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Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

Am I so very cynical, that I assume that Google Ads will be assumed by default to comply with these standards? And that therefore, those using Google Ads to advertise will have their ads shown 100% of the time, while the exact same ad served on the same page, but via a different ad network, might not be shown?

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FTA (emphasis mine):

>In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

They key here is not 'which ads' get shown, but rather which websites will be allowed to show any ads at all.

If this follows the trend of what happened to YouTube advertising (TV 2.0) in that certain websites will be targeted for demonetization without any transparency or consistency, this will open a giant hole for competitors to eat one of Alphabet's core businesses. Perhaps leveraging this use of control over Chrome to effectively cripple competing ad networks with perfectly reasonable ads on websites that don't want to provide profit to Google will open them to litigation as well.

This will be interesting.

Google's Display network is only a small fraction of their advertising revenue.

Search advertising revenue is #1 by far.

Google can make a lot of mistakes in every other vertical. As long as they don't screw up search they can fail as much as they want.

I hope this applies to YouTube!

Does this begin to count as anticompetitive behavior in the form of Tying? especially if you're correct and Google Ads are by default complaint. If google were to, say, change what compliance means regularly enough (which would be a pretty low bar,) ad buyers have no choice but to rely on Google Ads.

They would be fucking stupid to do so; they're already under pressure in Europe for manipulating search results to favour Google products.

Why would you make this assumption instead of just read the Better Ad Standards page to see what it's about?

Because of experience with large companies. Why would you think they wouldn't do this when this sort of "self policing" has pretty much always ended the way the OP suggests?

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