriad of reasons.
By the way, this is by no means an argument for advertisements (online/offline, "invasive" or otherwise). Advertisement as an industry does not create value. It's steering attention while sucking up money and there is also no reason to assume that it provides an inherent bias towards better products (the opposite likely being true).
Also Google/FB could be defrauding their ad customers to an absolutely mind boggling degree. Being the deliverer, and also reporting on deliveries, it's insane that they can operate basically unregulated.
The thing is people assume everybody that is browsing is like your average hackernews user. But my mom for example continuously clicks on those ads on Facebook. I my self sometimes click on ads that shows some tooling usually I then go to Alibaba and find the unlabeled tool for like 1/3 the price drop shippers or asking.
I agree, reading these comments I get a sense of tunnel vision among tech-literate people. I used to work in IT and it is not hyperbole to say that average content consumers click on almost every even vaguely appealing ad put in front of them.
> Hello advertisers. You are being manipulated and abused just like the consumers you are targeting.
Do you have much evidence for this?
Advertisers don’t spend big bucks blindly. Many companies have significant data science teams that keep an extremely close watch on ad spend return on investment.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t all being price-gouged (per the AG’s complaint) for instance. Paying protection to the mob also strongly correlates with your store not burning down in the middle of the night. We just don’t know how different things could be without this level of monopolistic distortion (which I admit could mean that without Google things _could_ be worse?)
Read the complaint in TFA... you can spend big bucks and even actually come out ahead in that, while being manipulated and filched by Google and Facebook.
Both of these things can be possible while one of them is illegal behavior (engaging in price-fixing cartels) and one is simply immoral to many of this forum
Most of these products are leaded or toxic. I had a Mandalorian mug gifted to me by a dumb gen-Z friend of mine and it came with an Amazon return receipt showing it came from a 3rd party seller despite the availability of the same official LucasFilm mug being sold by Amazon.com. I don't trust products from random sellers so I scratched off some of the glaze and tested it for lead, and what do you know..it was leaded. Buying from random sellers is a recipe for allergic reactions, toxicity, bad airdoor air quality from off-gassing, ad infinitum. If you have pets, toddlers, or care about yourself, you should be very careful what objects you put around your home. A shady pillow or carpet could be destroying your air quality with VOC dyes. I gave the friend a stern talk but it's doubtful I changed the habits of an uninformed consumer.
When shady manufacturers are willing to do this kind of substitution on pet food [1] and medical supplies [2], one should expect any kind of safety regulations for fabrics, dyes, paints, etc to be ignored as well.
I'm not a very trusting person. The custom stamps I purchased were ordered directly from the government's official website. I simply didn't know the product existed before I saw the advertisement. The rug was from ruggable.com (which seems fine) and the water bottle was ZOQQ (which looks questionable no matter what store it's purchased from).
I can't control the behaviour of others, but it's somewhat beside the point. I was giving examples of when the advertising worked. Whether it should or not is a whole different topic.
Same here. I see. I suppose my comment was just to convey how a lot of people end up buying toxic stuff through ads because they just click and buy without regard to where they are or going on the web.
It seems like you know exactly what to do with regard to authenticity, no knock on you.
Yeah, unfortunately we can't control the masses, let alone even friends and family, so these ads and products will thrive.
It's a bit sad because products used to come from trusted local vendors.
Now, a whole host of health problems and diseases are gonna be cropping up in people due to e-commerce. I wonder if we can already see that with the prevalence statistics.
The only advertising that advertisers have to do that actually makes a difference is advertising their services to their customers (and this would include an in house advertising division convincing the rest of the company that they're sufficient effective).
If they can actually show the effectiveness of an advertisement then good. If not they you fallback on "mindshare".
Really the people we need to be reaching are product owners et al.
> There is very little evidence to show that invasive digital advertising is actually effective
Wish.com would heavily disagree with you I'm sure. Almost everyone I know has ordered at least one thing off them, some use it more than Amazon these days for their overpriced useless junk needs
I don't think i understand how this was supposed to benefit Google? just making facebook bid like everyone else would surely have just raised the floor as everyone had to compete with them, where this way google makes less on the ads sold to facebook.
The point was to kill header bidding altogether forcing people onto google's exchange. Or some portion of the time, facebook's exchange.
Basically Google and Facebook wanted to create a walled garden where you're more or less forced to bid on their ad exchanges. Since they control the ad exchange they can front-run everyone and bid using insider info.
By eliminating all other competitors Google and FB can basically collude to split the pie.
It’s kind of a perfect plan really - it works as long as folks are using Chrome or anything Chromium based (which still feeds into Google’s leverage with W3C). Makes one wonder just how “free” Android really is.
This explains my question. How much does Google pay for its own ads on its own platforms? No way to check. Easy to manipulate. But this is a whole lot worse.
It takes two things for programs like "Jedi Blue" to happen.
First, you need sociopaths in leadership positions who champion this 'great idea' they've figured out. These people often rise up in large companies because they are willing to do this sort of thing without any remorse.
But second, you need developers to build it. A large number of them, usually, for a big project like this.
Dozens of people like us knew they were building a piece of software that was obviously illegal. Oh sure, management had probably told them some version of "but you see, it's legal because...". At a company that spent decades claiming they only hire the smartest people in the world, that doesn't pass the test for me- they had to know.
Which means that the people who built this fall into two categories, in my mind. Those who understand they're doing something illegal, but don't care- future sociopath leaders themselves. And those who know it's illegal but are too cowardly to walk away, to whistle blow, to do something about it.
I believe financial crime like this is far easier to be "on terms" with, if you're already in a system/team that condones it, since it has no direct victims. X Bank and AdTech startup Y might hurt, but there's no real impact.
There's also the fact that by the time you notice that something's off, you might already have implicated yourself in the crime and are afraid of getting in trouble. Probably not what happened in this case, but it does happen.
Blaming the developers is blaming the guys in the trenches. Developers are not lawyers, and the law is so complicated and so divorced from any sort of common sense that I don't think if I were in the position of one of those developers, I would have been able to tell that it was illegal. There is no such thing as software that is "obviously illegal" outside of cases like DMCA circumvention or cryptography export laws, and maybe not even then.
You are assuming that developers really know the implications of what they're doing. The reality is that, apart from a few that made the effort to understand the whole situation, most are kept on the dark about the real implications of each piece they're building. That's the "genius" of modern management, and why they want to make each software engineer a little cog in their machine.
Why would they care? Write this code that will make us more money and cost the advertisers some. Don't tell anyone.
I don't now when this goes from being illegal to being just aggressive business. As long as I am not in trouble, I can also sleep well at night, even if some advertisers make less than they otherwise would have.
What you are saying is that morals and laws are the same thing, which they are not. Laws can very well be immoral, and sense of morality depends entirely on each one of us.
All this presupposes that what the AG has written is correct, and that what happened was actually illegal. Generally a court of law decides that.
Since none of this has been proven, maybe it would be prudent not to throw all of the folks who work there under the sociopath or coward bus?
A cursory reading belies the authors don’t fully understand the mechanics of the industry (eg, the broken analogy comparing an ad exchange to a stock exchange), so I’ll reserve judgement personally.
It's worth noting with all the revelations in the last couple of days, that at least some of them aren't new. For example:
- "Jedi Blue: A Scandal That Highlights, Yet Again, The Need To Regulate Big Tech" (19 Jan 2021) [1]
- "Facebook and Google allegedly cut a deal that reduced ad competition" (17 Jan 2021) [2]
- "Google acknowledges it foresaw possibility of probe of 'Jedi Blue' advertising deal with Facebook" (7 Apr 2021) [3]
I mean this is all fruit of the same tree, the states' suit, but it seems there's some revisionism here. What is new is parts of the suit that were redacted were recently unredacted.
To be clear, these are fairly damning allegations and revelations.
Personally, I find the most troubling allegations to be about AMP and ad market price-fixing.
Please don't do the Twitter thread complaint cliché thing on HN. It passed tedious a long time ago, and reliably generates terrible repetitive discussion.
It's basically covered (as in excluded) by this site guideline: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting."
I imagine you're probably right. But I still don't understand - why not have a single Tweet, with a summary of a blog post running on your own domain? Wouldn't that make you even more internet famous?
Unlikely. Things which can be fit into Twitter threads generally are going to be more widely read and interacted with than if the same content were pushed to a blog.
The "why do ANYTHING online if it's not monetized?" attitude is such a pernicious trend. The internet will only become more censored and more homogenized if people only ever use services that will silence any thoughts/opinions that aren't 'Advertiser Friendly'.
Sure you could have ads pulled from your OWN website if you piss off an ad agency, but there are multiple ad agencies that exist. You can always switch providers.
When you go to a private company like Medium, anything you say will get you de-monetized, AND there's no other way to earn again. Some people face this situation and then create their own website to build back up their buzz, but why not start at that point initially?
I suspect this has something to do with the fact that the average 13-16 year old rarely opens their mobile web browser. To compete in 2021, you need an app. Something needs to change.
Lol so much armchair psychology going on here. According to your logic people publishing anything on the internet are doing it to become “internet famous”
Perhaps if they weren't on twitter.com. The site is impossible to use if you're not signed in, especially on mobile. This is probably 85% of the problem, IMO.
> I'd prefer something long form
Yeah, except not too long and not on Medium, either... haha. I like the idea of the constraints of a tweet and that a tweet thread (like a powerpoint) forces an economy of words. The tweet threads on HN are usually from high quality writers, so it's not actually that terrible to read them. But you're still stuck in the same "cognitive style" as powerpoint.
Maybe I'm simply old and my belief that "microblogging is an oxymoron" is wrong.
The purpose of AMP was completely obvious, and you all consented to buying into it anyway for the traffic. It couldn't have been successful without your help!
I remember in 2nd grade, a kid brought a note from his parent which was written in a few dozen tiny Post-It notes. The teacher was furious about the improperness of the format of the message.
That just came to mind seeing yet another too-fucking-long Twitter thread.
This comment is in every thread that links to a Twitter thread. Please don't do another one. If it was really such an ineffective method of communication, it wouldn't be on the front page.
Don't try to use political division to redirect people's anger at each other. I'm to the point where I'm deeply suspicious of the motives of anyone who deploys a novel way to recast an issue as partisan. I hope others are equally suspicious.
Let's not blame a whole company for what some small part of it did.
Google does a lot of good in this world. They were the first "ethical" tech company, the first tech company with "hacker values" at heart. "do no evil" is still a core value there.
> Let's not blame a whole company for what some small part of it did.
I think it's clear that it wasn't just one small part of Google. Multiple teams were involved in different projects aimed towards the same general goal.
And to the extent that it was a "small part", it's because there was an active effort to try to prevent it from leaking. That hardly counts in their favor.
What does that even mean? Unless you equate “ethical” with manipulating their dominant social position to shove a worldview you happen to agree with.
Which is a very… narrow understanding of ethics. As well as convenient, and, historically, trite (socially advantaged person agrees w/ the worldview a social institution imposes that reinforces and explains their privilege)
Read HN from 10 years ago. Posters were gushing about how cool and amazing Google is, how much good they are doing to the tech industry, how more companies should be like than and do ethical things like they do, for example support open standards and source instead of proprietary systems.
They were saying that Google is a company run by techies who value hacking ethics ideals and not by business men who only care about money.
> Let's not blame a whole company for what some small part of it did.
Let's absolutely blame them. Titanic power requires titanic responsibility, and requires titanic consequences for shirking or betraying that responsibility.
These companies make a tradeoff, playing fast and loose in order to move faster at their scale. But the consequence of that tradeoff is that, when they do stumble, when they do commit evil, the hammer must come down all the fiercer. Because they knowingly choose a structure and a way of operating that was prone to such outcomes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975222
A full article on Jedi Blue:
"Google acknowledges it foresaw possibility of probe of 'Jedi Blue' advertising deal with Facebook"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975782
A big discussion of an article on "Project NERA":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28974798