When reading things like this (and assuming it's true), I always wonder how it works in practice. I mean somebody has to actually implement the trickery in the codebase, right? Does that mean that one day there was a ticket that could be summarized as "Implement scam"? Or was there an attempt to hide the true purpose of the requested changes? Were the programmers not bothered by it? Were they in on it too? Are the implemented changes kept in Google's monorepo for everybody to see? Is it hidden somewhere else? Is it hot patched?
People think Google bought Doubleclick. But no: Doubleclick bought Google with their own money.<p>This is exactly the sort of thing Doubleclick would have done.
I really think this piece could be better written. Give us an executive summary or even bullet points of the activity. It went too fast into the details for me to see the overall trend.
I can see how anti-trust comes into it, if they're abusing their market power.<p>But isn't this also straight fraud? I mean, running an exchange, and then lying to both advertisers and publishers about the price that was struck?<p>If antitrust is hard to prosecute because of the vagueness of "market power", why don't they just throw them in the slammer for fraud?
The reporter appears to be confused.<p>> At the same time, Google would charge advertisers the price of the second-highest bid and pocket the difference<p>If my third highest bid is less than the second highest bid, there is no way to charge me the second highest bid. This is nonsensical.
The author analyzed one section of the pdf which amounts to a competitor creating a product, and so google creates their own competitive product. That sounds like a normal business practice.<p>It’s kind of silly to write a short article with an outlandish title, and then your only justification for the title is “just read the table of contents”. That pdf probably has tons of supporting information, but this blog post provides none of it.<p>(The embedded Twitter thread did not load on my initial read through, and it does provide actual content. But again.. embedded Twitter content when you have a brand new pdf filled with info?)