Google Faces EU Break-Up Order Over Anti-Competitive Adtech Practices (reuters.com) 51
Alphabet's Google may have to sell part of its lucrative adtech business to address concerns about anti-competitive practices, EU regulators said on Wednesday, threatening the company with its harshest regulatory penalty to date. From a report: The European Commission set out its charges in a statement of objections to Google two years after opening an investigation into behaviours such as favouring its own advertising services, which could also lead to a fine of as much as 10% of Google's annual global turnover. The stakes are higher for Google in this latest clash with regulators as it concerns the company's biggest money maker, with the adtech business accounting for 79% of total revenue last year.
Its 2022 advertising revenue, including from search services, Gmail, Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube adverts, Google Ad Manager, AdMob and AdSense, amounted to $224.5 billion. EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said Google may have to sell part of its adtech business because a behavioural remedy is unlikely to be effective at stopping the anti-competitive practices.
Its 2022 advertising revenue, including from search services, Gmail, Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube adverts, Google Ad Manager, AdMob and AdSense, amounted to $224.5 billion. EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said Google may have to sell part of its adtech business because a behavioural remedy is unlikely to be effective at stopping the anti-competitive practices.
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Come up with something that competes with Alphabet's advertising.
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Re:Typical Government Policy (Score:5, Insightful)
Please give us examples of effective monopolies broken up by competition.
There are cases of monopolies collapsing when the industry they monopolized becomes irrelevant (cf Central Leather in 1900). Otherwise what you propose never happens. Monopolies are actually illegal BTW. Just because monopoly law has not been enforced in 40 years does not change that.
Re:Typical Government Policy (Score:4, Insightful)
Monopolies are actually illegal BTW
That are absolutely not illegal. Abuse of them, on the other hand, is.
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Actually being a monopoly isn't relevant at all in any anti-trust regulations. They are typically written in terms of market power rather than whether a company is or isn't a monopoly in their field. Hence the same regulations apply to duopolies, oligopolies, and other situations where a company has significant market sway.
Re: Typical Government Policy (Score:2)
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Forcing divestment is late, very late. Google should never have been allowed to buy up the competition in the first place.
This, exactly. I understand why the Bush Admin was distracted when it approved the purchase of DoubleClick, and we were all still sort of techno-optimists and thought Google were the Good Guys... but that doesn't mean it was the right call.
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Google were the good guys, until they went public and were responsible to their share holders instead of the original owners.
Re:Typical Government Policy (Score:5, Informative)
But perish the thought of anyone creating anything to compete against it.
There are many search engines that try to complete with Google, and they have all failed. Google's infrastructure, sheer size, mindshare, and many other factors make it nigh impossible to meaningfully compete with it.
Government regulation of this type happens after all else has failed.
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It's the kind of biz driven by the Network Effect, which makes it dog-hard for upstarts to compete even if they are super-efficient and have cutting-edge tech.
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There are many search engines that try to complete with Google, and they have all failed. Google's infrastructure, sheer size, mindshare, and many other factors make it nigh impossible to meaningfully compete with it.
Even another $1+ trillion market cap industry leader couldn't meaningfully break into Google's market share of online search. If Microsoft cannot do it over 14 years, no one will. Regulation is the only reasonable way to reduce Google's 93% worldwide search engine market share across all devices.
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But perish the thought of anyone creating anything to compete against it.
You got it backwards. Here let me re-arrange your post so it makes sense:
Try to setup a company in a space owned by massive monopoly.
Fail in creating anything to compete against it
Second attempt to regulate it.
If regulation fails, then tax it.
If taxing it fails, then outlaw it.
Now that reflects reality. You're right it is typical government policy. Protecting people from abuse by enacting laws and regulating on behalf of the populous is literally their job.
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> Try to setup a company in a space owned by
> massive monopoly.
You do realize that every single player listed among today's "big tech" companies that people like to whinge about did exactly that, right? For some that "massive monopoly" was IBM. For many others it was Microsoft. One went up against both IBM and Microsoft in turn when each was its own massive monopoly. Another went up against first Barnes & Nobel, and then Walmart. Yet another took on Blockbuster and won.
Tech is littered with t
Re:Typical Government Policy (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize that every single player listed among today's "big tech" companies that people like to whinge about did exactly that, right?
While that is true, each of them showed success early in the adoption of the technology sector they disrupted. IBM had an 80% market share for PCs in 1982, but it was a young field. In 1993 they had only a 20% market share, but the total market had increased by 1400% over that time. So IBM was still able to grow their revenue 300% over that decade while their market share dropped dramatically. Your other examples were cases of internet companies disrupting legacy companies. It took arguably an industrial revolution (the digital revolution) for such an upheaval to happen. AI could potentially do that again, but not if we allow large tech companies to keep buying and or becoming large investors in younger startups.
Current tech companies have large market shares of mature markets. There will not be a 1400% increase in digital marketing revenue over the next decade. We will not sell 10x as many cell phones in 2033 than we sold this year. Cloud computing revenue won't go up by 15x either (although this one could potentially see a 5x increase).
We cannot just assume new companies will come in to break up the current market leaders. If the US was as merger happy in the 1980s as it is today probably all of those companies would have just been bought by IBM. We need to both stop these mergers from happening going forward and start to fix the problems caused by 20 years of lax anti-trust policies.
IBM (Score:3)
You do realize that IBM was operating under a consent decree from the 1950s on because of their dominance in the computer space? There are lots of interesting stories about their misuse of their monopoly power over the years. Amdahl was one. IBM would have done more dirty stuff if they hadn't been hampered by regulation.
AT&T was another such monopoly under strict government regulation. In a lot of ways we had the greatest phone system in the world at that time. All that old copper plant has been
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You do realize that every single player listed among today's "big tech" companies that people like to whinge about did exactly that, right?
Nope. Precisely none of them did. Every single player listed among today's big tech started with a unique position to build up their business. It was only when they got large enough doing their own thing that they started playing with the other big boys. IBM didn't get taken down by anyone offering big iron. They got taken down by a fundamental shift from their product type to a completely different product type, the personal computer and smaller servers. They never dominated that area because the market wa
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Case in point, for exactly what you just described:
There was a search company for a couple of years (ended about a month ago) called Neeva.
Instead of ads they charged about $4 a month, and delivered much better results than I got anywhere else, often including an AI enabled summary of what I was probably looking for that included specific references so you could just click on any claim it made to see if it was remotely sane. By far the most useful $4 I spent every month.
They closed that business and sold
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They are breaking it up because it's too hard for someone to introduce a reasonable alternative to the market.
Take the plunge Google. (Score:3)
Tell them NO and block the EU....
Re: Take the plunge Google. (Score:4, Funny)
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Oh no, who will serve up shitty search results?
Re:Take the plunge Google. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Tell them NO and block the EU....
I hope they do that. Not because I want Google gone but rather because Sundar Pichai is a horrible CEO and I would enjoy watching the shareholders and investors hang draw and quarter him before replacing him with someone marginally less horrible.
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Re:Take the plunge Google. (Score:4, Informative)
Tell them NO and block the EU....
Lol, EMEA makes up 29% of Google's total revenue. Do you honestly think Google is going to give that up? EU residents will barely notice if they start using Bing. Google has almost no leverage here. Their best bet is lobbying the US government to fight the EU based on trade treaties.
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They would probably lose less money that way.
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Make the EU great again
Make Asia great again
Make Africa great again
US laws stop at the US boarder. When people do business or visit the USA, US laws apply to them.
Well the revers is true too, when US citizens and businesses are in other parts of the world, local laws apply
We don't need US Karens here.
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I don't think Google will give up the EU revenue. But Google will not give up 295 Billion dollars a year in search revenue either.
They have been preparing for this for years.
Google will split search and advertising into separate companies -under the Alphabet umbrella. Alphabet shareholders will still own the most successful search engine company, and the most successful online advertising business.
They wont directly share data between the corporations, but they don't need to. They have already been worki
EU is a parasite (Score:1)
Create something of your own to compete with Google, ya farking wankers.
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Or, just hear me out. Google follows the laws in the markets they serve? I know that's a tall order for companies based in the USA but give it a shot.
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Create something of your own to compete with Google, ya farking wankers.
Let's see you create something to compete with a mega monopoly.
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BTW, my site is older than Facebook or Twitter: MessageBase.net [messagebase.net]
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You mean the gov't or EU biz? If competing with Google were easy, Bing would have done it by now: they have very deep pockets, but just don't have Google's network effect working for them: you need a big audience in order to have the ad revenue to "buy" a big audience.
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there are huge companies in europe, but unlike the USA (where you have the states, but everything is better integrated), EU is really a group of countries, different legal systems, tax, markets, languages and investors. This will change with time probaably, but due the amount of different cultures and countries, will take centuries to reach the USA integration level.
So any startup have higher difficulties to grow than in the USA. Europe companies are also less aggressive, nokia, arm, bayer, etc aren't set t
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With all the people and money in the EU, why are conditions not right for them to do it themselves.
The conditions are not right because ... wait for it ... an monopoly exists in the space.
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yes, just all other US based companies are able to compete with google... so many:
apple, in the small browser and phone OS businesses
facebook^Wmeta in the small social network and tracking^Wads businesses
Microsoft in the small OS market, cloud and (finally, after many years thanks to chat-gpt) search engine businesses
amazon in the small cloud businesses
what else is missing? notice that all those are huge also have their own monopoly and pour tons of money on it and in the end they not really competing (exc
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Actual content (Score:5, Informative)
If anyone wants to read the actual complaint from the EU, which the story utterly lacks, they can find it here [cloudfront.net].
TL;DR: In advertising "auctions" Google's ad publisher is communicating to its ad exchange the necessary bid to win the auction over its competitors.
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Google's ad publisher is communicating to its ad exchange the necessary bid to win the auction over its competitors.
"Don't be evil."
How about Microsoft? (Score:2)
They're leveraging their monopoly on the desktop OS market to push various applications on others. Competing OS' simply have no chance on the desktop, especially not on the corporate desktop.
Need Office? Shame, bound to Windows!
Need DirectX? Shame, bound to Windows!
Their browser is not successful as the competition? Simply sabotage the competition!
Their desktop conferencing application is not as successful as the competition? Include it in Windows!
No hardware drivers for your particular OS? There are for Wi
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What’s it like living in 1997?