Google Delenda Est

Can you see the stars aligning? Populist politicians are going to win in 2022 and there is growing evidence of criminal malfeasance at the BigTech companies...

Naked Capitalism: Unredacted Antitrust Complaint Shows Google’s Ad Business Even Scummier than Many Imagined

The State of Texas and fifteen other states plus Puerto Rico have filed a suit against Google for antitrust abuses in the online ad market. Late last week, the Southern District of New York unsealed the complaint, which at this point is the third amended complaint. We’ve embedded the document at the end of the post.

It isn't showing on the site right now, but the document is there (PDF): States Third Amended Complaint

Google shamelessly engages in fraud; in fact, the abuses are so bad that one wonders why the attorneys general are not separately pursuing those charges.

Here's one scheme dubbed Project Bernanke:

Yves at Naked Capitalism:

Mind you, I am not able to judge the merits of this suit, since antitrust enforcement has become so weak and precedents have also shifted to favor the big boys. One of the usual ways to successfully muddy the waters in an antitrust suit is to argue over the definition of the relevant market, as in to argue that the competitive space is bigger and the evil prospective monopolist doesn’t have a dominant share if you define its market “properly”.

Google should be fined out of existence for all the evil it does, but this scheme alone should implode the stock price because teh company relies on ad revenue. A nation that wasn't thoroughly corrupt would force Google to repay all the money and tack on treble damages.

By way of reminder, ever since its acquisition of DoubleClick, Google has become the largest ad tech vendor across each step of the value chain, with market shares as high as 90-100%, while also a major publisher itself (selling inventory on its owned and operated properties like YouTube). While most of this was more or less known, the Texas complaint made headlines for claiming that when faced with the prospect of Facebook supporting a disruptive technology known as Header Bidding, which Google viewed as an “existential threat,” Google struck a deal with Facebook. According to the so-called Jedi Blue agreement, Facebook would curtail its Header Bidding initiatives in return for special privileges when bidding in Google’s auctions.

There is more over at Naked Capitalism.

Will anything happen? The corrupt government allows malfeasance by BigTech, BigPharma and BigBanks. There is also the Federal Reserve's manipulation in the markets. A roughly 30 percent drop in Google should be a starter move in a long and winding bear market that eliminates Google as a major corporation in world. BigTech should be ravaged as their manipulative schemes come apart, profits decline and capital flees the sector. But will USG block it? I'm skeptical of anti-trust law at this time, so it's probably going to require political intervention of some sort. Come 2025 the U.S. could have a populist POTUS and Congress who will lift USG's protection of these corporations. Governments usually act well after the market has done its work though. Sarbanes-Oxley passed in July 2002. The S&P 500 Index bottomed in July 2002. It would go slightly lower in October 2002, and that bottoming process continued until March 2003. If history rhymes, the time to be getting short is now.