European Commission Fines Google €2.95b Over Abusive Ad Tech Practices

You as a prosecutor, who will you take to jail? whole committee? Those who voted in-favour? Somebody who brought the proposal? Only CEO?

Each of these decisions if done consistently over time, would invoke changes in companies, to get some fall-guys in right places.

I believe the reason you got down-voted was because you comment did not add anything of productive to the discussion.

Can you name any other company that if they owned Chrome it would've been better for the users and the web?

This argument sounds intuitive, but are we really sure about that? People willingly seek out marketing materials to find things they want to buy. I've seen people flip through coupon books and catalogs as idle entertainment. That plus word of mouth may well be sufficient to keep knowledge of new products and such in circulation. Hell, it might even yield better-informed consumers, allowing the market to function more efficiently.

If my environment was not inundated with advertisement, I'd only be seeing more things that I'd be willing to pay for, not less.

>I agree that some sites make advertisements a massive eyesore, but that's a problem that can be solved in other ways.

Ads are not simply a way of getting your product in front of people. Ever wonder why ads are the fig leaf for mass surveillance? It's because they constitute some primitive, mild, poorly understood, but completely socially acceptable form of *non-consensual behavior modification*.

That this has been tolerated up to now is a historical contigency. Much like other civilizational essentials like tobacco products and leaded gas, as soon as someone prices in the externalities - whether through regulation or through disruption - the societal attitudes to them will quickly change from "unavoidable" towards "inexcusable".

Most of the things I own / purchase / use… I have neither seen a commercial for nor pursuaded by it if I saw it in passing. So there are other ways. Right now few of the largest companies on the planet contribute little-to-nothing to society other than showing garbage down people’s throats. Perhaps there is some happy medium but I don’t think society can ever reach it any longer

The ads we see online now (and the tracking that goes with it) are what, 20 years old?

The type of marketing and advertising we live with now is a direct descendent of research and work done in the last century (thanks Bernays).

The whole point of Google was to get people answers to questions they have. Our current approach to advertising creates the problems in people’s heads only to immediately sell the solution.

I had a decent idea. Not that it's easily practical, but it's more practical than other solutions.

Major problem today is information asymmetry. Google giving you free YouTube videos is front and center. Google paying for it by linking your location and this and that fingerprint from here and there is hidden in whitewashed language 3 settings menus deep. Many things are hidden in bottom right of a billboard in fine print, t&c fine prints, etc,.

What I propose is the law making sure that all information about the product that you intend to or are forced to by regulation to make public, public in the same measure. That is, if you're going to advertise "coca cola, open happiness" you also need to have in the same fontsize "39g of sugar" right next to it. Similarly google search bar needs to say what info of yours helped serve the ads you see, right next to the content paid for by those ads.

If you're going to hide less palatable stuff in your t&c, then marketing logos slogans all become illegal for you. And all information even positive ones must also be in fontsize8 t&c fine print.

Real estate ads can't put *artists impression at the bottom right of their ad in fine print, it has to be as big as the main tagline.

You get the idea. What I gave are just examples, slight variations of the idea that still focus on information symmetry as the main goal, will also work.

If you didn't take money from sources overtly connected to the brand or otherwise shady you won't be banned.

I am not sure why but otherwise seemingly intelligent people seem to be incapable of internalizing that any cost, expense, or fine levied against any corporate entity will always, with 100% (not any other percentage) be rolled into prices. The minor headache of it lowering returns will also be offset and will not really make a difference to any meaningful degree. Most likely Google, just like other corporations that are exposed to this kind of risk, will have set aside a "war chest" they have been building up over prior years, which further would defray any real impact.

Then of course there is the fact that these fines are rarely ever the actual amount that will be paid in the end, and most of the time it can be distributed over time.

What people should really take away from this is that in the end it really is kind of an extortion racket by the EU, but not of Google, but rather of the advertising companies the end consumers who end up paying from he higher priced ads through product prices, and possibly the general Google customer base.

This would really only be an issue that materially impacted Google if there were some kind of real competition in the space, which there is not really. What the EU could possibly do that would have a notable impact is setting industry standards to, e.g., a universal ad format that is ad broker agnostic, e.g., your app, site, service, etc could just serve up ads from all kinds of places, a kind of free market of ads not dominated by Google.

But even with that, with Google's advancement in AI generated content, they will likely also dominate the ad generation market soon.

The oddest thing is that the EU and Europe in general has all but floundered in many ways regarding the generation of a competitive technology industry. But that's a whole different topic.

There are two types of businesses: those allergic to change, and those unable to stay the same.

If you are at a corporation where you constantly have to be Doing Things which Demonstrate Impact, this sort of judgement or regulatory change is a godsend for hundreds or thousands of middle-managers and engineers.

You have a project with clear goals ("comply with court order/new regulations"), relatively low bars for success (minimal impact on the bottom line), and it's all very clear to upper management that the work you're doing is Important. Heck, you might be able to lean on it for a couple of years to justify your existence, instead of trying to convince people that changing the rating system from a five point scale to a percentage then back to a five point scale was a worthwhile use of a dozen employees worth of headcount.

There may be some industries where change is anathema or the owners' oppositional defiance disorder makes they unwilling to change things just because they're illegal, but there's also plenty of others where people will be gleefully fighting for the opportunity to comply with a court order.

A lot of it is a because the US brands are more recognizable and cheaper (due to dumping) and grow faster (due to the USA's VC glut).

IIRC a company like AirBNB was started in Europe, and was slowly growing, and couldn't get investment because "who would want this?" and then AirBNB was created, and then arrived in Europe, and they still couldn't get investment because "who wants a ripoff clone of AirBNB?"

This is plainly untrue if you're talking about tech beyond the mag-7 sized supergiants.

> Regulation may be good, but understand, actually, recognize, that it is also suffocating. People bragging that they have no weeds in their fields, when they have no fresh crops either....

And yet it is the tech giants in the US, oh so praised for their size, that are the "weeds" in many regards.

What good is Google when it's reliant on an advertising monopoly itself built entirely on monopolistic and fraudulent exploitation of the rest of the economy.

What good is Amazon when it's reliant on crushing all other retail and local manufacturing?

Many pennies together add up.

Some people are so poor that all they have is money.

We'll see how that pans out when the baby boomers finish retiring. Europe ate it's children to feed the retirees.

https://www.politico.eu/article/france-francois-bayrou-wakin...

Not to derail the conversation, but IMO the current US administration isn’t a wake up call. It’s a temper tantrum by people who understand that the US isn’t as relatively wealthy to the rest of the world as it was after WW2 but don’t understand why. If some of the thrash accidentally improves the West’s defensive posture or spending that’s good but there is no coherent plan of why things need to be changed.

I promise you that within the US, each of those first two fantasies is more popular than the third one.

Something like web search is basicallly part of a modern digital infrastructure. We don't want entrepreneurship in water or energy supply, I don't think we should rely on it in web search, because it will inevitably end up chasing profits over everything else.