https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-antitrust-trial-accuses-google-illegal-methods-push-up-ad-prices-2023-10-04/
A lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department pressed a Google executive on Wednesday about techniques the search and advertising giant used to push up online advertising prices in an allegedly unfair way.
More interesting is what came out during the deposition: Google straight up changes your search terms to give you results that trigger paid advertisements. Eg if you search for "children's shirts" it will swap for "[brandname] shirts" and show you ads for that brand.
Does it swap search terms just for the portion that returns the ad or for the search as well? If it's just the ad, that doesn't seem very problematic, just an implementation detail on how it chooses which ad to show. If it's for the search as well, I don't see how that would benefit Google. They wouldn't be able to consider a search result click a successful conversion if it wasn't an actual advertisement.
I read about this in a blog post on Wired, written by someone who was there (former executive of DuckDuckGo). He also mentioned how they may benefit from having results that aren't quite accurate, as then you spend more time searching, which means more time to serve you ads. There is an inherent conflict of interest between adverts and fast search engines.
Paywalled! Fuckin Wired.
He also mentioned how they may benefit from having results that aren't quite accurate, as then you spend more time searching, which means more time to serve you ads.
That's an interesting one, give up a bit of user experience for increased ad impressions. Pretty clever, but breaks all kinds of anti-competition laws if true.
If the ads were targeted to people searching for [brandname] then that would be straight up illegal. Companies would have a slam dunk case in court.
A subpoena would do the trick. Their employees aren’t going to jail for obstruction to protect Google.
You need some reasonable grounds to put before a judge before they'll grant a subpoena. A subpoena can confirm what they suspect, it can't be used to blindly fish for evidence.
However it could be that what was in the deposition gives them the grounds. Should be an interesting trial.
Google Search, Adsense/Analytics, Android and Chrome should be broken up.
It's feeding the same evil
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON, Oct 4 (Reuters) - A lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department pressed a Google executive on Wednesday about techniques the search and advertising giant used to push up online advertising prices in an allegedly unfair way.
Testifying at a once-in-a-generation antitrust trial in Washington where the United States has accused Google of abusing its dominance of search and some advertising, Google executive Adam Juda said the company uses a formula, which includes the quality of an ad, to decide who wins auctions that are used to place advertising on websites.
Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist asked Juda if he agreed with a document that Google had prepared for the European Union, which said that the company can "directly affect pricing through tunings of our auction mechanisms."
Juda said one thing that can be "tuned" is a rough formula that gives an ad a long-term value, or LTV, based on the bid given, the potential click-through rate or how many people will likely click on it and the quality of the advertisement and website associated with it.
Dahlquist asked Juda if they had introduced changes to ad sales in a way that raised the cost-per-click by a consumer that advertisers pay.
But Wendy Waszmer, a lawyer for Google, asked Juda on Wednesday afternoon on if there were ways that his ads quality team could raise prices unilaterally.
The original article contains 349 words, the summary contains 227 words. Saved 35%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Cool story, ngl I think Jedi Blue is a blacklisted phrase on Reddit, it's not talked about at all and discussion is suppressed. I thought the case went away, but I think it got bundled into the bigger antitrust case. Fuck Google