Tag: monopoly

A Trustworthy Remedy in the Google Ad Tech Trial

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

From Plaintiffs’ Demonstrative C, DOJ Remedies Hearing Exhibits

The Google advertising technology trial is a very big deal. While we are waiting for the final decision from Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia, I want to present some thoughts on the least resolved of the case’s many issues, the hard parts the judge will be pondering. Actually, one hard part: trust. But I need to tell you a little about the case to make the trust issue clear. I’ll give a brief introduction, but will refer you for more detail to the daily reports I wrote for Big Tech on Trial (BTOT) last September-October.

The ad tech trial is the third of three cases in which Google was accused of illegal monopolization, all of which Google lost. The first (brought by Epic Games) was for monopolizing the Android app distribution market. The second was for monopolizing internet search. This one, the third, found Google guilty of a series of dirty tricks to monopolize two advertising technology markets: publisher ad servers, and advertising exchanges. That was in the liability phase, and what we’re waiting for now is the conclusion of the remedy phase of the trial, when we’ll find out what price Google will have to pay for its malfeasance.

I intended to describe for you how a trial on obscure technical issues could possibly be so important, but found I couldn’t. I kept running into unknowably vast questions. This case is about advertising technology, and advertising funds our whole digital world. So it is about who controls the flow of money to businesses. But it is also about the big data and technologies that enable advertising to target you so well, so privacy and autonomy, efficiency and manipulation, democracy and political power are all implicated. Then there’s artificial intelligence; Google’s monopoly on the technologies in this case gives it a big head start in monopolizing AI in coming years. And the rule of law: are the biggest corporations too powerful for law to constrain? This case, perhaps more than any other of our time, will guide the cases against corporate crime lined up behind it. More big issues start crowding in, and I can’t describe it all. So, I’m settling for the most general of summaries, and leaving it at that: the Google ad tech trial lies at the intersection of most of the forces shaping our society’s present and future. That’ll have to do because I’m moving on to the nuts and bolts. Read more »

Monday, February 19, 2024

Why Biden Matters

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

Biden: Mueller / MSC, CC BY 3.0 DE; Brandeis: Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain; both via Wikimedia Commons

Biden matters because he is taking on the real problems that are wrecking America, the deep structural problems, created over decades, that benefit powerful people who will do anything to prevent change (the way fossil fuel companies do anything to block climate solutions that hurt profits). He is the first president since LBJ to take on problems that big.

“How can that be?” you ask. “Joe Biden hasn’t transformed the Middle East into peaceful democracies like George W. Bush did. Nor has he ended racial and partisan animosity in America like Barack Obama did, or drained the swamp like Donald Trump did. What has Biden done?” He has taken on a challenge as big as his three predecessors’ ambitions: breaking corporate monopoly power and restoring healthy competition.

“Competition policy” is the innocuous name for this program. It’s big because it seeks to cure the root malady ailing America. Obviously, I was being sarcastic about the successes of Biden’s predecessors: they got nowhere on their signature ambitions, because they did not even try. Bush’s program for the Iraq transition was an arrogant experiment in free-market fantasy, uninterested in democracy. Obama announced in an apology letter to supporters after winning the nomination that he was not going to change our corrupt and toxic politics. (I wrote a Daily Kos piece about it in July 2008.) And Trump, as the very embodiment of the swamp, would no more drain the swamp than a bullfrog would. But Biden is serious. Read more »

Monday, October 30, 2023

Less than Zero

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

(Rspeer at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

We think we live in a democracy, though an imperfect one. Every election, our frustrations bubble up in a list of proposed reforms to make our democracy a little more perfect. Usually, changing the Electoral College heads the list, followed by gerrymandering and a motley of campaign finance, voter suppression, vote count integrity, the dominance of swing states, etc. My own frustration is the very banality of this list, its low-energy appearance of arcane, minor, and futile wishes, like dispirited longshot candidates carpooling to Iowa barbecues. Enormous differences among these reforms are masked by the generic label, “electoral reform.”

One change—Instant Runoff Voting—should stand alone, for it’s far more important than the others, or even than all of them put together. Democracy is supposed to keep government and voter interests aligned, with elections correcting the government’s course; without runoffs, though, that alignment is elusory because no electoral mechanism really tethers the government to the public interest. Where other flaws in our electoral process have in-built, practical limits on the damage they can do, elections that lack runoffs have no limit on the divergence they allow between leaders and citizens. Which may explain a lot about where we are today.

Many years ago, during the Cold War, I worked for a military policy research company. I had an epiphany there: foreign policy was heavily influenced by the fact that two-player, zero-sum games are easy to analyze. If everything that’s good for the Soviet Union is equally bad for the United States, and vice versa, and no other players matter, it’s easy to settle on a logical action in any situation. Today’s polarized, cutthroat domestic politics is eerily reminiscent of those Cold War foreign policy days. First-past-the-post elections—the kind we mostly have in the U.S., where whoever gets the most votes wins, with or without a majority—produce two parties with perfectly opposed interests and easy “for us or against us” answers. Everyone is familiar with the electoral logic that drives this result: the logic of “spoilers.” The further consequences of spoiler logic, though, are much less familiar. Read more »