<story><title>Unredacted Antitrust Complaint Shows Google’s Ad Biz Even Scummier Than Imagined</title><url>https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/unredacted-antitrust-complaint-shows-googles-ad-business-even-scummier-than-many-imagined.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiripospisil</author><text>When reading things like this (and assuming it&amp;#x27;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 &amp;quot;Implement scam&amp;quot;? 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&amp;#x27;s monorepo for everybody to see? Is it hidden somewhere else? Is it hot patched?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>macilacilove</author><text>Here is what to say engineers:&lt;p&gt;(1) BidManipulation is only used in some testing&amp;#x2F;market simulation environment.&lt;p&gt;(2) only used in cases where some pricing bug&amp;#x2F;weird legal issue happened that needs some tweaking to be corrected.&lt;p&gt;(3) only used in some weird markets where it is legal.&lt;p&gt;(4) implement many weird obscure features for &amp;quot;next generation ad experience marketplace stuff&amp;quot; and push them to production leaving it to higher ups to configure which combination of them are being used at which market.&lt;p&gt;(5) empower engineers to come up with additional &amp;quot;whacky ideas&amp;quot; and keep a culture where it is assumed that almost all of them are not passing legal review but they could be enabled at any time.&lt;p&gt;Not a recommendation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Unredacted Antitrust Complaint Shows Google’s Ad Biz Even Scummier Than Imagined</title><url>https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/unredacted-antitrust-complaint-shows-googles-ad-business-even-scummier-than-many-imagined.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiripospisil</author><text>When reading things like this (and assuming it&amp;#x27;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 &amp;quot;Implement scam&amp;quot;? 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&amp;#x27;s monorepo for everybody to see? Is it hidden somewhere else? Is it hot patched?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IX-103</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t even understand the point of the &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; as described in the article. Dropping bids (possibly including the second highest bidder), sure, that happens all the time when the creative is deemed inappropriate for the website. Changing the way charging is done and doing all the necessary accounting to create a &amp;quot;slush fund&amp;quot; to use to boost other bids? That doesn&amp;#x27;t really even make sense. Keep in mind that Google is already choosing the optimal bid prices based on the page &amp;amp; individual so why would they charge their slush fund when just charge the advertiser&amp;#x27;s account.&lt;p&gt;It sounds a lot like someone is upset that Google values ads on their site lower than ads on other sites and is upset that Google consistently bids less on their site than for other sites for the same ad (again no shock there as Superbowl advertising costs more than daytime television).</text></comment>