Monopoly, not the free market, is the secret to Big Tech’s success.
A clandestine deal recently revealed in the wake of an antitrust lawsuit by 10 state attorneys general allowed Google and Facebook to dominate the online advertising space together, keeping smaller competitors out of the game, according to a New York Times report.
In an article titled “Behind a Secret Deal Between Google and Facebook,” the Times described how the two corporations pulled it off back in 2017.
That year, Facebook was testing a new way of selling online ads that would have threatened Google’s dominance of the market. Just two years later, however, the company made the announcement that it would instead join an alliance of companies launching a similar effort — an effort led by Google.
In other words, Facebook abandoned plans that would have put it at odds with the search giant and instead teamed up with its prospective competitor.
Although Facebook never clarified at the time why it gave up its own project, the antitrust lawsuit filed last month implies that Google offered Facebook a sweetheart deal so it would back down from threatening its business.
The Times spoke with executives at six of the partners in the alliance, who said their agreements lacked many of the generous benefits that Google gave Facebook, placing the social-media giant at a significant advantage compared to other partners in the alliance.
The Google-Facebook deal reportedly had the code name “Jedi Blue” and involved a segment of the online advertising market called programmatic advertising. Header bidding, a new advertising method, emerged as a new method as part of a workaround to decrease reliance on Google’s ad platforms.
Per the Times:
In the milliseconds between a user clicking on a link to a web page and the page’s ads loading, bids for available ad space are placed behind the scenes in marketplaces known as exchanges, with the winning bid passed to an ad server. Because Google’s ad exchange and ad server were both dominant, it often directed the business to its own exchange.
The header bidding workaround gave news outlets and other websites the ability to solicit bids from multiple exchanges at the same time, increasing competition and leading to better prices for publishers.
To prevent major losses from the new method, Google rolled out an alternative called Open Bidding that allowed other exchanges to simultaneously compete alongside Google, which, in turn, would get a fee for every winning bid.
The Times reports:
The threat of Facebook, one of the biggest ad buyers on the internet, supporting header bidding was a grave concern at Google. The draft of the complaint reviewed by The Times cited an email from a Google executive calling it an “existential threat” that required “an all hands on deck approach.”
Facebook announced in March 2017 that it was testing header bidding with publishers like The Washington Post, Forbes and The Daily Mail. Facebook also took a jab at Google, saying the digital ad industry had been handing over profits to “third-party middlemen who make the rules and obfuscate the truth.”
Before Google and Facebook signed the deal in Sept. 2018, Facebook executives outlined the company’s options to Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, according to the draft of the complaint: hire hundreds more engineers and spend billions of dollars to compete against Google; exit the business; or do the deal.
Large tech corporations such as Google and Facebook have come under additional scrutiny in recent days due to the clear political influence they wield, as shown by the actions of the major social-media companies banning President Trump and many who support him.
The same companies are also doing their best to keep conservative alternatives from getting off the ground. Parler for example, found itself offline after Google and Apple took it off their app stores and then Amazon removed it from its servers.
This is far from the end of the censorship; it will go as far as we allow it to. Already, the Left is calling for cable providers to pull the plug on news stations One America News (OAN) and Newsmax.
Step by step, the globalist-controlled corporations are moving America toward a technocracy where the arbitrary will of socialist CEOs, not the Constitution, is the supreme law of the land.
