But while the harms to publishers and advertisers have been outlined at length, there’s been less talk about the seemingly major consequences for consumers perhaps harmed by the alleged monopoly. Those harms include higher costs of goods, less privacy, and increasingly lower-quality ads that frequently bombard their screens with products nobody wants.
By overcharging by as much as 5 or 10 percent for online ads, Google allegedly placed a “Google tax” on the price of “everyday goods we buy,” Tech Oversight’s Sacha Haworth explained during a press briefing Thursday, where experts closely monitoring the trial shared insights.
“When it comes to lowering costs on families,” Haworth said, “Google has overcharged advertisers and publishers by nearly $2 billion. That’s just over the last four years. That has inflated the price of ads, it’s increased the cost of doing business, and, of course, these costs get passed down to us when we buy things online.”
But while it’s unclear if destroying Google’s alleged monopoly would pass on any savings to consumers, Elise Phillips, policy counsel focused on competition and privacy for Public Knowledge, outlined other benefits in the event of a DOJ win.
She suggested that Google’s conduct has diminished innovation, which has “negatively” affected “the quality diversity and even relevancy of the advertisements that consumers tend to see.”
Were Google’s ad tech to be broken up and behavioral remedies sought, more competition might mean that consumers have more control over how their personal data is used in targeted advertising, Phillips suggested, and ultimately, lead to a future where everyone gets fed higher-quality ads.
That could happen if, instead of Google’s ad model dominating the Internet, less invasive ad targeting models could become more widely adopted, experts suggested. That could enhance privacy and make online ads less terrible after The New York Times declared a “junk ad epidemic” last year.
The thinking goes that if small businesses and publishers benefited from potentially reduced costs, increased revenues, and more options, consumers might start seeing a wider, higher-quality range of ads online, experts suggested.
Better ad models “are already out there,” Open Markets Institute policy analyst Karina Montoya said, such as “conceptual advertising” that uses signals that, unlike Google’s targeting, don’t rely on “gigantic, massive data sets that collect every single thing that we do in all of our devices and that don’t ask for our consent.”
That is an interesting argument to have, and I choose to disagree with you. Besides what’s told in the article, my own problem with the likes of Google is that this amount of corporate power makes them, like oil barons, an international governing body that affects policies worldwide. They can unintentionally, like Facebook in Myanmar, enable genocide by slacking on getting bhirma-languaged moderators and just not giving a damn about what they give platfrom for. Like a butterfly effect, something decided in Silicon valley may cause a tornado on the opposite side of Earth. And supporting Google we delegate such power to their board of directors we can’t even choose, let alone impeach. They are akin to kings blessed by a god of capital and have more reach than modern hereditary monarchs in spite of that being not as obvious and direct. The Algorythm deciding what to show you, may it be ads or an answer to your question, controls you and your worldview on the level a step higher than the resources they reference. Like, we all know there’s this crazy Conservapedia, and now imagine, that it’s the first result in every google search, everything you want to ask the internet about is explained by insane rightwingers. Google chooses not to do that, to rank it down, thanks, but they can change that at any point and we wouldn’t even know, because they are completely closed to external review. That’s nice they are kinda aligned with what the US+Europe do for now, but as we see with Twitter getting musk-off with it being a propaganda vehicle, we somehow forget that it’s a nearly irrelevantly small spot compared to a jaggernaut like Google that is The Internet, the start page for billions of people, and it navigates the decision making of almost all of our world now, while, uhm, building their business around reselling that influence to third parties for money. Right now, they plan to ban adblocking in Chrome and their sole real competitor Mozilla is majorly paid by them, they also has a saying on how we use our phones\tablets due to android popularity, so they are a judge and the executioner of how we use the common internet we live our digital lives in. And they succeed at flying under radar for how long they exist.
That’s actually frightening to think how much power they hold, and that the things in the article is them holding themselves back to appear neutral, reasonable and uninvolved. At the same time, I suppose, even the coming US elections won’t shape the world just as much as the politics of Google’s board of directors. And, if they’ve wished so, they could pick a winner just by what ads and resources they show to most of the voters.
The power of an american corporation can’t be good for americans (and the world) if it isn’t even controlled by them. It’s just their interests don’t explicitly cross those of the US. But you can guess that if there’s something really uncomfortable to Google, they have enough connections and bribed politicians to undo it in it’s uterus.
Your argument is reasonable, although I don’t think the fact that Google is aligned with the USA and Western Europe is a coincidence. This anti-trust action is itself a demonstration of the power that the US government does have over Google, and Google knows better than to provoke the use of that power. Anti-trust law is largely a matter of the government’s opinion rather than objective rules, so Google has no effective legal defense other than keeping the government’s opinion of it favorable.
I don’t think Google could get away with deliberately manipulating elections in the way that you propose. Even if it were to tilt the outcome from one established party to another, that party would not be beholden to it. (If the party that it helped knew that it helped, then unless that party controlled Google, it would rightly consider Google a threat rather than an ally.) Furthermore, manipulating elections would have a huge risk of being revealed and facing devastating blowback. Engineers rather than the board of directors are the ones who actually make Google function and those engineers would be neither oblivious to nor loyal to some plan for domination by the board of directors.
With that said, I disagree with you primarily because I’m very risk-averse when it comes to matters like this. Right now, the “juggernaut like Google that is The Internet” is working in our favor and if we break it up then we won’t have a juggernaut working in our favor anymore. We would be better off if we were able to accomplish what you propose while retaining dominance of the internet, but IMO the reward is not worth the risk of forfeiting that dominance. Those who are losing need to take risks but those who are winning should not, and right now the USA is winning.
Glad to hear your points fleshed out.
As I read this thread and your response to my jaggernaut quote, I feel like it’d be okay to reduce my view of Google from an american pov (and I’m russian lol) to some artifact from a folklore tale, like a sure-striking sword. The carrier of such pointy thing concluded it pierces the heath of their enemies by itself and never fails, but is oblivious to other properties it has. They would have a great time weilding it, occasionally getting a king’s contract and their daughter’s hand, but them putting their whole life on the line depending on a behavior of such an unpredictable magic thing. That is a very insecure position to be in. And anti-trust legistations are kinda nice, but touting them as an adequate and a timely measure sounds kinda weak in a world where corpos like Big Mouse can shape and abuse patent law to it’s profits, and Google isn’t better.