But while the harms to publishers and advertisers have been outlined at length, there’s been less talk about the seemingly major consequences for consumers perhaps harmed by the alleged monopoly. Those harms include higher costs of goods, less privacy, and increasingly lower-quality ads that frequently bombard their screens with products nobody wants.

By overcharging by as much as 5 or 10 percent for online ads, Google allegedly placed a “Google tax” on the price of “everyday goods we buy,” Tech Oversight’s Sacha Haworth explained during a press briefing Thursday, where experts closely monitoring the trial shared insights.

“When it comes to lowering costs on families,” Haworth said, “Google has overcharged advertisers and publishers by nearly $2 billion. That’s just over the last four years. That has inflated the price of ads, it’s increased the cost of doing business, and, of course, these costs get passed down to us when we buy things online.”

But while it’s unclear if destroying Google’s alleged monopoly would pass on any savings to consumers, Elise Phillips, policy counsel focused on competition and privacy for Public Knowledge, outlined other benefits in the event of a DOJ win.

She suggested that Google’s conduct has diminished innovation, which has “negatively” affected “the quality diversity and even relevancy of the advertisements that consumers tend to see.”

Were Google’s ad tech to be broken up and behavioral remedies sought, more competition might mean that consumers have more control over how their personal data is used in targeted advertising, Phillips suggested, and ultimately, lead to a future where everyone gets fed higher-quality ads.

That could happen if, instead of Google’s ad model dominating the Internet, less invasive ad targeting models could become more widely adopted, experts suggested. That could enhance privacy and make online ads less terrible after The New York Times declared a “junk ad epidemic” last year.

The thinking goes that if small businesses and publishers benefited from potentially reduced costs, increased revenues, and more options, consumers might start seeing a wider, higher-quality range of ads online, experts suggested.

Better ad models “are already out there,” Open Markets Institute policy analyst Karina Montoya said, such as “conceptual advertising” that uses signals that, unlike Google’s targeting, don’t rely on “gigantic, massive data sets that collect every single thing that we do in all of our devices and that don’t ask for our consent.”

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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    2 个月前

    Different sides, same coin.

    You can’t improve ad targeting without doing shit that even normal people will be creeped out by, and if you’re creeping people out they’re not going to buy your shit.

    They’ve really pushed it as far as they can probably reasonably go without crossing that line too badly, and even then we’ve already crossed into normal people coming up with concerns that like thinking they’re having their phone listen to their conversations to show them ads.

    They’re (probably) not, but it’s also perfectly believable given what’s been done so far to “make the ads more relevant”.

    This is really a dead-end for everyone, short of someone coming up with a way to stuff ads into your dreams.