11 Comments

I wonder whether the negative reviews were due to a jarring experience of consumers so accustomed to seeing Google placements that they're barely noticed. That would seem to support DOJ's arguments.

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“So we still don’t know the exact percentage of Google’s revenue that search advertising makes up, or just how big the revenue has been since 2019.”

How is that possible? Isn’t google a public company? Don’t they had to file for the SEC and publish annual reports?

Don’t their income statements in those reports break down the sources of their revenue?

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Looking at alphabet 10K for 2020, their Revenues were:

2017 - 111 billion

2018 - 137 billion

2019 - 162 billion

2020 - 183 billion

Clearly growing quite a bit each year. So if “Google earned over $98 billion in advertising revenue from its owned and operated properties in 2019” then Dischler’s testimony that it was it was above $100 billion in 2020 would credible.

Still not sure why, being a public company, any financial results for 2020 on advertising revenue would be “redacted“.

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023

Various intelligence agencies send pots of money to google as payment for monitoring what people are searching and reading, and that money is all off-the-books. According to Snowdon, it was more money than Google made on advertising while he was a contractor for the CIA. I am not sure I believe that, but I am willing to believe *lots and lots*.

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023

“Pots of off-the-books money” to Google when the NSA is just sitting there?

I’d need some thing more than rumor to not be highly skeptical.

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Oh, the NSA is paying Google too. At least that is the Guardian found out, and what other declassified documents have shown.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs-tech-companies-paid

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I'll take a look.

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Advertising revenue isn’t under the table off the books. So my original question stands. How is a public company able to keep basic financial information about its public business operations secret?

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I'm not sure I follow that claim either. I'm looking at alphabet's most recent earnings report here:

https://abc.xyz/assets/20/ef/844a05b84b6f9dbf2c3592e7d9c7/2023q2-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf

It clearly shows the total revenue from google advertising $58,143mil and the total revenue across all units $74,604mil, for an approximate 77% of all revenue coming from google ads. See page 2. Is there something I'm missing about this claim?

Unless they truly want to argue to that judge that when adding x billion dollars from our intelligence agencies, it's actually far lower than 77% or 66%.

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Ah. Found it. Just had to Google “google annual report 2020” and there it is.

And on page 59, a list of revenues by type:

“Google advertising ..... 146.9 billion”

Remove YouTube ads ($19.7 B) and you get $127.2 billion.

Found it in literally less than 60 seconds. So why would he be reporting that it in court it was “redacted“. What was the point of that?

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Looking at alphabet 10K for 2020, their Revenues were:

2017 - 111 billion

2018 - 137 billion

2019 - 162 billion

2020 - 183 billion

Clearly growing quite a bit each year. So if “Google earned over $98 billion in advertising revenue from its owned and operated properties in 2019” then Dischler’s testimony that it was it was above $100 billion in 2020 would credible.

Still not sure why, being a public company, any financial results for 2020 on advertising revenue would be “redacted“.

Expand full comment