Roughly a month after being hit with apretty damnatory antitrust suitled by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton , Google come out its response on Sunday via apublic blog posttackling some of the more “ misleading ” allegations .
This is pretty out of character for Google , which has , until now , been middling individual with its response to any antitrust investigations — both in communications with the press and with its ownrank and fileemployees . Even the web log Emily Post itself is middling myopic , narrowly focusing on a handful of charges from the Texas case without addressing any allegation from , say , thedozensof other body politic or theDepartment of Justice , amonga few others .
“ AG Paxton tries to paint Google ’s intimacy in [ the adtech ] industry as villainous . The inverse is true , ” write Google ’s Economic Policy Director Adam Cohen .
Photo: Alastair Pike (Getty Images)
“ Unlike some B2B companies in this outer space , a consumer internet ship’s company like Google has an incentive to maintain a overconfident user experience and a sustainable net that works for all — consumer , advertizer and publishing house . ”
Cohen then goes on to describe some of the specific points that Paxton fuck off wrong . A just chunk of these are related to the way the suit refers to Google ’s on-going endeavor to quash competition that need office via a awry adtech drill known as “ cope bidding , ” which you may scan all abouthere . But some of Cohen ’s more egregious attempts at debunking the AG deserve some debunking themselves . Here are the two biggest doozies :
As we ’ve establish our ad tech product , we have given peoplegranular controlsover how their information is used to individualise ads and define the sharing of personal data to safeguard people ’s privacy .
On report , Cohen has a point . Google has pass the past class roll out controls across itsmyriad properties — even overhaulingcore partsof its flagship internet browser — for the rice beer of its users ’ privacy . What the web log handily leaves out is thatjustabouteveryoneof these updates seem to hurt the same flaw : They ’re impossible to understand , mean just about every consumer will see them impossible to put into pattern .
One of the many , many ( many ) suits facing the company actually turn out this . Back in May , Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovichspearheadedan investigating into the company ’s privacy practices that included some ( initially redacted ) comms from Google employee who werejust as confusedas the people who expend its Cartesian product .
And then there ’s this nugget from Cohen :
The ad technical school diligence is fabulously crowded and free-enterprise . [ … ] We compete with family name like Adobe , Amazon , AT&T , Comcast , Facebook , Oracle , Twitter and Verizon .
Again , Cohen does have a point here — the adtech ecosystem isridiculously herd . Ridiculously . Google ’s been reminding us of this exact pointfor long time .
But opportunityisn’t the same thingas choice . Google owns the most popularvideo streaming serviceandsearch enginein the country by a massive gross profit . In the U.S. , for example , Google ’s flagship search engine is estimated to controla little over 90%of the the total lookup locomotive market share . YouYube , meanwhile , saw cyclosis numbers last year thateven surpassedrivals like Netflix .
In other words , Google has lots of citizenry with tons of eyeballs across its properties every second of every day . Because online advertising is largelya numbersgame where marketer require to spend the least amount of money to get hold of the most people potential , there ’s an worthless , spontaneous requirement in the advertising industry that results in people pouring their advertizement budgets into Google ’s systems even if they have tohold their noseswhile doing so .
In part because adtech organisation on the whole aremind - numbingly involved , and in part because Google ’s moderately pixilated - lipped about the financial specifics about its own ad biz , it ’s pretty tricky to gauge how strong its throttlehold is . Onerecent studythat came out of the ISBA — an adtech trade tie in the UK — alleged thatclose to 30 centsof every ad dollar spent online could end up in Google ’s pockets . And we know that even though role player like Amazon are rapidly encroaching on Google ’s greensward , the so - call Google - Facebook duopolystill devoursmore than 60 % of the advert dollars spent online .
What ’s ironic about Cohen ’s financial statement is that the exact names he alleges compete with Google ’s adtech line , moot what we ’ve seen throughout the preceding year . Last year , Adobedowngradedits so - called Advertising Cloud so significantly that one analyst call the move Adobe ’s way of “ effectively shutting up store . ” Last year we also saw reports that AT&T wasstrongly consideringselling off its standalone adtech biz , Xandr , which had spend the retiring few yearsstrugglingto get a competitive foothold in the wacky humankind of digital ads . Verizonclosed shopon its standalone Oath advertising server business last class as part of a company - wide reshuffling that result in close to 800 Verizon Media employee beinglaid off . And Twitter ’s advertizing revenueplummetedso badly last year that it … well , made a fewquestionable choiceson the product end .
Google ’s core arguments on the privacy and power front are actually really standardized in one specific way of life : They only ring honest if you do n’t really question Google ’s title .
If you accept Google ’s definitions of squishy terms like “ seclusion ” or “ competition ” or even Son like “ misleading , ” you ’re accepting the status quo that Google defined for itself as something universal . It ’s not . The style you or I delimit “ privacy , ” or that lawyer and economists specify “ competition ” is bound to show a bit of variation because , well , these phrasesdon’t actuallymean much on their own . But if we ’re going to let Google extoll its virtues via blog post , we should at least ask them to define what those virtues even are .
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