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.

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

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.

• 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.

Yesterday Andrew and I traveled a few minutes to meet up in Ramat Gan, one of Israel’s top business districts abutting Tel Aviv to visit startup Block TV and their beautiful studio and offices. Here’s the interview (you can also see it on their site).

Andrew laid out the case clearly and very well. He covered the basics of the actions taken by these companies and why Australia is such a good place to bring this case. I added some points about the deplatforming background of the social media Goliaths. If you want to deeply understand what’s really going on with advertisers dictating the moves of the tech Goliaths, you really should listen to this section of the No Agenda Show.

Back when Andrew first told me about this case, I told him to stop saying the case was worth $500Bn, nobody would believe him and he sounded like a Bond villain. As I’ve got deeper into the story I’ve realised that’s probably at the low end of what these companies have done. And when Facebook brazenly launched their Libra cryptocurrency, it became absolutely obvious that having destroyed journalism, and gobbled up global media advertising, these companies are fully intending to take over the world’s money supply.

Additional coverage in this round:

• Israellycool: Did Facebook Try to Destroy an Entire Industry?
• Pamela Geller: How Facebook Tried to Destroy an Entire Industry and Eliminate Its Competition
• Beincrypto.com: Lost Money During The 2018 Cryptocurrency Ad Ban? You Can Now Claim Damages in Largest Class Action in History

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.

Unfortunately, and this is something I’ve always struggled with because of the naming convention my friend used, I probably inverted Mundia and Modia in the explanation! Mundia is the real physical world, Modia is the world of interpersonal relationships between people. I don’t really like his terms, which is why I explained them at the beginning! I’m more Mundian than Modian. I suspect that what makes Trump so interesting is his ability to excel in both Modian and Mundian worlds.

The Sargon of Akkad video I mention is here on BitChute.

There’s also a short little explanation of what it is to be an Indigenous Jew in Israel… because I got some comments while I was filming this live.

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 want more information or you want to help fund JPB Liberty’s law suit you can read more here and if you want to directly contribute to the funding, please get in touch with me, Telegram is a good way. If you want to contribute now and especially if you’re on Steem, take a look at the project’s Fundition page.

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

This is the extract from the Libra White Paper I read:

As we embark on this journey together, we think it is important to share our beliefs to align the community and ecosystem we intend to spark around this initiative:

• We believe that many more people should have access to financial services and to cheap capital.
• We believe that people have an inherent right to control the fruit of their legal labor.
• We believe that global, open, instant, and low-cost movement of money will create immense economic opportunity and more commerce across the world.
• We believe that people will increasingly trust decentralized forms of governance.
• We believe that a global currency and financial infrastructure should be designed and governed as a public good.
• We believe that we all have a responsibility to help advance financial inclusion, support ethical actors, and continuously uphold the integrity of the ecosystem.

UPDATE: You can directly contribute to the legal fees and have a stake in any future payout from this legal action by going to Fundition – a crypto based crowd funding tool.

It seems everyone I know is currently trying to sue one or all of the big tech giants. From my understanding most of the action is in the US and most of it makes a lot of noise but is unlikely to succeed. Almost all previous attempts to sue for viewpoint discrimination or arbitrary banning have not succeeded up to now.

So let me introduce a case that I actually do believe in. It’s a bit left field but that’s why I like it.

About a year ago all the tech giants took the somewhat extraordinary step of banning almost an entire industry from using their advertising services. As Google and Facebook (with Twitter desperately trying to keep up) are just vast advertising companies. Within weeks of each other all changed their terms and services (which you have no legal way to argue over) to exclude an entire industry from the most important advertising market on the planet.

Both Facebook and Google induce you to pump your information into their servers by offering you a “free” service. Once they have your data and your attention they then sell your data and your attention to the highest bidder: companies that want to advertise to you. You are their product and they sell you and your attention to become amongst the most profitable businesses in the world.

They claimed their ban on an entire industry built around a single technology most usually known as “blockchain” was because there were some scammers using this technology. It is as if they looked at some scam emails from Nigeria and decided, together, lets just take Nigeria off the internet. That would be good for everyone.

Now it turns out both Google and Facebook have reported teams looking at using blockchain technology themselves, this decentralised blockchain technology could well be a competitive way to win market share from these tech giants. Squashing an industry that might generate competitors is not allowed in certain parts of the world, especially when two companies (Google and Facebook) together control way more than 50% of the advertising spend in many countries (it’s as high as 80% in some places).

Andrew Hamilton (who I’ve known personally from his work with various pro-Israel groups like Shurat Ha’Din) is an expat Australian, now resident in Israel but with extensive legal experience in Australian competition law. He has done the work to figure out which laws these companies have broken, formed a company JPB Liberty and put a law suit together. He’s paid for independent legal advice to review his case and that’s been positive. He’s now moved into raising enough money to start the case which includes buying insurance against losing and paying the other sides costs.

BitCoin and the blockchain will replace the tech Goaliaths

Facebook and Google are very rich companies but they’ve broken Australian law and the potential scale of the damages are so big I won’t even type them. Within weeks of the advertising ban they both brought in the entire crypto currency industry suffered a monumental, public collapse in value. The crypto currency industry is one particular use of the blockchain technologies that Facebook Google discriminated against.

There are two ways to get involved, one is totally free and can even be completely anonymous:

Anyone worldwide who was adversely affected by the Crypto Ad Ban announcements on 30 January (Facebook) & 14 March 2018 (Google) and Google’s implementation of the ban in June 2018 including:

• Persons holding cryptocurrency on or after 29 January 2018
• Mt Gox Creditors
• Owners of Crypto Industry businesses including
  • Crypto Exchanges​
  • Crypto Wallet Providers
  • Crypto Projects (pre and post ICO)
  • Crypto Miners
  • Crypto Advisories

Joining as a class member is no-win-no-fee. You don’t pay to join or pay any of the legal costs, if there’s a win you collect a share.

The other way is to join as a funder of the legal costs. For this you will receive a share in 25% of the damages of people who’ve signed up for the Class Action. This is a comparatively high risk, high reward investment: I’m not giving investment advice here, but it is also an ideological way to wage lawfare against these tech giants.

One of the most interesting parts of this is that should there be a win or a settlement, the intention is to pay out via crypto currencies. That would have a doubly good effect because it would pump money into these alternative currencies driving value up for those in the market already and to replace some of the losses suffered when the advertising ban was first instituted!

All the details are on the JPB Liberty website. If you wish to sign up, you can go to this link and be sure to tell Andrew you heard about this from Brian of London!

Finally I recorded a detailed interview with Andrew, you can watch that here and I previously mentioned this case 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.

On Friday the UK Labour Party’s Shadow Minister for Digital Censorship and banning any speech that isn’t both Sharia compliant and politically correct, Tom Watson, issued a chilling public letter to the Chief Executive of Google (YouTube). He put this out as an image (which is annoying as hell) but I’ve turned it into text and will publish it in full here with my comments back to Mr Tom Watson.

Dear Mr Watson

Dear Mr Pichai

I am contacting with you regard to the use of your YouTube platform by a violent, racist, Islamophobic campaigner called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known in the UK and globally as Tommy Robinson.

I’ll skip over the grammatical issues, as usual you appear to make a big deal out of Tommy Robinson’s “real name”. Most people quickly come to terms with why people stepping into the public eye chose to use pseudonyms. This is especially true when others who have challenged Islam have been murdered or are under continuous death threat (Pim Fortuyn or Salman Rushdie are just two examples). Tommy himself has had a number of serious attempts to take his life with multiple Islamic terrorists currently in UK prisons for attempting to blow him and other to kingdom come in the past.

On Tuesday Facebook and Instagram removed his page, related pages and materials from their platforms for breaching their “Organised Hate” policies. However, as is quite clear from the comments threads on stories documenting this decision, Yaxley-Lennon supporters are transferring over their virulent hate to YouTube.

This paragraph is also filled with grammatical disasters, we’ll just take it as read from here that this letter is something I’ll be showing to my kids as an example of how not to write. Yes, Facebook caved to far-left pressure and deleted Tommy Robinson’s wildly successful Facebook page 24 hours after the posting of his devastating Panodrama documentary and it reaching more than 1 million views on Facebook. Why did this devastating exposé of the BBC trigger such a swift response from Facebook?

Yaxley-Lennon had 294,000 subscribers as of Wednesday. Since then, with YouTube his only remaining platform of global significance, his subscribers have leaped to 325,000. Recent videos he posted have been watched by between one and two million people. He is also using YouTube to move his supporters over to a website www.globalaim.co.uk and encouraging them to make donations to keep his movement alive.

Instead of becoming the UK’s new thought police, do you want, perhaps, to consider why so many people in the UK and world wide are eager to hear what he has to say? You’ve got a problem now: if you truly believe Tommy Robinson represents an ultra-extreme position, why are so many people watching his videos so soon after they’re published?

YouTube’s policy on hate speech prohibits content which promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on attributes including religion, race, immigration status or nationality. Many of his videos are clearly in breach of this policy.

Which videos on his YouTube channel today breach policies? Why haven’t they been taken down already? Clearly, if you believe it to be “many” you’ll have found them and will be able to provide them to us all as an appendix to your letter. I will be calling your office on Monday morning and asking for this list. I am in touch with Tommy and will take up any complaints you have directly with him and consider if any of his videos should be withdrawn.

If you believe Tommy Robinson has breached any of the UK’s draconian, anti-free speech laws, which have been enacted in recent years, why has he not been arrested? As you well know, I’m sure, he was wrongly imprisoned for speaking outside Leeds court. That case was overturned by the highest court in the land, last year, and his wrongful conviction quashed.

I understand YouTube suspended all adverts on his channel in January, cutting off significant revenue stream. I am now writing to implore you as a matter of the utmost urgency to follow the lead that has been, belatedly, set by Facebook, and remove forthwith all “Tommy Robinson” and related pages from your YouTube platform.

Advertiser friendly and contravenes YouTube’s community standards are two totally different categories, for now. Rational people who value free speech hope this remains so.

As the UK’s Shadow Digital Secretary I have recently been making the argument that the social media companies have failed to regulate hate speech and harm on their platforms. It is clear, as I am sure you are aware, that UK legislators are now moving rapidly towards introducing legal regulatory powers to deal with this those who seek to use the garb of freedom of speech to, instead, preach violent hate with the aim of damaging and undermining our society.

I hope UK voters can see that however bad restrictions on what was once considered “free speech” by the “mother of parliaments” are under the current Theresa May Conservative regime, they would be much worse if your Jew hating, Corbyn Labour Party ever seized power.

It is also the case that 30% of Tommy Robinson’s YouTube views come from outside the UK. What right does an out of power politician from the losing political party at the last UK general election have to determine what viewers in America can see?

The public interest is demanding an end to the laissez-faire approach to regulation not just in the UK but globally. However that should not mean that the social media firms avoid their responsibilities in the meantime to take action where it is clearly and vigorously required.

It would appear, seeing as how the Labour Party lost the most recent UK election, the last time this proviso was actually tested before the electorate, they chose the least bad option with regard to destruction of the necessary freedoms for maintaining a recognisable democracy. Freedom of speech, even unpleasant speech, is absolutely necessary to a functioning democracy. The freedom to challenge, with speech, a violent and aggressive ideology would appear to be a basic right you wish to remove from UK citizens like Tommy Robinson and the millions who wish to watch and share his videos.

I would ask that you immediately close down all of Yaxley-Lennon’s sites on YouTube before the virus of his views grooms countless more followers via your platform. I should also inform you, as a matter of politeness, that I will be releasing this letter to the media.

Fortunately the truth is sometimes a particularly virulent virus while the lies you peddle (such as “Islam is a religion of peace” for example) must be reinforced by draconian laws and repeated until the slaves understand the cost of challenging them is too high. Fortunately a few brave people exist to challenge your totalitarian dictates, people like Tommy Robinson.

I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely

Tom Watson MP
Shadow Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

I hope Google has the sense to resist this, I don’t have a lot of confidence. I look forward to hearing all the specific details of videos on Tommy Robinson’s channels which you have painstakingly identified to be “hate speech”. I shall be contacting your office by telephone on Monday (I’m working here on Sunday in Israel because we Jews start our week while you’re still in Church or at the mall). As a matter of politeness, I wish to inform you that I too have released this letter to the world.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Brian of London
Indigenous Jew, Israel