Being Evil

It appears that Google sabotaged ads to push its own AMP mobile web page format.

Let's see, 1 second per ad, a conservative estimate of 10 million ads a day slowed down, a minimum wage of $7.25/hour ……… That's Google taking about $2018.98 a day from consumers.

Even by the (hypocritical and corrupt) antitrust standard of, "Consumer Welfare," it seems to me that we have a good argument for breaking up the criminal enterprise known as Alphabet:

More detail has emerged from a 173-page complaint filed last week in the lawsuit brought against Google by a number of US states, including allegations that Google deliberately throttled advertisements not served to its AMP (Accelerated Mobile) pages.

The lawsuit – as we explained at the end of last week – was originally filed in December 2020 and concerns alleged anti-competitive practice in digital advertising. The latest document, filed on Friday, makes fresh claims alleging ad-throttling around AMP.

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According to the Friday court filing, representing the second amended complaint [PDF] from the plaintiffs, "Google ad server employees met with AMP employees to strategize about using AMP to impede header bidding." Header bidding, as described in our earlier coverage, enabled publishers to offer ad space to multiple ad exchanges, rather than exclusively to Google's ad exchange. The suit alleges that AMP limited the compatibility with header bidding to just "a few exchanges," and "routed rival exchange bids through Google's ad server so that Google could continue to peek at their bids and trade on inside information".

The lawsuit also states that Google's claims of faster performance for AMP pages "were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed".

A more serious claim is that: "Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a 'nice comparative boost'. Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow."

The document goes on to allege that: "Internally, Google employees grappled with 'how to [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower'."

Google promoted AMP in part by ranking non-AMP pages below AMP pages in search results, and featuring a "Search AMP Carousel" specifically for AMP content. This presented what the complaint claims was a "Faustian bargain," where "(1) publishers who used header bidding would see the traffic to their site drop precipitously from Google suppressing their ranking in search and re-directing traffic to AMP-compatible publishers; or (2) publishers could adopt AMP pages to maintain traffic flow but forgo exchange competition in header bidding, which would make them more money on an impression-by-impression basis."

The complaint further alleges that "According to Google's internal documents, [publishers made] 40 per cent less revenue on AMP pages."

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As for the complaint, it alleges that Google has an inherent conflict of interest. According to the filing: "Google was able to demand that it represent the buy-side (i.e., advertisers), where it extracted one fee, as well as the sell-side (i.e., publishers), where it extracted a second fee, and it was also able to force transactions to clear in its exchange, where it extracted a third, even larger, fee."

Break it up, burn it down, and bury the ashes.