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."
literature.cafe
515 readers12 users here now
(and anyone else, really)
This is a general special interest lemmy instance focusing on lovers of all things pertaining to reading and writing and all of the people that enjoy it as well as fandoms and niches that exist within reading circles. We federate with other instances, with our local communities being focused primarily on the above.
If you want to federate a new community, go to lemmyverse.net and copy a link to a community and paste it into the search bar. Be patient!
Also, consider installing instance assistant to better navigate lemmy and find communities better! Find links to download them here: firefox, chrome, edge
Instance Rules
- Keep it cozy. (No -isms, bigotry, gatekeeping, or general disrespect. Just be nice!)
- Please, no visual porn. (Smut and discussion of smut is OK as long as it is tagged as NSFW.)
- No spam.
- Be mindful of other instance rules.
- Keep self-promo to a minimum.
- Tag AI generated content as such.
- Please avoid piracy.
Server Info
Registration is open with human approval, just to make sure there's no bots afoot. Approval should take less than a day (and are sometimes near instant)
Please check your spam folder for an email from noreply@literature.cafe if you are having difficulty finding email confirmation.
Community creation is enabled. When creating new communities please be mindful of the instance focus.
If you have any issues or concerns, please message an admin
For those visiting from other instances, we have a community directory to make finding communities easier: !411@literature.cafe
We also have alternative lemmy UIs to use for those who want them.
A familiar UI - old.literature.cafe
Photon - ph.literature.cafe
Tesseract (photon fork with more multimedia focused features) - t.literature.cafe
Donations are greatly appreciated and go entirely to server costs but are not required.
