> 16. Having reached its monopoly position, Google now uses its immense market power to extract a very high tax of [redacted] percent of the ad dollars otherwise flowing to the countless online publishers and content producers like online newspapers, cooking websites, and blogs who survive by selling advertisements on their websites and apps. These costs invariably are passed onto the advertisers themselves and then to American consumers. The monopoly tax Google imposes on American businesses—advertisers like clothing brands, restaurants, and realtors—is a tax that is ultimately borne by American consumers through higher prices and lower quality on the goods, services, and information those businesses provide. Every American suffers when Google imposes its monopoly pricing on the sale of targeted advertising.
In another thread, someone mentioned that the regulatory difficulties of operating a credit card company are so high that no one has started a new one in decades. So theoretically, removing some of the regulatory capture would help unseat Visa and MasterCard.
Fwiw, there is also Amex and Discover. They're far smaller players though.
Probably because there is enough competition on the credit card and payment market; do they have a monopoly? Are they driving the competition out of the market?
Another interpretation here: US regulators have been asleep for decades, and they haven’t taken much of a look at a number of companies abusing their monopoly positions.
There's that too, and the US political system ensures that that is kept in place - companies hire lobbyists, lobbyists cozy up to politicians, money is funneled to said politicians' election funds, and politicians are either formerly business leaders, or have a cushy high paying job waiting for them after their term if they play their cards right.
I think with all this (and the cases vs FB, Apple, etc), the tech sector didn't manage to pay and influence the politicians enough. Which is quite telling for the US' political systems.
Enough competition? Collectively, those two control 90% of the credit/debit transaction marketshare as of Jan 2020. Almost every move and change is mirrored by the other -- they don't even try to hide the fact that they practically operate in unison.
Almost all credit card companies have stipulations that merchants are not allowed to charge less for people paying cash -- forcing cash paying customers to pay the same price as those who cost the merchant a CC fee. This is basically a 3% tax we are all forced to pay on everything we buy.
> These costs invariably are passed onto the advertisers themselves and then to American consumers
IIRC the total ad spend has not changed much in the digital age. So it's more appropriate to say that these ad dollars are starving all content-making media. And it's not hard to argue that it has led to a deterioration of media quality in past decade
The tax is that a businesses have to raise their prices in order to afford Google's ads, which are only able to be priced so high due to illegal business practices. That means you, the consumer, are paying synthetically higher prices for everything because of Google's ad monopoly. Paying the Google tax.
Not to mention that because Google is the de facto owner of Internet search, it essentially pits businesses against each other, forcing them to engage in a bidding war for limited space at the top of search results.
This, unsurprisingly, leads to higher and higher expenditures on ads, rather than on improving the product of a business. In the end, consumers end up with mediocre products with above average prices - advertising costs being passed on to end consumers.
These costs can be quite significant (I work in e-commerce space), ranging from 10% to 20% of the end price the consumer sees.
That's not the argument. The argument is that they charge an exorbitant, consumer-harmful amount, which they are only able to do because of their monopoly position and anti-competitive practices.
Where’s all the people pointing out that it’s not a monopoly since nothing is stopping you from rolling your own ads platform, you’re just not entitled to reach, and Google can charge what they want?
Whenever I see this type of response in these discussions, I wonder if the people writing them got their definition of monopoly from Wikipedia or from Hasbro.
huh? I suffer due to targeted advertising? I'm better off watching ads for trucks and heartburn meds?
I don't think a newspaper has a God given right to a certain percentage of all the ad dollars, and I don't see how Google's business model amounts to a tax. What "costs" are they even referring to? How is a search engine supposed to collect revenue for the services rendered? Google connects users with information, and content providers with eyeballs, and does a better job of it than anyone else. The world before Google was a worse world, where these connections didn't happen.
This argument is so specious and just full of unsubstantiated use of buzzwords. IANAL but if it doesn't pass the common sense test I can't see it getting far in court.
I think the complaint is saying your targeted ads are higher than they naturally should be because google is using monopoly power to raise prices.
So google raises prices, companies pay higher prices and then charge more for goods. This the harm can be calculated by comparing the price of ads under monopoly vs ads without monopoly and then multiplying by some average margin over cost.
Well, except for the surveillance society Google and others of its ilk ushered in.
And except for the huge concentration of power that megacorps like this and their owners accumulate, that relegate most of the rest of us to lifetimes of kissing their asses and shining their shoes.
Google dominates search, but most of the items listed related to programmatic which is pretty competitive. The other big players are not small names.. amazon, Verizon, at&t, the trade desk, etc.
Nobody is as big and widespread as Google. They dominate programmatic too. The open market is secondary and highly influenced by whatever runs through Google's network.
Isn't what it's saying about google having monopoly power over online advertising in general?
For a change I don't think this is a complaint about it being targeted, aside from the fact google is uniquely able to target.
You suffer because one company has monopoly power over targeted advertising, so companies must pay it whatever it asks for, which means higher prices / worse products.
I just want to point out that this, "The world before Google was a worse world" might be true before 2000 or so, but certainly not for the past decade. Remember when Google result pages had sparse ads, that were clearly and boldly delineated from "natural" search results? Google was great then in helping me find stuff, I knew when I was clicking an ad, and the best products and services could still rise to the top of "natural" search results without paying a "Google tax". I also didn't get ads that followed me everywhere I went on the Internet, but I still had good relevant ads because Google had plenty of context from my search terms.
These days, nearly the first entire page of results is ads, which for most people look nearly the same as natural results. Google even gets most people to click on ads, and collect their pound of flesh, when the user typed the name of the business in the search bar. Google doesn't really need to worry that much about competing with other search engines for better natural results because they've mostly killed them all off. IMO Google's search engine peaked about a decade ago and has just gotten worse since.
Seems like a KO punch under the Sherman Act.