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Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

(www.nytimes.com)
863 points IdealeZahlen | 5 comments | 17 Apr 25 14:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.022s | source
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Frieren ◴[17 Apr 25 18:43 UTC] No.43720645[source]▶
This is necessary now, but it should have been done years back.

Nowadays, many companies backed up by investors with very deep pockets are doing this in all markets: start to buy middle-man companies in a space, it does not matter which one, dominate the market thanks to monopolistic power. Screw the clients making them pay too much, screw the providers paying them too little. Go for the next market.

Google does this for ads. But, with Apple, does the same for app vendors. Amazon does it for all kinds of brands with physical products. Uber does it for taxi drivers and their clients. All of them take a big chunk of the profit while making things more expensive, but they are the only real option to reach clients as they have used tactics to monopolize entire markets.

This should be impossible, because there are laws against it. If it is allowed the future of the economy is one big corporation with all workers working for it, and everybody buying from it. It looks like a scifi dystopia.

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foobarian ◴[17 Apr 25 19:01 UTC] No.43720826[source]▶
If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is communism! Would have probably slept much better at night.
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dragonwriter ◴[17 Apr 25 21:59 UTC] No.43722682[source]▶
> If only Marx et al. knew that the end game of capitalism is communism!

Using "end game" as it seems to be here -- for the natural ultimate result -- Marx argued that as a pretty central thesis of his work (through the mechanism of capitalist development -> proletarian class consciousness -> socialist revolution -> socialism -> <stuff mostly left as an exercise for the reader> -> withering of the state -> communism.)

OTOH, a single entity run for the benefit of a narrow group of stakeholders employing all labor, supplying everything, and effectively enslaving everyone through private control of the means of production is not Communism, or even socialism (defined by proletarian control of the means of production) but just monopolistic capitalism (and, yes, this is where a major non-Leninist Communist criticism of Leninism, and its descendants like Stalinism and Maoism, that feature totalitarian control of a command economy by a narrow self-perpetuating party elite stems from.)

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1. dumbledoren ◴[17 Apr 25 23:57 UTC] No.43723537[source]▶
> and, yes, this is where a major non-Leninist Communist criticism of Leninism, and its descendants like Stalinism and Maoism, that feature totalitarian control of a command economy by a narrow self-perpetuating party elite stems from.

People always criticize that, and yet those systems delivered: They raised the Soviet citizens from mud huts to apartments within one generation. One thing that is prominent in the stories about the fall of the Eastern Bloc and its aftermath is how the Soviet citizens never thought that they could lose 'staples' like free education, healthcare, childcare, housing, food, paid vacations, maternity leave, guaranteed jobs etc in capitalism. They thought that they would have everything that Leninist socialism gave them in the USSR and an additional consumer economy. They were dumbfounded to find out that wasnt the case.

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2. paulryanrogers ◴[18 Apr 25 02:58 UTC] No.43724548[source]▶
It can be argued those systems 'delivered' in spite of their cruel, indifferent, and centralized nature. Not solely because of them.
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3. dumbledoren ◴[18 Apr 25 18:35 UTC] No.43730704[source]▶
> cruel

If the US killing people when they cant pay for healthcare or pushing the homeless outside city centers in the winter to have them freeze to death does not make capitalism 'cruel', then those systems werent cruel either.

Doublespeak poisons the mind.

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4. paulryanrogers ◴[18 Apr 25 19:43 UTC] No.43731271{3}[source]▶
I'm not trying to defend capitalism here, so not sure where you think you see doublespeak
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5. dumbledoren ◴[20 Apr 25 07:59 UTC] No.43742280{4}[source]▶
The 'cruel' adjective. If capitalism is not cruel, then such a criticism cannot be made against socialism, communism etc.

And if one would bring up 'political persecution', capitalism persecutes the politically non-compliant harder than any eastern bloc country - and did so both in the 1950s and still does it today.