Google is eating everybody else’s lunch. The share of Advertising revenue that Google passes back to the content owners whose content their entire business is built on the back of, has steadily gone down. This was deliberate and they knew what they were doing.

That graph is explained in the following footnote and you can read more about the paper from which it is taken at this link:

In Google’s annual 10-K SEC filings, Google breaks down its advertising revenue as going to “Google properties” or “web sites of Google Network members.” The term “Google Network members” refers to non-Google websites on which Google places advertising. In its 2017 10-K, Google explains that it generally accounts for third-party revenue on a gross basis: “For ads placed on Google Network Members’ properties, we evaluate whether we are the principal (i.e., report revenues on a gross basis) or agent (i.e., report revenues on a net ba- sis). Generally, we report advertising revenues for ads placed on Google Net- work Members’ properties on a gross basis, that is, the amounts billed to our customers are recorded as revenues, and amounts paid to Google Network Members are recorded as cost of revenues. Where we are the principal, we control the advertising inventory before it is transferred to our customers. Our control is evidenced by our sole ability to monetize the advertising inventory before it is transferred to our customers, and is further supported by us being primarily responsible to our customers and having a level of discretion in establishing pricing.” In 2004, Google buying tools allocated approximately 50% of advertising revenue to Google’s proprietary properties, such as Search, and the other 50% to non-Google websites selling their ads through Google’s buying tools and advertising exchange. Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Mar. 30, 2005), https://perma.cc/5A4Y-8EY4. It was in 2006 that Google acquired YouTube. An- drew Ross Sorkin & Jeremy W. Peters, Google to Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion, N.Y. TIMES (Oct. 9, 2006), https://perma.cc/5TG8-8BVE. In 2005, Google’s share of advertising revenue increased to, approximately, 55%; 2006, 60%; 2007, 65%; 2008, 68%; 2009, 68%; 2010, 68%; 2011, 71%; 2012, 71%; 2013, 73%; 2014, 75%; 2015, 77%; 2016, 80%; 2017, 81%, 2018, 82%; 2019, 84%. Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Mar. 16, 2006), https://perma.cc/Y272-BRAP; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Mar. 1, 2007), https://perma.cc/H4ZJ-FL7B; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 15, 2008), https://perma.cc/W6FU-AA2T; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 13, 2009), https://perma.cc/5PZY-UZS5; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 12, 2010), https://perma.cc/7B6E- REEV; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 12, 2011), https://perma.cc/9ZKX-XPKL; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Apr. 23, 2012), https://perma.cc/YS3R-TLE4; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Jan. 29, 2013), https://perma.cc/3W45-M9R9; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 11, 2014), https://perma.cc/79A2-6TCT; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 6, 2015), https://perma.cc/7DJZ-FD8S; Google Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 11, 2016) https://perma.cc/EU2M-T6QC; Alphabet Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 2, 2017), https://perma.cc/4QKP-UUZJ; Alphabet Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 5, 2018), https://perma.cc/22HL-SSSP; Alphabet Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 4, 2019), https://perma.cc/ELZ2-AC93; Alphabet Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) (Feb. 3, 2020), https://perma.cc/RWE8- 27PB.

Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s my thoughts on taming Big Tech censorship in the USA.

Yesterday’s post is here.

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Welcome back to BlockTV. I’m Brian of London and this is my alt-tech opinion for BlockTV on the 3^rd of February 2020.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that the big tech giants, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple have too much power and control. Whether that’s a problem or not seems to be related to the size of your slice of their massive lobbying budgets.

The Antitrust Subcommittee of the US House Judiciary Committee is currently working on an investigation and a couple of weeks ago the committee took time out from impeaching Trump to continue doing something useful, perhaps. They held a field hearing about the power of online platforms and spoke to witnesses specifically about Facebook, Google Amazon and Apple.

This was part of their investigation into the competitiveness of digital markets: this is a bipartisan investigation which will generate a report and recommendations for new laws and regulations seeking to govern how big tech platforms work.

This meeting took testimony, under oath, from four witnesses^⁠1. All four told compelling stories of how difficult it is to innovate in a market dominated by companies which have grown so huge. Throughout I heard a clear tension between business people who want government to get out of the way and let them innovate, against a recognition that Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have grown unnaturally large and are now a threat to innovation.

This is David Heinemeier Hansson, the CTO of software service provider Basecamp.

[Video]

It was very clear in all of those tests that Facebook was by far and away the most effective way to market because of the immense amount of personal data that they have so we could target our apps to just an astonishing degree and no other advertising platform was able to compete and this is why Google who also has the same sort of capabilities of charging and Facebook is able to capture 99% of all growth in Internet advertisement as was stated in that report from 2016 because they simply have devastatingly effective machinery.

He’s arguing, and I’m in complete agreement, Facebook and Google managed to collect and gather a trove of personal information in an early gold rush. Most people had no idea they were handing over something this valuable in aggregate because individually they either thought it a fair exchange for free email, photo sharing with grandma and some shiny beads or they simply never thought of it. Apple and Amazon are sitting on similar power.

As these giants grew quickly, the incumbents in the advertising market, whose business they were eating, didn’t see it coming. Back in 2010 now prominent crypto invester, Lou Kerner, made what seemed like a wild prediction for Facebook advertising revenue in 2015 and that Facebook would come to dominate online advertising and how online advertising would dominate advertising in general.

[Video 48s]

Facebook hit his prediction about 18 months after his prediction but this was still wild growth.

I have worked on and run many websites since before Facebook started up until today:  especially in news and opinion, Facebook can easily send 70% of a site’s traffic. Whether you’re buying adverts using their astonishingly intrusive targeting data, or just trying to have your thoughts heard, Facebook is the giant you can’t ignore. 

For the crypto world, we can’t ignore Facebook’s January 2018 ban on crypto advertising and their casting of cryptocurrencies as a “frequently associated with misleading or deceptive practices”.

[Read]

Ads must not promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings, or cryptocurrency.

Google and Twitter copied this weeks later. This attack on an entire industry that may one day compete with these incumbent giants doesn’t appear to have been illegal in America (though it may have broken Australia’s anti-cartel laws).

America doesn’t really have the same anti-trust regulations as Australia which is a pity. Even now the politicians don’t seem to know what to do next. Toward the end of the hearing the politicians ask the panel what they suggest: the short version is they really don’t know what to do about it.

Speaking in a separate interview to the Verge^⁠2, committee chairman David Cicilline said this:

[Audio 36s]

This is not an investigation that results in an enforcement action investigation.

Congress is the only place that has the ability to actually change the statutes and update the laws and put proposed regulations in place that actually fix this marketplace. So unlike an enforcement action that focuses on the behavior — a single company gets directed to do a single thing — our work is much broader. And it is actually more significant because if we do it right, we can get this digital marketplace working properly. And that will benefit consumers. It will benefit the next great company that’s going to come down the pike because competition was possible.

The US Government is slowly coming to terms with the dramatic concentration of power which has happened to social media, online advertising, local, national and international news, retail sales and the distribution of apps on our phones, the most important communication devices in the world. It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened to fast than for governments.

But for those of us with the ear to the ground in the crypto world, where suspicion of big government and their regulations is real and well founded, how do we feel about whatever this committee will propose? Does anyone think US authorities have done a great job regulating crypto? Can we place most of their efforts in the category of mostly harmful?

If you’ve got an opinion, look me up on twitter @brianoflondon or @brianoflondon on Steemit. Tell me know what you think.

For now, that’s Brian’s Alt-tech opinion.

¹ https://judiciary.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=2386

² https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21078903/podcast-house-antitrust-chairman-cicilline-tech-monopoly-vergecast

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

Field Hearing: Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 5: Competitors in the Digital Economy

Date: Friday, January 17, 2020 – 10:00am
Location: 01/17/2020 10:00 AM MST
Tags: Antitrust

If you want to watch the whole thing, you can here (link). Fox had a good write up. All of the witnesses told compelling stories of how difficult it is to innovate in a market dominated by companies that have grown so huge. Throughout I heard a clear tension between business people who clearly want government to get out of the way and let them innovate, but a recognition that Google, Facebook and Amazon (in particular) have grown unnaturally large and are now a threat to innovation.

I pulled out the following clip by the CTO of software service provider Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hansson. He has decided not to use Facebook for advertising and he explains how that is so difficult to do. It is entirely analogous to a news site or prominent individual who choses not to be active on Facebook or is banned from it for whatever reason.

He’s arguing, and I completely agree with him, Facebook and Google managed to collect and gather a trove of personal information in an early gold rush. Most people had no idea they were handing over something this valuable in aggregate because individually they thought it a fair exchange for shiny beads and services. Amazon is also sitting on a similar power.

I no longer have access to Facebook and I absolutely know that for the kind of blog posts I write, I would receive something like 70% of my traffic from there if I merely had a Facebook mirror of my blog posts. Whether you’re buying adverts using their astonishingly intrusive targeting data, or just trying to have your thoughts heard, Facebook is the giant you can’t ignore. That’s one of the reasons why their ban on crypto advertising had such a devastating effect.

America doesn’t really have the same anti-trust regulations we’re using in Australia for our suit. Which is a pity, they don’t seem to know what to do. Toward the end of the hearing the politicians ask the panel what they suggest: the short version is they really don’t know what to do about it!

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

I’m also talking more generally about Zuckerberg’s recent interviews and his speech at Georgetown University.

Finally I address Indigenous Identity very briefly.

Happy to see comments and answer questions down below! Let me know what you think about any of this.

The Maxine Waters clip on C-Span is here:

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

I also spoke about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his new push toward free speech (or so he says). There’s a lot more to say on this, I’m listening to him in his Fox News interview as I type this.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

In this podcast I go over the transcript pointing out some of the astonishing details of what was said. The transcript comes from Gates of Vienna (one of the oldest and best counter Jihad blogs in the world). Many thanks to Tania Groth for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling.

Here are some of the points I make:

• Lotte is the first journalists to ask Facebook directly for the evidence of what it claimed he did to deserve to be removed.
• Facebook haven’t ever produced screenshots of problematic posts and can’t produce them.
• The claims made by Facebook can’t be confirmed by any journalists.
• The process by which people are chosen to be removed is entirely internal within Facebook though they may consult “experts”.
• No details of these processes will be provided to journalists.
• Facebook wishes there were global rules for “hate speech”.
• Facebook is not content to just apply rules against illegal speech, they must go much further and prevent people being harmed by “hate speech”.

Facebook is unfit to be running their network with the kind of power they have. My personal belief is that the world does not need it and Facebook is indeed a massive danger to all free societies. Centralised control and power such that Mark Zuckerberg wields, is too dangerous. I wrote more about Zuckerberg here.

If you’re interested in a legal effort to challenge Facebook (in a way that could inflict a financial blow on them which could threaten the existence of the entire company, take a look at this post.

The full original interview with subtitles is here on the Rair Foundation Website.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

• Since July 1st the financial value of submitted claims has jumped from $30m to over $200m and are still streaming in;
• We have more than 350 claimants;
• We’re in discussion with established sources of funds for class action legal cases;
• Significant private contributions to legal funds;
• Written acknowledgement of our warning letter from Google Australia;
• Significant press coverage.

We’ve gained more press coverage and sign ups to the suit have accelerated. People, especially Crypto insiders, are realising that what the tech Goliath did, by calling their entire industry a scam, was very wrong!

Up until now there seems to have been a sort of Stockholm syndrome mentality within crypto insiders. Some crypto insiders believe there were lots of scams and the whole industry needed to feel guilty about them. They just took the punishment from these huge mega corporations and felt they deserved some of it! Evidence just doesn’t back this up. We have to fight that mentality which seems to be a very strongly held belief in a myth. You can read more about why this is a hoax here.

This article in Decrypt contains a very interesting revelation from a Facebook spokesperson:

While the suit names Facebook, Google and Twitter directly, Hamilton said he considers Facebook the principle offender, and alleged that the tech giant instigated the ban.  

In comments to Decrypt, a Facebook spokesman who did not want to be quoted by name said the social network would look into any cases where unfairness is alleged. The spokesman added that the initial ban had been intentionally broad to better understand the crypto market; the intent had been to create clearer policy around what constitutes acceptable crypto advertising.

Decrypt – Sued for billions, Facebook is accused of killing crypto businesses by Ben Munster

Does this phrase: “the initial ban had been intentionally broad to better understand the crypto market” mean Facebook decided to ban an entire industry before they even understood it? That would be an astonishing admission. Or are they just gaslighting now?

In the meantime JPB Liberty has received an acknowledgement of our initial letter sent to Google in Australia. They confirmed Google Australia was talking with Google in the US and a few other details.

We were also covered by Nadja Bester of BeInCrypto with an excellent and detailed explanation of the case.

This video I recorded in Jerusalem was especially good at driving sign ups to our case.

Not directly connected with JPB Liberty’s case (but I did mention the Crypto Add Ban) I appeared on Block TV again talking about Brexit and Bitcoin.

If you want to join the fight, instructions below. We’re always looking for class members as no-win-no-fee participants and at the same time, if you want a financial stake in this project, you can send money by PayPal or various crypto and you will receive a cryptographic token representing your share in the damages.

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.