States' 3rd Amended Antitrust Complaint Against Google Looks A Lot More Damning
from the pay-attention-to-this-one dept
There are lots of different antitrust actions currently ongoing against Facebook and Google, with varying degrees of quality. From the beginning, the strongest one has been the lawsuit a bunch of states -- led by Texas -- filed against Google. When it was filed, I noted that there were sections that were heavily redacted which had the potential to be pretty damning, but the redactions made it hard to tell. I also found some of the non-redacted bits questionable, as they suggested a complete misunderstanding of some aspects of the technology. Last Friday, Texas filed its third attempt at a complaint and it reveals a lot more about the stuff that was redacted in the earlier filings -- and I'll now say that this is the most serious, and the most damning, of all the antitrust lawsuits out there. How Google responds to the lawsuit will be extremely interesting and worth watching. Given the errors in the original filing, it's possible that there are errors here too, but if what Texas is alleging in this latest version of the lawsuit are accurate, then Google should be in trouble.
The filing is 242 pages long, and much of it gets deep, deep into the weeds about the online advertising market. But there are two key parts that stand out as potentially very important and very damning for Google (and, partly, for Facebook as well). Most of the news coverage has focused on the claim that Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg signed off on a special deal to combat header bidding -- a form of getting around Google's position in the ad market. When the header bidding claims first came out, I found them questionable, as the early claims suggested that Google was abusing its position to kill off header bidding, which seemed ludicrous to me, because I'm contacted probably half a dozen times a day by ad companies offering their header bidding solutions for me to use. But, the details now revealed suggest Google really did work with Facebook to try to suffocate the header bidding market:
Facebook understood these stakes as well. Internal Facebook communications indicate that Facebook’s March 2017 announcement was intended to signal Facebook’s willingness to support header bidding. Facebook knew that Google would see its participation in header bidding as a major threat. Evidently, Facebook was executing a planned long-term strategy—“18 month ‘header bidding’ strategy to minimize “[the Exchange Bidding] tax”—by threatening to expose the hidden costs Google charges publishers.
Google and Facebook entered into formal negotiations shortly thereafter. Both sides recognized that Facebook’s leverage came from its critical role in supporting header bidding. As a Facebook document from February 2, 2017 memorialized, “What Google wants: To kill header bidding (us baptizing their product will help significantly).” Elsewhere, Facebook employees summarized an earlier meeting between the parties discussing header bidding and Exchange Bidding (“EBDA”), “We discussed the EBDA product they’re building. Both parties (FB and G) were candid about why header bidding exists and that EBDA’s sole reason for existence is to kill it.” In an October 30, 2017 email, senior Facebook executive [REDACTED] discussed the proposed Google-Facebook agreement and explained to another Facebook executive, [REDACTED] , “they want this deal to kill header bidding.” Google put the matter just as bluntly, explaining internally in 2017 that the goal of partnering with Facebook would be to “protect” Google’s “leadership position in 3P [third party] ad buying/selling.” To that end, the endgame with Facebook was to “collaborate when necessary to maintain status quo.” The “status quo,” in this case, was an unlawfully obtained ad server monopoly and an ad exchange charging many multiples over the competition.
As negotiations proceeded, Google began to accept that Facebook’s price for abandoning header bidding would require Google to share some of the auction advantages it had previously taken for itself. In an August 9, 2018, internal Google presentation, one slide averred that if Google could not “avoid competing with FAN” in the trade for third-party inventory, then it would instead collaborate with Facebook to “build a moat.” Google thus preferred to share a slice of its monopoly profits with a potential entrant rather than risk reducing its monopoly power.
The prospect of cooperating rather than competing with Google was enticing for Facebook too. As internal Facebook documents reveal, Facebook believed that partnering with Google was “relatively cheap compared to build/buy and compete in zero-sum ad tech game.” Facebook identified “build/buy ad tech” as the company’s second-best option but noted that entering the market would have required “huge [engineering] and services investment, and patience for sales cycle.” Compared to the time and expense of building a new technology and competing on the merits, entering an unlawful deal with Google not to do those things was an attractive option.
Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer [REDACTED] was explicit that “[t]his is a big deal strategically” in an email thread that included Facebook CEO [REDACTED] When the economic terms had taken their form, the team sent an email addressed directly to CEO [REDACTED]: “We’re nearly ready to sign and need your approval to move forward.” Facebook CEO [REDACTED] wanted to meet with COO [REDACTED] and his other executives before making a decision.
The ultimate outcome of these negotiations was a September 2018 Google-Facebook agreement signed by Philipp Schindler, Senior Vice-President and head of Google advertising sales and operations, and Ms. [REDACTED] Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer and member of Facebook’s Board of Directors, who herself was one-time head of Google advertising. Google CEO Sundar Pichai also personally signed off on the terms of the deal.
Two quick asides before getting into the meat of this: First, I have no clue why the obvious names of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are redacted here. They are the CEO and COO of Facebook and there's no mystery in that. It seems like a really bizarre choice to redact them when their titles are named, and even Sandberg's former job is mentioned. Second, (and maybe this explains the redactions?), it sure feels like a similar suit about this very same deal may now be on the horizon for Facebook.
As for the substance, again it will be interesting to see Google's response on this, but from this description, it sure looks like pretty garden variety anti-competitive behavior that involved two giants in the marketplace working together to limit the impact of a system that would chip away at the market they mostly controlled. If this is what happened and this is what the deal was about, then this lawsuit looks entirely legit.
The second really interesting bit in the case is the part I would argue is even more damning against Google, and if it's shown to be true, I hope that Google is significantly fined and banned from this practice. Politico's antitrust reporter Leah Nylen did a wonderful job breaking down the claims about how Google's "Project Bernanke" supposedly worked and if this is what Google did, it sure sounds like straight up deceptive practices, bordering on fraud -- and Google should probably need to pay out a lot of money to publishers who had Google ads on their site at the time.
At issue are the different types of auctions, and Google is accused of misrepresenting what kind of auction it was running. As the lawsuit explains:
By way of background, “first-price” and “second-price” auctions are common types of auctions used in various industries and contexts. Generally speaking, in a first-price auction, the buyer pays the amount of their own winning bid; and as the name implies, the buyer in a secondprice auction pays the amount of the second-highest bid (sometimes with a negligible additional amount, e.g., one penny). A “third-price” auction, therefore, is one in which the buyer pays the amount of the third-highest bid. As addressed below, Google’s secret Bernanke program surreptitiously switched Google’s AdX exchange from a second-price auction to a third-price auction on billions of impressions per month.
This may sound a bit confusing, but as Nylen points out, in a first price auction -- the kind most people usually think of as an auction -- the highest bidder ("the first price") is what is paid. As Nylen says: "So, if Henry bids $19, Alice bids $18 and Scott bids $9 — Henry wins and pays $19." A second price-auction or a Vickrey auction means that in the above scenario the winner pays the second highest bid -- i.e., Henry wins, but pays $18. This is the way that eBay auctions work, and some argue it provides a more efficient solution for getting bidders to bid the real value they put on the item up for bid.
From here, it's not that difficult to figure out what a "third-price" auction means -- in the above scenario it would mean that Henry wins, but only pays $9. It's hard to see a situation in which that actually makes sense, but here the complaint accuses Google's "Bernanke program" of effectively shifting between 2nd and 3rd party auctions within the same auctions and collecting all of the remaining cash. In the above example, the way this would work is that Henry bids $19, Alice bids $18, and Scott bids $9 in order to, let's just say, put an ad on Techdirt. Again, according to the complaint, Bernanke would effectively ignore the 2nd bid on the publisher side, telling us that the second bid was actually Scott's $9 bid, and therefore claiming to us (or any publisher) that the "clearing" price was $9 -- and it would then take its 20% fee of $1.80. But for the advertiser, Google would still show them the actual top three bids, telling them that $18 was the clearing price. So now, rather than Techdirt (the publisher) get the $14.40 we should be getting, we'd be getting just the $7.20, and Google would walk away with $10.80 (rather than the $3.60 it claimed it would take).
That's all a bit confusing, but this graphic in the complaint makes it clearer:
Now, those numbers are pretty stark, and the amounts would be quite different if you had 3 bids that were all pretty close, but the complaint notes that Google's own internal data showed that Bernanke lowered publishers' revenue by 40%.
Google examined some of the effects of its secret Bernanke program, finding that it drops any given publisher’s revenue by upwards of 40 percent. Stating the obvious, one Google employee observed: “Bernanke is powerful.” Publishers had no idea Google was dropping second highest bids and impacting their revenues in this way.
That certainly looks like a combination of deceptive practices and something close to fraudulently taking money that was supposed to go to publishers. At the very least, this revelation is absolutely going to lead to some publishers filing a separate civil suit against Google demanding their cut, and possibly having it turn into a class action lawsuit. Hell, I'd bet advertisers are going to file a similar suit noting that they overpaid for ads as well.
Given some of the other information in the complaint, there are some hints as to how Google got to this point. The description above sounds pretty damn evil, but there's a kind of dumb and dangerous internal logic. Google realized that it was starting to lose ad auctions to 3rd party systems quite a lot, and the original point of Bernanke was apparently not to steal money from publishers, but to have Google start winning more auctions. So, the initial idea behind Bernanke seems to have been to inflate bids to try to win more auctions -- and in those cases you can see a kind of logic to dropping certain bids from the auction as they were "artificially" inflated in order to win more auctions. Though... that's still pretty sketchy.
Again assuming this is accurate, this is, to put it mildly, fucked up. It's just out and out greed by the ad team, and it completely fucked the advertising market for tons of news organizations that relied on such things. I mean, as described in the complaint, this is so evil it's almost stupid. Google would have been much better off simply admitting that it was taking a much larger cut of the ad revenue than cooking up this ridiculous scheme.
So, yeah, I'll be reading the answer to this amended complaint carefully to see if there's some alternative explanation, but based on what's in this complaint, this is not just the strongest antitrust claim against Google, but one that Google should very much lose. There are lots of claims out there of bad behavior by various tech companies, and much of it is misrepresented or misleading. But if this is accurate, it's incredibly damning and Google should be in serious trouble for it.
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Filed Under: ads, antitrust, deceptive practices, price fixing, project bernanke, texas
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"I’m amazed you were allowed to publish this article given that Masnick himself subscribes to the outdated consumer welfare standard and prolly likes the status-quo as it is. I wonder if he’s typing up an article right now about how Europe’s latest antitrust push will “harm innovation”…"
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Re:
Lol. It's almost as if I don't come in with any specific preconceived notion and focus on what actually seems to be most effective/reasonable given the situation, data, and details. But that particular AC has a strawman Mike that he insists is the real Mike, no matter how many times it gets knocked down.
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Re: Re:
indeed. I was making similar points at the time.
I simply felt the schadenfreude of you less than a week later endorsing anti-trust actions, against google, was just chefs kiss
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Re: Re:
As well as half the commenters here.
(I used to wonder if the reason he always put my name in quotation marks was that he was accusing me of being a sockpuppet, or because he just doesn't know how to use quotation marks correctly.)
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Re: Re: Re:
I’m fairly certain he thought you were a sockpuppet for Tim. The jury is still out however, on the theory that you are in fact, an actual sock puppet.
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Re: Re:
"But that particular AC has a strawman Mike that he insists is the real Mike, no matter how many times it gets knocked down."
Baghdad Bob's own little world doesn't just contain a strawman Mike. What was it again? "There are motherfuckers, stupid motherfuckers..."
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Where's blueballs?
If that troll had any consistency, he would praise you for saying things like
But he's a contrarian troll so I doubt he'd do that.
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He’s probably still recovering from the anuerysm he gave himself trying to figure out how he can support corporations using the DMCA to silence legal speech and decry all instances of corporate censorship at the same time.
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Re:
You sure he fully recovered from his supporting terrorism that one time?
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Re:
I really don't think cognitive dissonance was ever a problem for that one.
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Re: Where's blueballs?
God, are people still doing that "Where's Poochie?" thing?
The troll's so far inside all your heads that you feed him even when he's not around.
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Re: Re: Where's blueballs?
Something which I'm sure is endlessly entertaining to the trolls in question, knowing that not only are there people wanting them to show up but that even when they haven't those people are already talking about them.
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Re: Re: Where's blueballs?
He's not that far inside my head; I just like to summon the trolls who say that Mike is in the tank for Google when stuff like this comes out because I like seeing heads a sploding.
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Re: Re: Re: Where's blueballs?
There once was an out of the blue
Who hated the process of due
Each lawsuit he'd made
Was DMCAed
And shoved up his ass with a screw
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Ah, the true classics never die. 🙃
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Re: Where's blueballs?
Sorry, all I could think about was the Red Peters album, which contained the greatest bar closing song of all time.
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Online advertising... sketchy?!?!?!
shocked avatar goes here
Given much of what we've seen filed in courts as of late, its really hard to trust claims made in them.
The performative lawsuit isn't something new and I find myself at a loss who to root for in this.
"If this is true" / "If the information holds up"
Access to the underlying documents is going to be critical, simply to find the grain of truth at the center & see if the choclatey coating on the outside is chocolate or crap.
I mean we've NEVER EVER seen State Attorney Generals filing pointless lawsuits just to cash in on public perception & prepare for the next hop up the political ladder.
I mean if Google did this, its really bad & its time to punish them, but at the same time the simple fact one can have serious questions about the veracity of what a SAG files is really rather frightening.
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'Oh you're being honest this time? Suuure you are.'
See, this is the sort of thing you can bring to the table when you prioritize actually building a case over scoring cheap political points.
This is what politicians and AGs should have been working on all this time rather than the blatant political stunts that have been the default so far, because as damning as this looks(and even just a quick readthrough of this article looks pretty bad for Google) you can be sure that they're going to be pointing to all the past PR stunts to try to discredit this as just another attempt along those lines.
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Re: 'Oh you're being honest this time? Suuure you are.'
If you thought QI undermined public trust in the justice system, just wait for our 5th amended complaint...
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I wouldn't be too surprised one way or the other.
We've seen examples of both sides being the bad guy.
Now, I would still be a little surprised to see Google directly defrauding people as described in the "Bernanke" scheme. Pretty sure this is illegal enough that they would have trouble wriggling out of this one. I would be less surprised with the first scheme being confirmed, which is more of a manipulation of market than a direct "pocket undue difference in a muddled transaction between two other partners". Because the examples we've had before were more about leveraging their position to reinforce their hold on a market than outright business lies which can be easily documented.
On the other hand, Texas officials (including at least one bought-and-paid-for prosecutor) have been getting away with some outrageous lies, and have proven several times how shameless they are in their attempts to take down Google... among other things. So them lying about this wouldn't surprising at all. Also, they might have twisted something real but benign into an apparently criminal scheme.
I guess we'll have to see how this all turns out. If I had to place a bet, I think Texas is most likely to lie here than Google's Bernanke system being as the lawsuit describes it.
Guess I'll go buy some popcorn. :D
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Re:
I disagree. This is exactly how a bunch of engineers think. It’s the way of thinking that results in door dash pocketing driver tips. We aren’t pocketing the tip, we pay them less when they get a tip. That’s how hourly workers do it, right? It’s all very abstract and divorced from the In theory, the dropped bid is inflated by Google’s shill bids. the website isn’t losing money because, in theory, the third highest bid is more accurate to the actual bid value (which as mike notes, isn’t likely to see such a stark difference in the real world). And google isn’t charging the advertiser more than it thought the ad was worth.
Yes. there are a ton of legal issues with it. Yes, it looks like fraud to most people. The thing is, The brain of an engineer often thinks in ideal circumstances, abstract code and theoretical scenarios. The real world just complicates things. UI designs based around function, not real human behavior. That’s how we got a nuclear launch warning in hawaii - the test button was a hyperlink, right next to the hyperlink that really sent out an emergency broadcast. Dumb UI design chosen because it’s cheap and functional, with no consideration to mitigating human error.
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Re: Re: The brain of an engineer
I've been a software engineer for 40 years and I think that's bollocks. A good software engineer has to understand people or no-one else will be able to work on their code and no-one will want to use their crappy user interface.
Sounds like you're thinking of autism.
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Re: Re: Re: The brain of an engineer
Don't do that. That just waves a giant flag that says "I have nothing of value to add to the conversation" - even when you do.
If you've been a software engineer for 40 years, then you will, of course, realize that there are plenty of software engineers who are great at coding and functionality, but who have zero skills at UX.
That's why UX people exist - to try and catch that stuff. If you're saying that somewhere along the line, the UX people, the legal folks, etc. should have caught this and said "don't do that" to the engineers that designed it, then yes, you're right.
But the thought process James outlined? That's believable. People make mistakes like that frequently, and people will also rationalize things to their own benefit, or not really think about things from an outside perspective. I can believe the designers just not thinking about it from the perspective of "is this fraudulent?" Someone clearly should have, and should have put a stop to it, just like someone should have thought about "maybe don't put the test link for the nuclear attack warning right next to the actual link." But that clearly didn't happen - in either case.
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Re: Re: Re: The brain of an engineer
"I've been a software engineer for 40 years and I think that's bollocks. A good software engineer has to understand people or no-one else will be able to work on their code and no-one will want to use their crappy user interface."
Manifestly not true. You said it yourself - you were a software engineer. Try a stint as a sysadmin, DBA or Tech Support. Or second-line support where actual interaction with the client is scarce to nonexistent?
You may come out a humbler person more aware of human weaknesses.
But odds are also decent you'll come out a dyed-in-wool BOFH and design some device where the user has no authority to fsck things up, with one single button and enough bling to keep the herd of lusers happy. Like Steve Jobs.
"Sounds like you're thinking of autism."
This is probably a good time to bring up the amount of people on the spectrum who actively look for work where they don't need to interact with unpredictable humans and can often mitigate that irregular sleep schedules.
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Re: Re:
Wrong, it's how a bunch of MBAs think.
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Re: Re:
Correction, Google isn't charging the advertiser more than the advertiser bid.
When Google passes to the ad exchange an inflated bid, the auction result bid may end up greater than the original bid; the difference is covered by Google. It still makes sense for Google, because (a) the relative changes are on par or less than the usual Google comission (b) Google sure does the math before deciding on what the changes actually are. You can do that math too, and then see in what circumstances it works without the elements of fraud alleged by the complaint.
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... and the part of me that thinks this might be lies or a distortion of the truth is based on the simple fact that there is no way something like this would stay a secret forever.
The reputational damage, the endless wave of civil suits as everyone sues the tits off Google / Alphabet / whatever-shell-corporation-it-is-this-week, the fact anyone involved would be happily thrown to the wolves if it got Google /Alphabet off the hook legally speaking ... the consequences for when the game was up, not if, are so severe that it's difficult to see how it could get green lit.
Yes, I know corporate America and late stage capitalism seem to just dive headlong into short term profit at the exclusion of anything else (including long term sustainability) but the consequences here seem so bad that I can't see how this went beyond a dubious experiment that was shut down afterwards as the downsides vastly outweighed the positives.
I have no difficulty seeing Google / Alphabet (any US company frankly) being greedy enough to pull a stunt like this. Being smart enough to figure out a scam like this, yet somehow stupid enough to think it will never be uncovered? That's a whole different ballgame.
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Texas is certainly misleading by examining that one part of Bernake harmed publishers and glossing over the fact that the other part of Bernanke ("inflating" bids) increases publisher's revenues. Hint: Google earns a commission fee from the transactions, and Google is greedy.
This is an anti-trust lawsuit, because the owner of an ad exchange can, in theory, decide to contractually require from participating ad networks that the pair of bids they submit are exactly the same as their client advertisers requested (whatever that means for automated bidding...). Or, keep it freestyle, allow for networks to submit optimized bid values.
The purpose of a second price auction is to prevent manual bid wars and that is still upheld
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Guilty!
Well, maybe. If so, I propose the same penalty Microsoft got on their last loss: Google will have to set up a confusing website that makes it possible for people who can prove they were harmed by Google to fill out piles of paperwork that eventually gets them a coupon for ten percent off their next purchase from Google.
:D
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So much for "Don't be evil."
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Re:
They removed that line from their code of conduct years ago:
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393
First quarter 2018.
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Re:
Sex workers will admit they are fucking you for money, the politicians... not so much.
Google can be evil, but not as evil as facebook...
What we call evil is sometimes just how business operates in the nation and we look away from everyone else doing it because they aren't making the huge bucks like big tech.
In a functioning nation the businesses would avoid stunts like this, because they would end up caught (by lawyers we could actually trust were being truthful).
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Prostitutes sell sex. Whores sell their principles.
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