Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public).
Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsoft, nVidia, ...
How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site?
You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?
Sure, I think we can agree that at Google scale the business interactions with me as a potential supplier are automated and soulless.
On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless.
Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rather that I have nothing of value to offer them.
I cannot tell you how much I despise this idea that a company can be too big to talk to their customers/partners/products.
If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?
In this situation it's not "google providing the site owner with value."
It's the site owner providing Google with value (that they want Google to pay for).
It's not incumbent for companies to interact with every person who thinks they _should_ be a supplier to said company. I get people cold calling me every day wanting to be my supplier. I absolutely ignore most of that.
In this case Google's algorithm did not ignore the potential supplier. It evaluated the site and sent a reply saying basically "thanks, but no thanks".
Now, I understand your gripe - an algorithm did this, not a human. But this has been the Google way since long before they were a fifth of this size. So it's not like a competitor changes Google's way of doing business.
And Google's way is not a secret. If you don't like it, then don't have a business relationship with them (as a supplier or customer.)
But let's imagine you're CEO of option 2. What do you think you might do differently which would make this site, in its original form, appealing to advertise on?
Having multiple ad companies doesn't sound like an improvement when the advertising space on offer doesn't seem to be good for advertising.
Or to put it another way, do you feel this space does have value, but Google is leaving that value on the table? If so, why hasn't some other company taken advantage of this value?
Having only one ad network means that the monopolist holds all the cards. They can extract huge margins from advertisers while passing on very little to websites. And they can make all the rules. Websites have to comply no questions asked. If the monopolist closes your account it may be the end of the road for your business.
That said, Google is not actually a monopolist in online advertising. There's also Facebook, Amazon and a couple of smaller ones like X and Microsoft. The problem is that the big ones appear to have cleanly divvied up the space without stepping on each others' toes much.
For instance, Amazon does compete with Google for advertisers' money, but it has very little effect on the choice a website like Apportionment Calculator has as they can't sell their site on Amazon.
Similarly, I'm not sure how much of a competition Facebook Audience Network actually is for AdSense. I think it's mostly interesting for sites that have a significant Facebook/Instagram presence. Again, not much of a choice for small web apps like Apportionment Calculator.
>The real complaint is that Google did not consider the original site to be "ad supplier worthy".
No, that was not the complaint. The complaint is that Google demanded changes that made the site worse for users. These changes are clearly meant to optimise ad revenue.
Google is in a position of power that allows them to make these demands. More competition between ad networks would reduce the power of each individual ad network and give publishers more negotiating power.
>As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
As I understand it, no other ad networks have even seen the site. Amazon and Facebook are clearly unsuitable. Microsoft may have been worth a shot. For this type of site I think Google has a nearly complete monopoly.
Their point is that if there were more ad companies then the chance they would have allowed the site to go up as the original. Not to 100% of course but drastically higher than 0%
The new unneeded content doesn't make the site more appealing to advertise on, instead it exists purely to satisfy arbitrary standards set by Adsense. I feel you've missed the point of the article
I get it. The unnecessary content games the Adsense algorithm, convincing it that the site now has value as a "place for adverts".
That, in itself, is not actually a win. There would need to be traffic, clicks on ads, and so on to be a win.
There's no evidence (either way, it's simply not mentioned) if the site actually makes any revenue from the ads that are now on it. Perhaps the automated Adsense algorithm was correct "the original site isn't a good ad site" - and the mistake is that it can't see what "seems" to be true to us, which is that the new site is no better.
A calculator sounds like a pretty good place to advertise actually. Any tool where a user spends a lot of time instead of rapidly scrolling through it could be decent ad space.
Sure, a calculator. But this isn't really a general purpose calculator. It's a simple question/answer of "number of votes in this district". How long honestly are you going to spend on a site like that? It sounds to me like a very long-tail question. (Admittedly, I've never even felt the urge to ask the question much less search for a web site to answer it.)
> Can you elaborate on what the value of the site might be, to say a competitive advertiser,
Lots of ads don't care very much what site they are on, even if the purpose of the site is somehow unknowable.
But google knows the traffic it sends there. And it's able to show ads alongside those search results. Why can't it put similar ads on the page?
And apparently adding the dumb text unlocked ads, so there's the value being put to work. The old site has the same value, google just refused to recognize it.
> how that value might be unlocked?
Uhh, put ads on the site and the ads will get valuable views.
I don't know what you're asking here.
Or are you asking how competition between advertising networks would help? You wouldn't see several big networks in healthy competition all having the same bad requirements that a superpower can get away with.
I think that if you had 5 advertising networks, they'd all operate the same.
I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view. I think if there were 5 advertising aggregators they'd say the same.
You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table, not just for this site, but a lot of others like it. I'm suggesting that if this category of site had value to an advertising aggregator, someone would be leveraging it (and that someone eould likely be Google.)
>I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view [...] You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table
What makes you say these things? Google isn't walking away from a deal here. They are simply imposing their own rules knowing that the publisher has very little choice but to comply. Google probably knows that the enshitified version of the site makes them more money, but that doesn't mean a cleaner site has no value. It's just not maximising advertising income at the cost of user experience.
If there were several ad networks competing for this kind of business then each of them would have less power to impose their rules. Their margins would be far lower. Advertisers would pay less and/or sites would be making more money. And sites might have a choice to prioritise user experience over maximising ad revenue.
The point is that if google ads were busted up into more corporations it would be more competitive and there would be other ad companies that would offer superior options.
I don't think market cap is the right signal, but vertical integration. The worst monopolistic behaviour almost always involves one company controlling multiple parts of a supply chain. That's obviously why vertical integration is so popular!
This was something that was always seen as inspiration in Apple, while they were small. Once a company of that nature gets to a certain size, it becomes far to powerful as any movement in the core business, intentional or otherwise, can influence multiple industries simultaneously.
This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to let them fail.
Yeah, so I think that the issue isn't that Apple does several things well, it's that they do something well and then only consume that product themselves.
To an extent every business must generalise and specialise in various configurations as they get going and differentiate themselves, but at the point where Apple is building its own silicon which it then puts in its own hardware on which you can install software from their app store, regulators should be able to clearly say "if you're going to make chips, you have to let other people buy them too" and "if you're going to have an app store you have to let other people have an app store too" and so on.
That's not feasible for a very small business, but it's not as if you can apply a "market cap" point at which it becomes feasible. You can however pretty easily tell when a company has a "wholesale" division and a "retail" division and is essentially selling to themselves in the same way as another company might sell to them. It's always challenging codifying that stuff into law but we have a pretty long history of doing so, I don't think it would be an insurmountable regulatory challenge.
That and acquisition of a direct competitor who has beat a larger company. If you lose a competition, you should fall behind. Losing a competition and then forking out cash to make the leader switch teams before he crosses the finish line is a complete perversion of the game
When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary.
Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.
Isn't that true for many if not most laws? We don't not have taxes just because lots of people will argue they're too high or too low, we don't not have a criminal justice system because people will argue sentences are too harsh or too lenient.
Instead, for things deemed worth having as law, we try to set the rules at levels that as many people as possible find as reasonable as possible (albeit in an imperfect way because there's indeed no way to get universal agreement on anything, and because not everyone acts in good faith when choosing, and because money influences politics too much, and all the other reasons why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others).
I agree that the solution is unrealistical. But not for this reason: the "no limit" is also arbitrary and people do not agree if this is right. Moreover, lots of people do not agree with regulations and norms in society, but society creates these things and people learn to comply to live in society.
I think it’d be more accurate to say “imprecise” rather than “arbitrary.” For example, the legal drinking age is set to 21 (or whatever) based on politicians’ estimation of when most people are mature enough to handle the consequences. It’s true that there is no way to exactly specify a perfect age limit, but that doesn’t mean the limit was set randomly without any reason or basis, i.e., arbitrarily. Sorry if I’m being too pedantic; it’s just one of those nights I suppose.
If the value of "GDP of all African countries" is a numerical value then it is simplistic. If the value is informed by the functions which result in such numbers then it is perhaps too complicated.
If the parent has lots of experience with African economies then the value might be a distillation of the latter complicated ensemble of functions into something very meaningful.
That’s not what arbitrary means. The age is set as low as possible while still being reasonable as to not send kids to war. Maybe the distinction between the ages 16-17 and 17-18 seems “arbitrary” but there is a reason the age is 17 and not 71. Hence, not arbitrary.
That's why compromise happens. It's clearly superior to "let this company grow to an unlimited size, have all the power in the market, and tell customers to go pound sand because we're too big to fail". It would be a great start to set a cap or market percentage (assuming the market is huge, which obviously online marketing is).
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
Corporations are necessary for specialisation, e.g. even knowing what your legal liability is, having someone to enforce health and safety rules, being able to run a production line rather than having one person spend about a year making a single car.
We can't get most of the interesting things we see in developed economies just by sole traders hiring someone directly for each thing without a corporate structure, partly because that too is a specialisation, and partly because that's way too fragile (every such thing either has a bus number of 1, or it's a mediocre reinvention of a corporation).
> I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Could be. There's a reason we don't see aliens in the sky.
A the same time the "miracle" of collective action that you want to get rid of — because everything corporations do wrong is also done by other kinds of co-operations — isn't really just corporations, it's everything that makes us primates.
That's why you need to be more precise than "just ban them all", why the simple and obvious solution is wrong.
Nvidia is a great example of why a flat rule like this wouldn't work. Nvidia pretty much just does one, pretty specialized thing (GPUs) and trying to break it up into >10 pieces worth <$20B each (approximate median GDP of African nations by IMF) would be completely unnecessary. Just their gaming GPUs had ~$6B in profit in just the last year alone, and we know that their market cap comes much more from the AI market. We definitely could use stronger anti-monopoly laws, but market cap limits aren't the way to do it.
I wish this preference applied to governments as well. No government should have dominion over more than either a a certain percentage of people nor a certain percentage of production capacity.
So, I'm generally aware how monopolies form but given I'm not a web developer, what are the difficulties in starting a competing ad revenue company in the world today beyond the typical difficulties facing starting companies/startups?
If what you make is an ad platform, you have the normal chicken egg problem that without your ad network existing on many pages, no one wants to buy ads from you, and opposite way that without lots of ad buyers no one wants to reserve room for your ad network on their site.
But that's a normal startup problem. What makes it impossibility to beat google is that they control so many other parts:
- they know everything about the visitor. What they've searched for on google, which videoes they watch on YouTube, which websites you visit through their ads or browser, where you normally shop through Maps, who you keep in contact with through Gmail, which apps you use on your Android. Etc. Etc. There is no way you can place more relevant ads than them.
Secondly, if someone were ti to switch from AdSense to your startup, they might suddenly find themselves with their traffic having tanked. Why would google search send them to their site, when they can send the visitor to a site where google also makes money..
> If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries
What does this mean?
In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion.
Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and it has quarterly revenue of about $60 billion -- if it were a country in Africa, its annual revenue would rank in the top 5 in terms of GDP.
The aggregate GDP of all of Africa is about $2.9 trillion. Literally only Microsoft exceeds that today.
Are you just picking companies with a market cap above $2 trillion? What about $1 trillion? $500 billion? Alphabet's market cap at the end of 2016 was $540 billion. Has Google's influence over the internet increased meaningfully since then?
(I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis; I'm just trying to understand your benchmark.)
I assume he picked some ridiculously high number as a starting point.
In the end the problem is capitalism, the idea that investors (people merely looking to turn money into more money) should be considered the only owners of companies.
That forces this eternal growth model on us that enshittifies everything.
Announcing GoogleSquared, it's an entity which is entitled to precisely half of Googles profit (or loss) in any year before stock buy backs and dividends. It will buy back exactly as many shares of stock as Google does every year, issue exactly as many stocks as Google does every year to exactly the same entities, and issue exactly the same dividends, and do nothing else.
Every google stock owner gets 1 share per share of google stock.
(perhaps thumbing the nose a bit too much, but the general idea...)
I wish there was a way to turn “I’m pretty sure this business is pulling some BS” into “Just shut them the fuck down already”. But that would probably require the Justice system to work.
What you're saying is heresy in a capitalist world.
It absolutely is the root of all problems, but people, consciously or not, will deny it and try to justify how it is necessary or how accumulated capital is not the issue.
Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsoft, nVidia, ...