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Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

(www.nytimes.com)
863 points IdealeZahlen | 3 comments | 17 Apr 25 14:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.657s | source
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spacebanana7 ◴[17 Apr 25 15:37 UTC] No.43718419[source]▶
Google isn't a monopoly in the Standard Oil sense of the term. Its ad revenue is big because it occupies so much user attention. I actually think many suggested remedies would actually make Google more profitable.

For example, prohibiting Apple-Style search deals would mean that Google gets a smaller amount of traffic, but that traffic would come with zero cost. That could end up being more profitable. A similar argument applies to Chrome or any other customer acquisition vehicle.

The real barriers to making Google competitive are fixable but require a different sort of regulation outside of antitrust.

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1. FuriouslyAdrift ◴[17 Apr 25 18:08 UTC] No.43720320[source]▶
87% of Googles revenue in 2023 was advertising. $265 billion. They hold more than 80% market dominance in all markets they compete in.

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

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2. spacebanana7 ◴[17 Apr 25 18:41 UTC] No.43720622[source]▶
Market share and market dominance are very sensitive to how you define the market.

Facebook has >$100B ad revenue [1]. Does that compete with Google? Reasonable people can probably disagree about exactly how much so. From an advertisers perspective they compete for the same marketing budget, but from a consumers point of view they feel like different products.

Things get even more tricky when we compare YouTube to TikTok, or Amazon search result ads to Google search ads.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/544001/facebooks-adverti...

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3. Aloisius ◴[18 Apr 25 00:33 UTC] No.43723730[source]▶
A simple test is if you got rid of a product, what would customers use as a direct replacement? Those competitor products, the product you got rid of plus the customers of those products, are a market.

Here, the products are Google Ad Exchange (Doubleclick Ad Exchange) and the Publisher Ad Server (DoubleClick for Publishers) which are now Google Ad Manager and the customers are publishers selling space for ads on their websites.

Website publishers can't really use Facebook as a direct replacement, so they're not in the same market.