Thread by @WillRinehart

The Senate hearing on Google's ad business is beginning. You can find the livestream here: bit.ly/33w3gKb. Thread to follow.

In her opening statement, @amyklobuchar says that case against Google could be the beginning of a reckoning in antitrust.

If you're interested, you can find all of the testimonies here: bit.ly/33w3gKb.

Why did Google ads get pulled from the @FDRLST, asks @SenMikeLee. The Federalist had racist comments, says @d0nharrison, and we were working with the site to solve this problem. They could have had a click through screen, delete the comments, or moderate, Harrison says.

Google clearly has extraordinary market power if it can force small sites to moderate racist comments, says @HawleyMO. #antitrust

@HawleyMO is pushing a line of inquiry that will be key to the Google #antitrust case. How do we define search? Hawley thinks that people searching for products on Amazon's web site doesn't count as search that would be competitive to Google.

I'm interested to hear what @deaneckles thinks of this hearing.

@amyklobuchar asked @d0nharrison if the AdMob merger was anticompetitive. Harrison notes that the company took AdMob's nascent tech, combined it with Google's talented engineers, and were able to deploy the services across the site. #antitrust

@SenBlumenthal is right that Google is a big player for publishers and advertisers.
Google was ranked 6th in total ad spending, at $3 billion, behind Disney, Amazon, and Comcast: bit.ly/3hym94l #antitrust

@d0nharrison just brought up an underappreciated part of the conversation w/r/t Google's AMP. Sometime before 2015, Google reduced the total ad load by 50%, which dramatically increased user experience metrics: bit.ly/35AY9LD.

.@tedcruz just asked @d0nharrison about Robert Epstein's work on search engine manipulation. Harrison was being nice, but I won't be. Epstein's work is wild. Epstein said "bias in Google’s search results may have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes." bit.ly/3kp9zpZ

To answer the question @amyklobuchar just asked about user knowledge of their data, there is a huge amount of research on this topic. I reviewed some of that here: bit.ly/2zCnpPY

The first panel just closed and I think the best line of questioning came from @SenMikeLee on the issue of user metrics. Google should be held to account for fraud. #antitrust

Quick question, shouldn't these senators, who collectively spend millions on political advertising, know how effective Google ads are? #antitrust

@amyklobuchar is right that the stocks of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook constitute 20% of total market value. But market value isn't the same as revenue, etc.

@amyklobuchar I agree with @CarlSzabo on this one. Breaking up Google isn't the path forward if there are consumer harms. Here is an WSJ op-ed of mine making the argument: on.wsj.com/2AslL7c and here is the longer paper: bit.ly/2RE1Y82 #antitrust