[Plura-list] Google's short-lived data-advantage

[Cory Doctorow]

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Next Tuesday, I'm giving a workshop in collaboration with Phoenix's
Changing Hands bookstore: "All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing":

https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

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Today's links

* Google's short-lived data-advantage: Don't believe the criti-hype.

* This day in history: 2011, 2016, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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🥛 Google's short-lived data-advantage

There's a lot of ways to think about the movement to tame Big Tech, but
one of the more useful divisions to explore is the "Night of the Comet"
people versus the "Don't Believe the Criti-Hype" people.

This is a division over the value of the data that Google, Facebook and
other large tech firms have amassed over the years - data on their
users, sure, but also data on the advertisers and publishers they serve
with their ad-tech platforms.

Big Tech companies and their investors are really bullish on the value
of this commercial data-advantage: they say that spying on us - the
users - lets them manipulate our opinions and activities so that we buy
or believe the things their advertisers pay them to push.

More quietly, their investors believe that the data-advantage extends to
publishers and advertisers, a deep storehouse of data that makes it
effectively impossible for anyone else to do the precision targeted that
Big Tech manages, which is why they have such fat margins.

Night of the Comet tech criticism accepts these claims at face value:
Big Tech's advantage, they claim, comes from having amassed this
insurmountable data-advantage that allows it to both predict and shape
what we - and therefore advertisers and publishers - will do.

The implication of this is that traditional antitrust remedies -
breakups, say - won't be merely ineffective; they'll be terrifyingly
harmful.

If Googbook invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew
fidget-spinners, then breaking them up will only make it easier for
Robert Mercer to hijack that mind-control ray to turn your uncle into a
Qanon racist.

Googbook's data-advantage, in other words, is like a planet-killing
comet heading towards the Earth. If we break that comet up, it will turn
into a killing rain of meteors that shower onto every part of the globe
- we can't break up the comet, we have to *steer* it.

In this version of tech criticism, the answer is to leave Big Tech
intact, but turn it into a utility, or some other highly regulated
entity, bound by rules that limit its use of that mind-control system.

Bringing Big Tech to heel by deputizing it to serve as an arm of the
state (and perhaps a national champion in the new Cold War with China),
like the Bell System prior to the AT&T breakup in '82.

On the other side, you have the Don't Believe the Criti-Hype school. Lee
Vinsel coined the term "Criti-Hype" to describe a kind of criticism that
actually hypes its subject - say, by repeating Big Tech's self-serving
claims.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

These claims aren't just self-serving, they're also highly dubious.
Everyone who's ever claimed to be able to read - or control - our minds
was lying (to themselves, or to everyone else, or both).

The "psychometrics" that all this behavior-modification depends on is -
to quote *Nature* - a "scant science." From Big Five Personality Types
to microexpression/sentiment analysis, we're deep into the realm of
irreproducible results and junk science.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03880-4

The Criti-Hype school posits that the supernormal returns to capital for
Big Tech aren't driven by awesome ad-tech capabilities, but rather, by
monopoly (buying or crushing all competitors) and the fraud it enables
(the industry has nowhere else to go).

That is, Big Tech makes money the same way hedge-fund managers make
their own stunning returns: by cheating so they get paid whether or not
they're any good at their jobs. The mere existence of a profitable
industry is not proof that the industry is run by competent people.

And to be clear, there is a *lot* of fraud in ad-tech. Tim Hwang calls
it a "Subprime Attention Crisis," where the ads are fake, the clicks are
fake, the publishers' inventory is fake, the whole thing *riddled* with
fraud.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

As Aram Zucker-Scharff wrote, "The numbers are fake, the metrics are
bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are
knowing bullshitters profiting off the fake numbers and none of the
models make sense at scale of actual human users."

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

It's a "bezzle" - a con whose mark hasn't twigged to the ruse...yet.

And while the Night of the Comet side relies on the irreproducible
claims of self-proclaimed Svengalis, the Criti-Hype side has an
increasingly corpus of cold, hard facts about the bezzle's operation.

Take last November's "Why Google Dominates Advertising Markets," Dina
Srinivasan's  superb and detailed dissection of Google's crooked
ad-markets, in which they steal from advertisers and publishers by
rigging the bids on both sides of the exchange.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adtech

Srinivasan proves you don't need mind-control rays to explain how Big G
makes fantastic returns from the ad-tech market. That prospect is
further explored in the UK Competition and Markets Authority's 437-page
report on "Online platforms and digital advertising" (Jul '20):

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf

Here's where it starts to get *really* interesting. In May 2020, Yale's
Fiona Scott Morton and Omidyar's  David Dinielli used preliminary CMA
data to publish their "Roadmap for a Digital Advertising Monopolization
Case Against Google."

https://omidyar.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Roadmap-for-a-Case-Against-Google.pdf

Morton and Dinelli zero in on the actual mechanism of Google's
data-advantage, the thing it commands a lion's share of, which
advertisers genuinely prize: location data. If I know you're around the
corner from my cafe, I might spend a *lot* to show you an ad for my pasties.

This location data advantage is undeniable, but man, it has a short
half-life. Thing is, I might spend a lot of money to show you an ad for
my coffee shop when you're around the corner, but once you've moved on,
you can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. You're dead to me.

This short half-life tells us that we're not living the Night of the
Comet nightmare scenario. Break up Google, starve it of location data,
and within *hours* most of its location targeting advantage is
gone...forever.

As the antitrust cases against Google proceed, more and more of these
technical exposes of rigged markets emerge, showing us how monopoly and
fraud are at the heart of the data-advantage, and how contingent,
time-bound and fragile that advantage really is.

The latest is the bizarrely named "Project Bernanke," a formerly secret
ripoff that was exposed when Google forgot to redact a document it filed
in its Texas antitrust case:

https://twitter.com/KhushitaVasant/status/1379955848118726659

Google used data from recent ad-auctions to help advertisers shade their
bids for ad-placements, exploiting the information asymmetry so the ads
it brokered won the auctions, ensuring that rivals ad-brokerages were
frozen out.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/googles-secretive-project-bernanke-reportedly-093732134.html

Though Google insists that this was just an industry practice, the
leaked document reveals that Google kept this a secret from publishers.
Its internal presentations claim that they made $230m in 2013 alone from
this practice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-secret-project-bernanke-revealed-in-texas-antitrust-case-11618097760

All together, this constitutes a highly specific account of how a
data-advantage worked - and what its weak-point is. Project Bernanke was
not grounded in longitudinal market data from ad-sales - it exploited
*recent* data to deliver a $230m+/year advantage.

The multisided market - a multisided bezzle - exploits the monopolist's
data advantage to harm readers, publishers and advertisers, not by
predicting and shaping their behavior by bypassing their critical
faculties with spooky, advanced psychometrics.

The bezzle requires fresh data - it's a flywheel that uses the
monopolist's god's-eye-view to freeze out competitors and entrap
publishers and advertisers to get more data to rig the market to entrap
the publishers and the advertisers.

It's not a comet. It's a monopoly. It's not terrifying supergeniuses
using machine learning to turn us into clicking zombies: it's
garden-variety monopolists using anticompetitive, underhanded, dishonest
and (probably) illegal tactics to maintain their monopoly.

Bust the trust, ban the conduct, and the data-advantage evaporates with
the half-life of that extremely time-bound data. The criti-hype that
says that the data-advantage is a deadly, unstoppable comet is just
Google's own sales-patter, flipped on its head.

Don't believe the criti-hype.

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🥛 This day in history

#10yrsago Central European folk-dancers illustrated sorting algorithms
https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/2255-sorting-algorithms-as-dances.html

#5yrsago Save Comcast! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-comcast

#5yrsago Congresscritters spend 4 hours/day on the phone, begging for
money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk

#1yrago Snowden warns of permanent pandemic surveillance
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#patriot-act-ii

#1yrago PE companies that looted healthcare want billions in bailouts
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#socialized-losses

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🥛 Colophon

Today's top sources: Dina Srinivasan (https://twitter.com/DinaSrinivasan).

Currently writing:

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1034 words (57089 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
https://craphound.com/news/2021/03/28/past-performance-is-not-indicative-of-future-results/

Upcoming appearances:

* All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing, Apr 13,
https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

* Book launch for Bruce Sterling's Robot Artists & Black Swans (Book
People), Apr 27,
https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-bruce-sterling-robot-artists-black-swans

Recent appearances:

* The Right to Repair Movement, Monopolies, and Solarpunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmosdDCrL-4

* The surveillance state, digital monopolies, and why we should be
worried (Podsongs)
https://anchor.fm/podsongs/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-the-Surveillance-State--digital-monopolies--and-why-we-should-be-worried-eso43k

* Conspiracy Theories (Utopian Horizons):
https://soundcloud.com/utopianhorizons/conspiracy-theory-w-cory-doctorow

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

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