The second Gilded Age we’re currently living through is something, huh? Our modern plutocrats are funding their own space programs; our modern tech monopolies spread conspiracy theories while squashing small businesses. However, some holdovers from the first Gilded Age may help us alleviate these plagues: there are multiple federal antitrust cases winding through the courts taking aim at big tech. Two of these ongoing cases are against Google, and both allege violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
The first case, United States vs. Google LLC (2020) went to trial last year, and this summer, Judge Amit Mehta found that Google had an illegal search engine monopoly. He’s given DOJ regulators until December to come up with recommendations for what should be done to Google’s search monopoly. Meanwhile, United States vs. Google LLC (2023) began proceedings at the start of this month.
This second trial is looking at the advertising side of Google, with a narrow focus on how Google controls advertising on news sites. According to Karina Montoya at the Center for Journalism and Liberty (a left-leaning think tank), a DOJ win in this second case has the potential to transform how news websites are funded.
It’s understandable that we’re all preoccupied by the election, but it’s worth keeping a weather eye on these cases. Below the jump, a brief overview of the government’s argument in the ad monopoly case, plus some links to journalists and resources you may want to check out if this interests you.
(Note before I continue: I’m not a lawyer or a legal analyst or a tech worker or anything; I’m just a freelance marketing consultant with some professional interest in this area.)
I’m sure most of us here are old enough to remember how novel Google Search was when it first appeared on the scene in 1998—ah, the heady days of the pre-Facebook internet! And we all likely remember that Google entered the ad business a few years later. As it grew, it voraciously acquired other online advertising companies and their technologies, building up its position to the point where Google now has what the DOJ calls “a trifecta of monopolies” in the sector.
In very, very simplified terms, these three monopolies include:
- Control of publisher-side ad technologies (for hosting ads on websites or in apps)
- Control of advertiser-side platforms (for creating and managing ad campaigns)
- Control of the ad exchanges (where advertisers bid to place ads with publishers)
(There’s also a fourth thing that gets mentioned in passing: Google owns all the data these monopolies generate, whether it’s about user behavior or ad performance.)
With these three monopolies, Google can engage in all kinds of bullying and self-dealing that would be much harder to do in a more competitive market. The DOJ produced this graphic for its opening statements in an attempt to illustrate this triple monopoly. You may or may not find it helpful:
Amusingly, one of the best descriptions of what’s at issue in this case actually comes from a 2016 internal email by a Google product manager who wondered, “Is there a deeper issue with us owning the platform, the exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the [New York Stock Exchange].” (On the stand last week, this guy tried to brush this statement off as “late-night drunken ramblings.”)
So far, the government has called numerous witnesses from publishers like Gannett and News Corp, who have all testified to how difficult it is to avoid doing any business with Google, and how its monopoly allows it to manipulate auctions and take greater and greater shares of ad revenue from publishers’ websites. The DOJ has also attempted to prove that Google has been destroying potentially incriminating messages—something they were shown to have done during the previous trial about the search engine monopoly.
Google, for its part, has sort of feebly meeped that its ad business is so successful because it is effective and convenient. Sure, Jan.
The trial is expected to continue for several weeks. Here are some of the better sources of reporting I’ve found:
- Ars Technica – Senior policy reporter Ashley Belanger seems to have most of the bylines for their stories about this trial. Her recent article “How Breaking Up Google Could Lower Your Online Shopping Bill” provides some interesting food for thought.
- The Verge – Senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner is covering this trial for The Verge. She’s been doing some great pieces about specific revelations from the testimony, including this one about how Google used its monopoly to bully publishers into accepting less favorable terms.
- Better Offline – Ed Zitron is an independent journalist and PR guy who reports on various forms of tech chicanery—I’m pretty sure Anne Laurie has linked to some of his writing on Elon Musk and/or Sam Altman of OpenAI before. His newsletter, Where’s Your Ed At, is good, but if you can cope with podcasts, his Better Offline podcast recently featured some illuminating discussions about the Google case with experts. Sounds like he’ll keep recording shows about it as the trial continues.
- EDIT: USvsGoogleAds – Thanks to commenter David Collier-Brown for flagging up this useful, one-stop resource for trial info from a coalition led by CheckMyAds.
David Collier-Brown also flagged up a blog and video by lawyer Jennifer Hood of Index Exchange, an ad tech company. Thanks again, David!
Finally, if you want to read about the previous search engine monopoly trial, USVsGoogle.org is a good place to start. It’s another one-stop website produced by a consortium of progressive and left-leaning organizations interested in holding tech accountable. Not sure if they’ll be addressing the ad tech case on the site soon – I couldn’t see any recent updates when I visited.
Have thoughts about this, or additional reporting or context you’d like to share? Please comment below—I’m sure there are Jackals with practical expertise on the tech or legal front worth sharing. You can also talk about anything else at all – consider this an open thread with a side of Google-bashing.
Defenders of Democracy in Michigan, Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin
Adam Lang
Hmm. Is that sarcasm? I’m not sure that ‘most of us’ here both 1) are at least 40 and 2) were tech-savvy enough in 1998 to be on the internet much if at all.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam Lang: Look, this is a home for elderly shut-ins.
Adam Lang
@Omnes Omnibus: Sure okay but were all of us YOUNG shut-ins in 1998?
TBone
@Adam Lang: I was asking Jeeves.
TBone
@Omnes Omnibus: 😆💜
Kay
Thanks for the round up, Rose. I don’t know anything about this.
Suzanne
@Adam Lang: I remember telling one of my professors about Google in my sophomore year of college (so 1999-2000) and she had never heard of it. LOL.
ETtheLibrarian
One are that is not monopoly per se but sort of is, is their AI as it shows up in search results. Google is basically infringing copyright to show that AI Overview. I can’t find it now but there was an article I read that included interviews with two people who are independent businesses that have web pages for said business and make money from the traffic and ad on their site. One was recipes and the other was reviews of products I think. They had begun to notice a tick down in their traffic and such when AI Overview showed up because people didn’t need to click through. The less traffic the less advertisers want to advertise.
Old School
I assumed we were in trouble when Google dropped “Don’t be evil.”
The monopoly over advertising makes sense to me. The search engine monopoly makes less intuitive sense. I suppose the information is buried in the links, but is it due to patents?
Edit: Found it. Google paid manufacturers and carriers to carry Google and not carry other search engines.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam Lang: Given the demographics here, I would say that quite a few were middle aged shut-ins then.
bjacques
Bring back Inktomi!
TBone
@Omnes Omnibus: not me, I was a cougar.
divF
@Adam Lang: Don’t be so sure. I’ve been on the internet since 1981, and on this board, I’m certain I’m not alone.
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s a vile slander! They let me go out for coffee at least once a day (and with my laptop!).
Starfish
@Adam Lang: Tell me about what your experience was like in 1998.
R-Jud
@Suzanne: I think I’m a year older than you (I was a sophomore in 1998-99), and I definitely remember sitting in the computer lab messing with this new “Google” thing.
hueyplong
@Adam Lang: “Hmm. Is that sarcasm?” itself seems kind of 1998. If, you know, my memory is still ok.
R-Jud
@Suzanne: I think I’m a year older than you (I was a sophomore in 1998-99), and I definitely remember sitting in the computer lab messing with this new “Google” thing.
R-Jud
@Suzanne: I think I’m a year older than you (I was a sophomore in 1998-99), and I definitely remember sitting in the computer lab messing with this new “Google” thing.
Kyle Rayner
This is exciting! I actually only just learned about ad exchanges this morning, in a video about why Tumblr’s ads are so infamously bizarre. Basically, I understood it as: Google doesn’t bother bidding on serving ads there anymore, so we get the smaller companies serving less vetted ads.
In 1998… I went only on websites I heard about off-line. Or, if very (very) brave, sites linked to in emails. It still felt like we were early adopters, getting around to using it by 2001. Change spread slowly back then.
Omnes Omnibus
@TBone: I really don’t care to know.
R-Jud
@Kyle Rayner: Thanks for sharing that video! I’ll check it out later.
I admit to watching all this unfold with grim satisfaction – I used to manage Google ad campaigns and do search engine optimization analyses (SEO) for clients, but I’ve been moving away from all that since the start of 2021 because it all just started to feel spammy. I mostly just do competitive research and copywriting now.
Starfish
I am so happy that you are covering some tech policy.
Sometimes, “Where’s your Ed at?” makes me wonder where his editor is at. He is long-winded and repetitive, but he is not wrong. Maybe his podcast is more to the point?
When it comes to tech policy, I am glad that some countries are beginning to control some of the tax dodging in tech.
We need a national CCPA, and a lot of tech policy people are skeptical of the implementation details of KOSA.
matt
As I understand it Google is pretty bad but not as bad as Facebook across the board, but they have a more dominant market position so they’re targeted. I’ll admit this isn’t something I monitor super closely though.
TBone
This also might be of interest
https://www.americanprogress.org/events/lowering-costs-through-better-competition/
wjca
One other at least semi-monopoly is LinkedIn. Pretty much everyone in a white collar job, or aspiring to one, has a LinkedIn account. It’s something every hiring manager checks immediately after he looks at a resume for a potential employee. Or, often, instead of a resume.
Turns out, LinkedIn has recently made a change to its Terms of Service. Anything about you, including any comments you make, what searches you do, what your profile says, can be used as input for their AI. Unless you opt out. To opt out, log in, click on your picture icon, go into your Settings for Privacy. You may have to dig around a bit to find it. Then switch from the default (Yes) to No.
Old School
Off-topic:
Warning to Gulf Coast residents: It looks like a hurricane is coming your way later this week.
R-Jud
@Starfish:
No lie told in your comment. Ed Z. is also useful as a signposting toward other writers and news sites (and sometimes his rants have funny gems in them). His podcast, I’m afraid, is often equally long-winded, but he asks decent interview questions when he has a guest. Fair warning: it’s an IHeartRadio show, so it has a TON of ad breaks.
Mai Naem mobile
I used to listen to a tech guy on a radio show ~1999 who talked about a new search engine that was really good called google. Back then google was a much better search engine. Now it’s a mess. If’s it’s consumer product infomation you’re looking for its full of ads. If it’s news stuff it’s a bunch of misinformation/disinformation websites. It’s no wonder this election is so close.
FastEdD
It makes sense that anti-trust actions against Google aren’t just the search engine. They are about the control of both sides of advertising and that’s where the money is. I wonder if they will try something like breaking up Mama Bell into regional Baby Bells. That wouldn’t work in the big international world of the Innertubes.
Starfish
@Mai Naem mobile: At some point, there was some internal struggle between the search folks at Google and the ad folks at Google. The ad folks won so search got optimized for serving profitable ads over helping people find what they were looking for.
With Google optimized for advertisers, then we got a lot of Search Engine optimized content. You know all those recipes where someone is going on and on about grandma’s tomato garden in Italy for pages before you get to the recipe? Google rewarded that behavior so we had more and more recipe bloggers engaging in that. Through word repetition, they ranked higher in search. Also, adding more content that no one asked for gave them more room on their pages to insert ads. The recipe bloggers AND google made more money this way.
lowtechcyclist
@R-Jud:
You can say that again! ;-)
twbrandt
@R-Jud: I find Ed Z both enlightening and annoying in almost equal measure. His most recent podcast, where he talks with Jason Kint about this lawsuit, is pretty good since he mostly asks good questions and then gets out of the way.
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
IIRC, ‘cougar’ is shorthand for ‘horny middle-aged woman on the prowl. I bet she’s got some pretty juicy stories! Maybe you don’t want to hear them,,,
Doc Sardonic
In 1998 the internet was for porn and bad sci-fi fan fic that frequently crossed over. Also the early stages of music and video piracy.
Starfish
@Doc Sardonic: There were a lot of Tori Amos fan sites.
Kristine
@ETtheLibrarian: I scroll right past that AI roundup b/c I don’t know where they got the info they mashed together to create it, from reliable sources or the “eat rocks/sure these mushrooms are safe” crowd. I wish I could block it, but read that it wasn’t possible. I would like to see that change.
lowtechcyclist
Up until about 1997 or so, for most of us the Internet was mostly just email because that 14.4 (or slower) connection was just too damn slow to load web pages in a reasonable amount of time.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: I know what the term means. I would be quite content not to have details from DelCo Dawn. TYVM
trollhattan
@Mai Naem mobile: You could be describing shopping on Amazon–a search produces options listed by how much the sellers are paying Amazon, at least as far as I can figure. Intentional chaos.
In a more prosaic suit against a traditional Evil Corporation, California is suing Exxon-Mobil for their shenanigans re. faux plastic recycling. Greenwashing sans anything remotely green.
Kristine
@wjca: Thanks for the reminder. Just switched it off.
It’s under the Data Privacy header in Settings.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kristine: I don’t remember any of my log-in info from that site.
Kristine
@trollhattan: They should go after all companies when it comes to plastics recycling. They emboss a little ♺ then leave it to us to figure out how/where. This is especially true of the stuff that’s difficult if not impossible to recycle, but still comes stamped with the symbol. I make a conscience effort to keep the non-recyclables out of the bin, and I have trouble figuring things out.
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: 😆 🎶
https://youtu.be/GsojoK7M3qo
scav
@divF: Yeah, little behind you, I probably wasn’t on the internet until 1986? At least, with my own personal login. Acres of ascii cows and lots of quoting Python (Monty, of course).
Betty
So I am seeing a push from some techie billionaire supporters to persuade Kamala to dump her anti-trust official, Lina Khan. I certainly hope she doesn’t do that. This area of the law has been neglected by Democrats for far too long.
Kristine
Welcome, R-Jud. Looking forward to more tech policy coverage.
I’ve heard that the EU was going after Amazon? I’d love to see someone clip their wings when it comes to bookselling through their site, among so many other things.
Mai Naem mobile
@Starfish: i think at some point internet ads just become annoying and background noise.
OId Man Shadow
Don’t be evil… HAHAHAHAH
Just kidding. Being evil is awesome. I’m on a mega-yacht lying on a bed of hundred dollar bills, drinking Dom, and snorting cocaine off the bosoms of a woman thirty years younger than me! Woo!
SomeRandomGuy
@R-Jud: I’m sure I’m not the first to notice, but, you have three copies of the same comment and I mention this because someone else recently complained about a similar issue – 3 copies of the comment, no chance to edit.
(Don’t ask me why I remember oddities about UI, but I do.)
Betty
@trollhattan: Good for California in leading the way on this. There must be a concerted effort to replace plastic packaging. It has so many downsides.
trollhattan
@Kristine:
100% agree. Producers shifted the burden onto the consumer and the fact remains that most plastic, and most types of plastic, either are not recyclable at all or not currently recycled because there is no infrastructure to do so. And that’s ignoring the cost for recycling being far above what the virgin raw manufacturing materials cost.
IMO the only way to address this is front-load the cradle-to-grave packaging cost on the container manufacturers and product manufacturers using those containers. Those clever fellows will quickly switch to actual reusable/recyclable packaging.
Fun fact: our municipal recycling program no longer accepts any form of plastic film–bags, wrap, sheeting, etc. Apparently it clogs the automated processing equipment, so in the garbage bin it goes (along with blowing down the street).
Chief Oshkosh
@Adam Lang: At the time my preferred search engine was Alta Visa. So yes, I meet both criteria. Not sure, but I still think Alta Vista was better in some ways.
Slightly OT: But then, I still think that Eudora was the best approach to email evah.
trollhattan
I’m editing and formatting a database user manual and am really tempted to leave this sentence as is.
Kristine
@trollhattan:
That’s rough—it builds up so fast. Around here (NE Illinois), most grocery stores have bins for films. Some even take bubble wrap.
SatanicPanic
@Kristine: If it’s not like an aluminum can, or a glass or plastic bottle, I’m probably just going to throw it away. Like someone is really going to gather up all the tiny plastic condiment cups, food containers and bits of paper that are tossed into recycle bins. I’m sure they treat the small items like pennies and just throw them away. (or is it just me that throws pennies on the ground?) And I figure washing them out is just wasting water. But that’s just me.
SatanicPanic
@Chief Oshkosh:
Did you feel like Parks and Recreation accurately portrayed life in Pawnee?
TBone
@Betty: see my comment #24
Please join the Center for American Progress for an event featuring FTC Chair Lina Khan and Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) about protecting consumers and preserving competition.
Can virtually attend. Sept. 25
Starfish
@Mai Naem mobile: What happened at Google went beyond that. Internet ads were not just background noise. They began to shape content.
That is why when you search for something, you find a bunch of stupid listicles and other types of very shallow content.
trollhattan
@Kristine:
A few parks and especially dog parks in the area have self-stock/self-serve bag dispensers. Folks put their produce and similar bags in for others to use picking up after Rover.
It’s a drop in a big plastic bucket but a clever reuse scheme.
Anonymous At Work
Are these Section 1 or Section 2 cases? I think from the rest of the material that they are Section 1 since they have been brought by the government. I would hope for Section 2 since that permits treble damages.
The real hurdle is the appeal under a Rule of Reason analysis (Addyson) wherein anything that makes the Reagan-esque Baby Jesus Adam Smith cry is ruled illegal but everything else is a “reasonable monopoly”.
Sister Golden Bear
I, I can’t even…. 11th Circuit Rules In Favor Of Forced Trans Sterilization For Correct Drivers Licenses In Alabama
The decision is the latest in a series of court rulings from conservative courts with Trump-appointed
rolling back transgender rightstrying to eradicate trans people in the United States. The point of these sorts of laws is precisely to out trans people — in particular trans women — to make them targets of the sorts discrimination described above.Note: While trans women like me who have had bottom surgery are inherently sterilized by the nature of the procedure, there’s many trans women don’t get this surgery done, either because of cost (tens of thousands of dollars, often not covered by insurance), or they’re early in their social transition, or simply don’t feel the need to do so.
Math Guy
Google’s page-rank algorithm is a beautiful and elegant application of the Perron-Frobenius theorems for non-negative matrices: I teach that in my linear algebra courses and the students really like seeing how the mathematics that they are studying works in real-life. Then, in game theory, I can show them how Google screws them over.
Mai Naem mobile
@trollhattan: i try my best not to shop on Amazon but I’m pretty sure it’s not Amazon but Google. I have issues with Amazon but there’s is a kind of a retail business version of what Google appears to be doing with publishing and ads.
TBone
@trollhattan: I wish our PA Commonwealth would get with that program.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05052024/todays-climate-plastic-pennsylvania-ethane-cracker-plant/
And, closer to home
https://www.northcentralpa.com/news/new-plastics-plant-proposed-along-susquehannas-north-branch/article_dd733aee-b130-11ed-8790-6b022f2e683c.html
Anoniminous
@Chief Oshkosh:
Alta-Vista was the better search engine, hands down. The drawback was all the ads on their front page meant it took hours – subjectively speaking – to load before you could search. Google wasn’t as good but it loaded in a reasonable time and was Good Enough. The result was a shift of Innovators from Alta-Vista to Google which then increased word of mouth so the Early Adopters latched on to Google and that was the ball game.
David Collier-Brown
A good reference site for the new antitrust trial is https://www.usvgoogleads.com/
You might want to hoist it up to the sources paragraph
It’s run by a non-profit , https://checkmyads.org/ that works in “brand safety” (things like not putting your ad on a Nazi site like The Daily Sturmer). I’ve followed Check My Ads for some years, as I was at an ad exchange and they were talking about something we really cared about.
Spanky
@Adam Lang: Dude, I was a beta tester for Mosaic back in ’93, so don’t even.
Sister Golden Bear
@Adam Lang: I was regularly designing/building websites for Hollywood movie studios in 1997. Just sayin’.
Burnspbesq
@Doc Sardonic:
Very little has changed since then.
Anoniminous
@TBone:
Which remembers me the time when Senator Warren shut-down, shut-up, & totally pwned a smear about her supposed sexual voracity by tweeting, “Go Cougars.”
David Collier-Brown
Google were also opaque: it was hard to tell who had bid what for your ad, you just had to take Google’s word for it.
Mai Naem mobile
@Betty: yes,.yes, yes I so agree. People aren’t stupid. People know they’re getting screwed by different kinds of monopolies. You could even possibly get trumpers(!) on board with anti-trust stuff.
SatanicPanic
Nebraska might not be able to change their allocation system for EVs.
Two things-
It’s annoying as fuck that important decisions that could affect the entire future of our nation depends on some random Nebraska state senator.
Maine needs to just go change theirs before 2028. There’s no rational reason for Democrats to leave an electoral college vote laying around for Republicans to pick up because of some dumbfuck tradition that only two states have.
Anoniminous
@Adam Lang:
@Spanky:
@Sister Golden Bear:
Oh you noobs. I was building and selling BBS systems in ’79.
dr. luba
@Adam Lang: I am old, but not a shut in by any means; still work part time. And I was as un-techie as you could get in the 90s; my knowledge of computers was minimal.
I bought my first computer, an Apple Performa (arguably one of the worst desktops they ever made) in 1995, and used it mostly to create documents (way better than a typewriter) and do my taxes.
When I first got online, via a screechy modem, finding anything online was a lot of guesswork (name + .com and hope for the best) and using things like Yahoo search.
Google was a game changer. So fast and so accurate!!
It’s a disappointment what’s happened to it. So many ads/promoted sites, often you really have to dig down to find anything useful.
scav
@Chief Oshkosh: Didn’t we jackals actually manage a few solid emacs v. vi threads a good while ago? Back when we could turn everything italics by not closing tags and dogs ran wild?
Matt McIrvin
@SatanicPanic: It is a frustrating collective-action problem: while it’s not perfect, I’d actually prefer if *all* the states used the Maine- Nebraska system, but it’s a system that the majority party in any given state will always correctly see as giving the other side an advantage if they adopt it.
SomeRandomGuy
@Mai Naem mobile: Some old school blogger write about “the enshittification of everything” where something starts off neat and cool, but then gets shitty, because surprisingly-strong-reasons. Doctorow, maybe?
@FastEdD: One key component of anti-trust that you might not know (or others might not know) is, if Google had a “natural monopoly” as a search engine, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other also-rans couldn’t win market share because they didn’t search as well, that is not at all unlawful. However, once you do have a monopoly, you’re not supposed to use your monopoly in one thing (like operating systems) to pressure a different industry Legend has it, Microsoft had a ditty, “Windows ain’t done ’til Lotus won’t run!” and it illustrates the principle perfectly. If Microsoft used its OS dominance to hurt a rival’s spreadsheet program, that’s what anti-trust law is intended to prevent.
So: there probably isn’t an anti-trust case against Google if you don’t consider the entire end-to-end picture.
Philosophically, I think the US would be better off if they considered lack of competition in any industry a worry, because competition is inherently healthy. I really hope we’re not about to be bombarded with right wingers screaming their heads off just because Google probably *did* violate anti-trust law.
Starfish
@SatanicPanic: It’s even worse than that. Some of these things are not recyclable. They have the recycle symbol on them, but they are just not recyclable. That is called wish-cycling, and companies that use single-use plastics want to create more consumer confusion by marking more things that are not recyclable as fake recyclable.
Doc Sardonic
@Burnspbesq: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Jeffro
@SatanicPanic: I just saw that! almost ready to breathe out…almost…
It’s not just about Maine and Nebraska. Technically, the whole EC is depriving close to half the citizens of this country their equal rights under the law.
Either every state allocates them proportionally, or we go with that Interstate Compact thingy, or we get rid of the EC. The latter would be vastly preferred by moi, but it’s the hardest route, so…
(any of which would require big legislative majorities and a progressive SCOTUS, so let’s do that, and then make it a top priority going forward! We can’t keep doing this.)
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
Good for you. I was making sure I had it right.
And you were quite proactive about that, too! It wasn’t like she was getting ready to share them AFAICT.
Timill
@Matt McIrvin: It’s also gerrymandered. If they allocated EVs proportionately to the state vote, that would be one thing, but using House seats is quite another.
SatanicPanic
@Matt McIrvin:
@Jeffro:
Absolutely- if we want to apportion them by district, that might be a good idea if we could get everyone on board. Right now we have one red state that does it and one blue state. Since we can’t guarantee that the red state won’t move to winner-take-all, our best move is to do it first.
Baud
@Timill:
The rub is that, if a state is gerrymandered for the GOP, and allocation other than winner take all would hurt the GOP.
Still, I agree with you. It shouldn’t be by Congressional district in any state with more than a handful of electoral votes.
TBone
@Anoniminous: 💙😁
MobiusKlein
My employer has instituted various “data retention policies” with the stated reasons being data size, regular removal of possible customer info in mails, cost reduction.
But I strongly believe it’s to reduce discovery info for potential lawsuits.
They are good around actual lawsuits, but deleting stuff after 3 years feels shady.
Go into slack history to find that problem that happened 3 years and a month ago? Sol.
Hoppie
I do Google (Web Only) which is tolerable.
HumboldtBlue
When the triangle player FINALLY gets a solo…
R-Jud
@David Collier-Brown: Thank you so much! I’ve been on a late work call; I’ll get that into the sources above in a bit.
NotMax
Startpage (formerly Ixquick) has been my default search engine for some time. Based in Europe and scrupulous about adhering to EU regulations and standards.
On the now rare occasions I resort to Google, I’ve yet to see an ad of any kind and never have in years past (thank you, Firefox add-ons).
Purely as a side note, apparently Jurassic Age search engine Dogpile is still online, although not updated in like forever so I would in no way vouch for using it at this late date.
lowtechcyclist
@Sister Golden Bear:
And it shouldn’t matter one iota to the government whether a trans person has or hasn’t had bottom surgery for whatever reason. It shouldn’t be the business of anyone the trans persons themselves don’t feel like sharing it with. But especially not the business of the government because of its ability to intrude with sanctions such as these.
Kyle Rayner
@Starfish:
If we could get “IF YOU SMOKE, YOU WILL COUGH UP A LUNG AND DIE HORRIBLY” onto cigarette packaging, we totally can and should achieve at least this with recycling messaging.
Starfish
@MobiusKlein: There are numerous issues with maintaining data forever.
Retaining data for long periods of time also makes data leaks worse when companies get hacked.
Google recently updated its retention policy on timelines because eroding people’s privacy like that was dangerous. They began deleting visits to abortion clinics, domestic violence shelters, and so on.
Libraries intentionally deleted historic records of what you have been reading when the post-9/11 laws went into effect. They didn’t want people’s library history to be used to incriminate them.
JaySinWA
That’s a hard nope from me, unless you have a magic formula to end Gerrymandering to go along with it
ETA I see others advocating for proportional allocation. That I could go for.
David Collier-Brown
Aha! I found a blog and video by Jen Hood, giving Index Exchange’s opinion of the trial thus far:
https://www.indexexchange.com/2024/09/16/what-google-antitrust-trial-means-for-ad-tech/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=brand
My old boss, Andrew Casale, testified on the first day.
Yarrow
I knew someone who finished her Masters degree and moved to California to take a job with Google. In 1999. I’ve lost touch with her but often wonder just how rich she got with early stock options.
Jeffro
@SatanicPanic: I hear you, but I’d prefer that we (Dems) 1) make it a major campaign issue at all levels going forward and 2) note that we’re open to options that are fair but the EC ‘as is’ must end. Not just try for proportional allocation in red and/or purple states. (I may be misunderstanding you, though).
Either every state awards the votes proportionally, or we finish up the Interstate Compact (and tell the current SCOTUS to stay out of it), or we repeal the EC.
Belafon
@Adam Lang: From my experience with groups both in an out of the internet, the only young people that join existing groups tend to be old at heart. :)
Adam Lang
Okay okay the majority of COMMENTER Jackals were shut-ins in 1998, I stand corrected.
(I was an employee of a Silicon Valley software company in 1998, for the record. So I certainly qualify.)
Also re Google’s search catering to SEO, my web site used to be top five ranked for a number of regular and image searches (which always sort of surprised me but pleased me). Then for like five years sites that stole all my photos and put them up themselves, sometimes even stealing my bandwidth to do so (something that I had to spend a lot of time playing whack-a-mole to mostly sort of stop) were ranked with my photos and my site wasn’t. Then earlier this year my rankings went back up, although I’m now only top twenty or top fifty for regular searches and top ten to twenty for image searches, and possibly only for searches in the SF Bay Area. E.g. ‘golden retriever saint bernard mix’ gives you Jake in the top ten images and twentieth in regular search results for me. (I admit to being curious whether that holds true in other parts of the country).
I also used to rank #1 in google search results (in multiple regions!) for the phrase ‘slightly late’, which I’m not sure, in retrospect, was exactly flattering.
lowtechcyclist
@Jeffro:
This. It’s crazy that a shift of a million votes in California wouldn’t matter in the least, but a shift of ten thousand votes next door in Nevada or Arizona could swing the election.
“One person, one vote” should be true in a national election – and it should work like a national election, rather than as 51 state-level elections whose results get glommed together in a really stupid manner.
MobiusKlein
@Starfish: Certainly it’s important to prune customers data – that is on a 10 year retention policy. Plus right to be forgotten rules on top.
That data is not what is relevant to anti trust lawsuits though.
As for 10 years, I think that is standard or common for online money stuff
piratedan
ahhh for the heady days of Netscape Navigator and WordPerfect!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Kristine
@Omnes Omnibus: I hardly ever visit. I should probably just delete my account.
PaulB
Deleted, because a followup edit screwed up the formatting and I can’t fix it. I’ll repost instead.
cain
@Adam Lang: I was totally on the internet – I am young! ;)
cain
@Old School: They dropped “don’t be evil” when they IPO’d.
I hate when companies IPO, invariably they turn into assholes.
PaulB
So what can we do to stop some of this abuse? I would recommend the following:
It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you(r data). Take your privacy seriously. Through rigorous protection of my privacy, I haven’t seen an ad in months.
Note: because I’m blocking ads, I fund the sites I care about that might otherwise be negatively harmed. So I have an annual subscription to TPM, and have routinely helped out with fundraisers here.
Sister Golden Bear
@lowtechcyclist: Also too, the eugenics aspect of preventing trans people from having children is another major goal.
Kayla Rudbek
@Suzanne: I’m old enough to have used Netscape Navigator 1.0 in college
Kyle Rayner
@Sister Golden Bear: Love (/s) how people keep playing sterilization wack-a-mole with “undesirable” traits that always have and always will continue to pop up naturally in the population forever.
Surely THIS time their breeding program aspirations will finally work.
JML
@piratedan: i loved both Netscape Navigator and WordPerfect. I kept using Netscape for long past it’s true viability. WordPerfect was also far superior to Microsoft Word and it was a crying shame how Microsoft was able to kill it by bundling and favoring Office through it’s crappy O/S.
RevRick
Interesting that the Googles came up today since it became a brief topic of discussion at our church’s Green Team meeting. I had mentioned that our efforts to become carbon neutral and sustainable would be an excellent evangelism tool. Our pastor then jumped into the conversation and said she had managed to tweak the Google search results so that our church moved way up the list of any searches of Allentown churches. We hope to become a Creation Justice Church within a year, adding to our status as both an ONA (Open and Affirming) and WISE (Welcoming, Inclusive, Supportive, and Engaged) in the mental health community.
Starfish
@PaulB: Google Chrome is starting to disable uBlock origin on YouTube because Google makes less ad dollars if you use it.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: well now I want to know more.
I’m not sure the age range people mean for cougar. Isn’t is somewhat derogatory, in common usage? It’s part of the modern vocabulary I don’t use much. Does it just mean age gap older ladies w younger men?
i m asking real questions, all serious in the midst of a jokey interchange. However, the potential juicy stories, girl talk, could be fun.
Gloria DryGarden
@RevRick: I’ve not heard of any of these. Creation justice, what on earth is that? Thanks for spelling out what the other ones are. These give me hope.
you give Christianity a good name, the way you steward community, and care for people and our world. Goodness, as a form of nourishment.
Gloria DryGarden
@PaulB: super helpful action steps,
(and at the magic number 108, like a completed prayer)
Math Guy
@Kayla Rudbek: Programmed in FORTRAN and IBM Assembly Language. Using Hollerith cards.
Searcher
@cain: The thing to remember about “Don’t Be Evil” is that it was always a subversive motto inside Google. It wasn’t something management inserted into the corporate training out of the blue; it was something individual employees would graffiti on whiteboards in various conference rooms, as rebellion against various corporate schemes. When management started echoing it, it was always just mealy-mouthed management trying to humor the disgruntled employees.
Google, like all corporations, is a bunch of people. Some of those people are very passionate about things like user trust and privacy and information freedom. Some of those people are very passionate about making as much money as possible. A lot of those people are just hanging out trying to make a living.
The biggest changes have always come when some employees’ passion has intersected with the momentary whims of management. When the gCreep affair happened (a Google employee using his access to stalk teenagers), suddenly there was a lot of corporate will for implementing rigorous access controls around user data so that employees couldn’t willy-nilly spy on users, and when employees did need to look at user accounts, there was an audit process to ensure they were only doing what they were supposed to. But management didn’t create that change ex nihilo — there were passionate employees who’d been trying to get the changes through before that, but it cost time and money and created a greater friction for everyone else at the company.
Likewise, when Edward Snowden revealed the NSA was tapping into corporate fiber, a lot of projects around encrypting data in transit inside of datacenters and otherwise treating Google datacenters as non-secure suddenly become viable, even though they increased hardware costs with the overheads of extra compute.
This works both ways, of course. When OpenAI got everyone chatbot-mad, it basically killed the “AI Safety” teams because management suddenly wanted all the GenAI projects which previously would be shut down as being to risky to be green it.
“Don’t Be Evil” isn’t really dead at Google, because it was never really alive. It is what it’s always been — a rallying cry for the subset of employees passionate about some anti-capitalist-maximalism principles, who sometimes get their way when management gets panicked about the latest PR crisis/potential lawsuit.
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist:
@Jeffro:
There’s more to say about what the states get to do, in a national election, as we hear about maga persons on the election commissions or in place as Secretary of State, utterly poised to disrupt voting, and counts and certification. Which I find deeply disturbing.
I think Colorado is in on that multi state compact thingy, but what, all the states involved haven’t passed it? Why haven’t they? I’ve not kept up on this.
Gloria DryGarden
Not quite an elderly shut in, but almost. I have to get some different work that fits my aging health and injuries profile, maybe miraculously improve my prospects for retiring.
I’m really glad to follow this discussion about internet and privacy, although in some ways I’m just a few steps up from being a tech virgin, and I’m glad some of y’all will talk to me, so I can learn and grow.
I remember friends in the 90s talk about “wading the web.”
Until about 5 years ago, I didn’t have internet at home, so I parked at the library or a school after hours, to check emails or apply for jobs, etc. I don’t have tv. And I didn’t want to follow much news before or after a day of seeing massage therapy clients. It just wasn’t conducive to the space of curious openness, and kindness I needed for my work. So popular culture is sometimes an unfolding mystery and shock to me.
in college we used cards, I think it was Fortran. Big stacks of cards, rubber banded together. Programming and I didn’t quite take, though I had to do it for engineering courses. I still remember my CE professor GENTLY showing me where my assigned program was not going to work, and how to fix it, sitting in his office. I think he raised my grade over my intricate and complex effort, even though I didn’t quite reach the bar.
I used internet at friend’s houses, and Gradually I had a word processing program, and later dial up, and learned more basics. I would call a friend and ask, “my screen says this, what do I do?” Or “it says this, is it safe to turn it off now?” That was 35 years ago.
It’s good to get today’s overview about ads, and google/ Facebook/ linked in/amazon. I guess I need to start looking at privacy settings more often. Do you recheck it every month, like paying bills? I refuse cookies a lot, and sometimes it means I can’t get in, some sites, that’s ok. I need to learn this data clearing and turning off Facebook.. oh dear, does that mean, if I have it as an app, it’s just always going to be on?
I’ll look forward to some judicial clarity about the ads monopolies, and the ai interfering w ads traffic.
bluefoot
I’ve been watching this casually, so I appreciate the post. I have a naive question: Who are the SMEs (subject matter experts) within the DOJ? I’m not asking for names, but wondering about who does the analysis, comes up with guidances for how to break up a particular monopoly, then assesses whether a company was compliant with the DOJ decision.
Another ignorant question: Are there regulatory agencies for tech? I work in biopharma, which is HIGHLY regulated, but still government/regulatory requirements and guidances lag behind what’s going on despite a large number of experienced and trained people in the FDA etc. (Some examples: software as a medical device, validation of digital technologies for clinical assessments)
RevRick
@Gloria DryGarden: Creation Justice is a twofold emphasis of both caring for creation (reducing pollution and addressing climate change) while also addressing issues of justice, such as how this impacts the poor and vulnerable communities. The United Church of Christ pioneered this back in the late 1970s, when North Carolina proposed creating a landfill for toxic PCB disposal in Warren County, which just “happened “ to be 62% black and UCC clergy organized protests.
Kayla Rudbek
@Math Guy: okay, you beat me, as I never had to program with punch cards. FORTRAN was still in use and that was my scientific programming language in engineering camp. Maybe C+ by junior year?