[talldayo]

To me, the genius part is how they've forced the industry's hand. There's demand for cloud gaming, USB APIs, Bluetooth functionality and graphics libraries, but many OEMs don't implement it on their system. Chrome tells them that they either brush-up their native APIs, or lose their users to an arena where their browser is more capable than their smartphone.

That part I fully support, and it's Google's "die by the sword" answer to Apple's stubbornness. Google's AdSense abuses are a horse of a different color though, and absolutely deserving of antitrust remediation. The impact of AdSense has been so harmful that I genuinely fail to imagine a "solution" to the scale of it's harm. Alongside the Apple case, it's a posterchild for "Things the DOJ Should Have Done Years Ago" in this industry.

[a_wild_dandan]

How does Google abuse AdSense? And why is finding a solution difficult? I'm ignorant here.

[blackeyeblitzar]

There’s an argument to be made that it is abusive by simply existing. It’s a business that is built on network effects since it is a multi-sided auction (people offering ad space and people bidding to show ads in those spaces). There are massive barriers to entering the ad network space as a result, which lets incumbents get away with whatever they want. In my opinion, markets that are inherently not competitive, like ones reliant on network effects, need regulation and forced competition.

But more specifically, it is things like Google forcing site owners to enter anti-competitive agreements (see https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...). As part of the agreements Google required, site owners had to preserve the best ad space on pages for Google’s ads instead of ads from rival networks, they were not allowed to insert ads from rival ad networks on the pages that Google search results link to, and they had to get permission from Google before changing how rival ads were displayed on pages where both existed (allegedly).

Note that even if site owners found these clauses problematic, in a practical sense they have no choice but to just say “yes”. They need ad revenues to survive in today’s economic environment. And for them, the risk of not having ad revenue is existential while Google doesn’t have anything to lose by being aggressive. It’s an uneven situation where there isn’t really choice for anyone except Google.

[talldayo]

Too many ways to count, really. It's an enormous system and I'm not qualified to explain it in detail, nor am I a customer of their products.

The long-and-short of it is that Google wields undue monopoly power by mediating their competitors in online advertising, and abuses that control to manipulate ad rankings and kneecap paying advertisers. They do this in several ways, like changing the font/frame/location of the advertisement and fixing it's ranking relative to Google's own products. This is the main argument against them, though there are tons of little inconsistencies that many highlight as salient.