AdSense is the one that people underestimate. It's a piranha pool of liquid cash, billions-scale impressions and near global outreach. Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago, unless it was propping up a global influence campaign for their government.

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j16sdiz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am more concern with how they make scam much less detectable.

You can hyper-target your ad or scam to vulnerable individual.

Unlike traditional media, like newspaper, you can post an ad with no visibility outside your target group -- which is hard to discover.

The report button is just some generic "second look" and automation within the same organization, there are no oversight.

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pixelpoet 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am deeply saddened that it was developed by the hero of modern rendering, Eric Veach.

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parineum 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago

Why?

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bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

AdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.

	▲	streptomycin 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		But in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.
	▲	SilverElfin 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They forbid those websites from using competitors? Isn’t that blatantly illegal? I guess it’s not actually illegal until they lose a court case for antitrust.

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echelon 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Google owns 92% of all "URL bars".

They turned this into "search".

Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market.

It's downright evil.

Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get.

The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is.

They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.

	▲	Aerroon 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is. That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers. Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time. Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.

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inquirerGeneral 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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majormajor 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several?

I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?