Ex-Google Exec Acknowledges Aggressively Seeking Exclusive Mobile Deals 10
The Justice Department sought on Wednesday to show how Google did all it could to get people to use its search engine and build itself into a $1 trillion search and advertising giant on the second day of a once-in-a-generation antitrust trial. From a report: First out of the gate, the government questioned a former Google executive, Chris Barton, about billion-dollar deals with mobile carriers and others that helped make Google the default search engine. Barton, who was at Google from 2004 to 2011, said the number of Google executives working to win default status with mobile carriers grew dramatically when he was with the company, recognizing the potential growth of handheld devices and early versions of smartphones.
Google's clout in search, the government argues, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Since search is free, Google makes money through advertising. The government says the Alphabet unit paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T, device makers like Apple and browser makers like Mozilla to fend off rivals and keep its search engine market share near 90%. In revenue-sharing deals with mobile carriers and Android smartphone makers, Google pressed for its search to be the default and exclusive. If Microsoft's search engine Bing was the default on an Android phone, Barton said, then users would have a "difficult time finding or changing to Google."
Barton said on his LinkedIn profile that he was responsible for leading Google's partnerships with mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T, estimating that the deals "drive hundreds of millions in revenue." Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, told the court that scale, or the number of search queries Google received, was important, but pushed back during questioning on how important. He also acknowledged giving a speech in which he said certain search queries, for instance for a tennis racquet, were important in effectively advertising to the person who made the query and to subsequent ad revenues.
Google's clout in search, the government argues, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Since search is free, Google makes money through advertising. The government says the Alphabet unit paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T, device makers like Apple and browser makers like Mozilla to fend off rivals and keep its search engine market share near 90%. In revenue-sharing deals with mobile carriers and Android smartphone makers, Google pressed for its search to be the default and exclusive. If Microsoft's search engine Bing was the default on an Android phone, Barton said, then users would have a "difficult time finding or changing to Google."
Barton said on his LinkedIn profile that he was responsible for leading Google's partnerships with mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T, estimating that the deals "drive hundreds of millions in revenue." Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, told the court that scale, or the number of search queries Google received, was important, but pushed back during questioning on how important. He also acknowledged giving a speech in which he said certain search queries, for instance for a tennis racquet, were important in effectively advertising to the person who made the query and to subsequent ad revenues.
Why doesn't it work for Edge? (Score:2)
Edge comes pre-installed and is the default browser in Windows, which has about 70% market share on desktop, however it has less than 10% market share. AFAIK, it can't be uninstalled or even disabled. You can't uninstall Google in an Android phone, but you can at least disable it.
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I'm sure M$ is watching this case very closely.
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On my Windows environments, Edge is being forced down my throat.
Because of this, I will never use Edge and never use Bing.
Also "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" is a process that should not exist, or be disabled by default. It makes my laptop fan turn on and slows everything down when it is running due to CPU usage.
Also, when disabling the Microsoft Antivirus realtime protection - it should last for a week. Not mere hours. It slows down solution build time and just general usage of my PC.
"Since search is free" (Score:4, Insightful)
This assertion is often made but is not entirely true. Yes: the user does not pay in cash to use a search engine. However the search engine does learn something about what interests the user - this is personal information and has value. This value might be hard to quantify but it is not zero, the search engines put this information to good use.
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And the fix for this problem is to have the tracking removed - by law.
Advertising worked fine without tracking in the past. If everyone had to remove tracking at the same time then there'd be no competitive advantages lost by having to remove it.
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Re:"Since search is free" (Score:5, Informative)
Advertising included micro-targeting years before tech made it into a mainstream concept. At a high level, television commercials have long been targeted to different OTA stations and CATV providers, based on anticipated target audience. At a slightly lower level, direct mail marketing incorporated basic demographics (age/sex/location) for most of the 20th century. More sophisticated forms of micro-targeting (e.g., mail this ad to every white male 25 to 34 years of age we think owns a pick-up truck) have been available since at least the 1970s.
Google, Facebook, and friends didn't invent a damn thing. What they did was combine the data collection that builds profiles with the delivery of ads, vertical integration that anti-trust law (on paper at least) views with skepticism. In the past, you'd take your campaign to an advertising agency, who would take your desired target to a data broker (you didn't think Equifax and Experian only provided credit reporting, did you?), who would provide a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers. Then you work with the agency to create your ad and send it out.
Today, you just go to Google or Facebook. It's a one stop shop. Added bonus, they've got much more precise targeting than the data brokers of yesterday, because they've conned us all into using their "free" products, and those "free" products know literally everything about you. The handful of us that see this for what it is and opt out are still swept up, via horizontal and vertical integration (e.g., Google's purchase of DoubleClick); you literally cannot use the Internet without Google and Facebook having a profile on you. You can make it less accurate by not using their "free" products and through other methods, but it'll still exist, and they'll still be making a metric fuckton of money "targeting" ads at you regardless of whether the profile is accurate or not.
If you want a sense of how much money there is at stake, consider two things. Facebook once contemplated offering an ad-free tier, where you'd pay for the product and not see ads, and after crunching the numbers they realized no consumer would pay enough to offset the lost revenue. More recently, on a recent Disney earnings call, Iger copped to the fact that Disney+ makes more money from the ad supported tier than the ad free tier, despite the latter costing the consumer more. You couldn't do this with traditional TV advertising, even the somewhat targeted forms (CATV ad insertion), but with the Internet, you can micro-target to a ridiculous degree, and businesses (legitimate and otherwise) will pay a huge premium for that.
If you think streaming is enshittified now, wait until the ad free tier costs three times what it does today, or disappears altogether. Wait for programs that were never scripted for commercials (HBO, OG Netflix) to be interrupted mid-stream to insert them, like a bad YouTube channel where the content cuts out mid-sentence for some shitty ad, except it's an episode of The Sopranos, and you paid real money for the honor of watching it.
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Targetting is not tracking.
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Care to tell me how you target without a non-zero amount of tracking? It's a distinction without a difference. Do you think Experian just guessed the make and model of my car? I'm not really a Google apologist and I throughly loathe Facebook, but if I were so inclined, I could point out they're at least transparent about it. That's a fuckton more than you say about the data brokers of yesteryear, many of whom are still around, and the asshats that continue to feed information to them, frequently without