The word of the day in US v. Google was “parking.” As in: did Google buy some of its most ascendant and dangerous competitors in the online advertising business, all the while planning on parking them off in some far-flung corner of the company so that no one could possibly upset Google’s dominance? That is a central question of the government’s entire case against Google, and it came up over and over on Monday morning.
Pakistan
Government, opposition and public!
The " criminal act" of petrol price hike that happened late Friday night (November 5), provoked public outrage. The hike was postponed till November 1, but was implemented on the night between November 3 and 4.
I am saying it a "criminal act" again and again because it was a routine decision that should have been made in broad daylight, but at 2am in the morning the news broke and the people woke up in the morning to find that a petrol bomb had dropped on them. Now the rise in prices and the pace of inflation is so fast that even the column written on inflation last week before November 5 seems old and this repeated cry is causing boredom.
Apart from petrol prices, electricity rates have also been increased. Basic electricity prices have been increased by Rs1.68 per unit. For commercial and industrial consumers, the price has been increased by Rs 1.39 per unit. For consumers using 300 units, the price of electricity has gone up to Rs13.83 per unit. The government believes that a household using 300 units of electricity is prosperous. And he can afford to raise rates, and if that is true, it would be pointless to talk about it.
Like the people under the news of inflation, the most important news of Friday was also suppressed and this was the news, the report of the Election Commission of Pakistan on the rigging in the by-election of Daska, this report is eye-opener and biggest charge sheet against the PTI government.
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has detected systematic rigging in the NA-75 by-election investigation report. What do they think and do when they come to power, this report has put all the truth in front of them. This report is not limited to the disclosure of fraud but it is a criminal case. Several names have been written in this report but this systematic fraud must be thoroughly investigated. According to the report, the education department, police and district administration, ie the entire government machinery were used in the scam. The mastermind behind the rigging and its full implementation cannot be held responsible alone. Criminal proceedings should be initiated on the basis of this report and the culprits should be identified.
Reading this report, the question arises as to whether those who came with the mission of eradicating corruption have corrupted the entire government machinery. The Deputy Director of Colleges, the Presiding Officer, several officers of the Department of Education and then an army of police officers, all of which could not be managed by a single person. How SHOs remained election managers, police personnel stationed at polling stations continued to kidnap presiding officers instead of security, ignorance of returning officer and deputy returning officer, how many factors and roles are involved in this rigging. The story unfolds in layers.
Playing the role of opposition, the same PTI used to call others as ballot box thieves. Here, the entire election was rigged under the scheme. It will happen and the government will come down with a bang but now their own organized fraud has been proved. Those who call others "box thieves" are now ready for self-accountability.
The opposition's reservations about EVMs, ie electronic voting machines, seem to have come true after this report and the plan to snatch the powers of the Election Commission of Pakistan, this report has exposed the government's intentions. Who will now trust those who bulldoze the opposition and institutions and insist on bringing electronic voting machines? ۔
The political and administrative turmoil in the country over the last four or five weeks has made me think that the PTI government is on a "suicidal mission". Inflation bombs are being set off one after another and when there is a backlash against them, the captain addresses his Wasim Akram Plus (Usman Buzdar): "Whenever they ask you about performance tell them ask us after completion of five-year mandate."
Someone reminded the captain that if he had any mandate, it was economic justice, justice system, social justice, poverty alleviation, job creation, breaking status, eradicating corruption. The captain has a long list of promises that he may not even remember.
When the captain was saying this to the Chief Minister of Punjab Usman Bazdar, surely Bazdar must have been very encouraged that whoever had to ask me gave both a deal and a relaxation but is there any politician who is surrounded by political and economic challenges? Valuable can boldly reject all these questions under the pretext of a five year mandate ?? These are the evidences on which I believe that the captain and his team are on a mission of political suicide and the captain's advice to Bazdar was apparently a message to someone else.
The role of the opposition in this situation is also deplorable. The people are dying of poverty and inflation but the opposition is not making any effort to change the public mood into a movement. It seems that the opposition is thinking that the government may fall from its own stupidity or carry out the mission of political suicide itself. Perhaps that is why the Leader of the Opposition in the Punjab Assembly and PML-N leader Hamza Shahbaz talking to the media had said that it is the national responsibility of all political parties to find a constitutional way to handle the sinking economy of Pakistan and to get rid of the incumbant government. "
According to political analysts, if the opposition awaits like this, it should know that it will not be possible to get the people out to vote without representing the people. If politicians remain indifferent to the people today, then tomorrow the people will also be indifferent to them and then no one should complain that those who raised the slogan of step up didn't come along.
Technology
In US v. Google, YouTube’s CEO defends the Google way
The Justice Department on Monday grilled YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, who previously worked on Google’s advertising team, on the company’s competitiveness.
To kick off the second week of the landmark antitrust trial over Google’s control of online advertising, the Department of Justice called Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube and a longtime Google advertising executive. Mohan came to Google in 2008 through Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, which formed the basis of Google’s now-unstoppable advertising engine. Mohan also helped advocate for the acquisition of Admeld, another company at the center of the suit. He argued throughout his testimony that Google was never attempting to buy up and neuter its competitors; it was simply trying to compete.
The Justice Department grilled Mohan on one of the core tenets of its case: that Google has built an impenetrable ad empire by owning all three major parts of the adtech stack, including the system publishers use to offer ad inventory on their pages, the system advertisers use to buy and place ads around the web, and the exchange in the middle where all the buying and selling actually takes place. This empire, lawyers allege, allows no real competition and ultimately makes things worse for all parties involved, Google excepted. And whenever a possible challenger did arise, Google simply bought and shelved — or, perhaps, parked — them.
The “parking” concept came up during Mohan’s two-plus hours of testimony, when Justice Department lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum showed him an email exchange about whether Google should buy Admeld. Admeld used a technology called yield management and was making inroads into the online ad market by letting publishers assess demand from multiple ad exchanges at once.
In those emails, another Google executive wrote that “one way to make sure we don’t get further behind in the market is picking up the [company] with the most traction and parking it somewhere.” Acquiring the company in that way “would let us solve the problems from a position of strength.” In the government’s view, this seemed to be clear evidence that Google was trying to take a threat off the market.
“One way to make sure we don’t get further behind in the market is picking up the [company] with the most traction and parking it somewhere.”
In court, Mohan argued that’s not what “parking” means at all. He acknowledged that Google was interested in Admeld because Admeld was further ahead in development but said Google had no intention of shelving or shuttering the product. “That’s absolutely not what was going on,” he said.
Parking, he explained, refers to Google’s acquiring a company and then letting it operate more or less as before while it also begins to rebuild and integrate into Google’s technology stack. This process takes time — often years — and Mohan said that leaving the products running actually indicates their importance to Google as products and not vanquished enemies.
Mohan argued over and over, occasionally seeming frustrated to have to repeat himself, that Google was simply doing what it had to do to keep up. He told Teitelbaum that the goal was always “to build the best advertising stack for publishers, as well as tools for advertisers.”
In Mohan’s telling, the advertising business has always been fiercely competitive, and companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo even attempted to build similarly all-encompassing strategies. Controlling all three parts of the process, he said, is crucial to ensuring that only good ads are placed on only good websites, that everything happens quickly, and that no nefarious actors can cause trouble.
When Jeannie Rhee, one of the attorneys representing Google, began to cross-examine Mohan, she had him reiterate the parking point in several ways. She noted an annual update email Mohan had written to his team in 2008, after the DoubleClick acquisition, in which he compared the integration to “changing the engines on a plane while continuing to fly it.” Rhee had Mohan go through some of the DoubleClick team’s most impressive post-acquisition accomplishments, too, seemingly to show the product was still being actively developed.
Mohan said incorporating startups at Google is like “changing the engines on a plane while continuing to fly it”
Mohan’s testimony offered a fairly straightforward version of the arguments on both sides of this all-important trial. In the government’s eyes, Google has an insurmountable advantage in the ads business, built on the back of illegally tying various products to each other and by buying up any company that even looked like competition. According to Google, though, deep integration is the only way to build great ad products, and its acquisitions have only ever been in service of building better products in a competitive space.
The government has repeatedly presented evidence that it’s nearly impossible to leave Google’s platforms. Switching platforms for any reason is hard, and the prospect of leaving behind Google’s advertiser demand and access to platforms like Search and YouTube makes it untenable. Publishers have also argued that Google’s advertising products aren’t at all impressive. They say they feel stuck. And as the government sees it, Google is happy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on startups to keep it that way.
In 2011, Google did acquire Admeld, for a reported price above $400 million. (A number, by the way, that the Justice Department argues is far above Google’s actual valuation of the company — allegedly a signal of Google’s willingness to overspend in the name of crushing threats.) The Justice Department briefly investigated the deal at the time but ultimately let it close. Now, the company’s technology is part of Google’s dominant ad exchange, known commonly as AdX. All that’s left of Admeld itself is a Google support page telling publishers why AdX is so great.
Is that the good kind of parking or the bad and possibly illegal kind? That’s up to Judge Leonie Brinkema. She didn’t have much to say during Monday’s testimony, but everyone in the room acknowledged she’s the only one who matters.
Pakistan
Punjab Assembly Speaker urges ECP to implement Amended Election Act
He says this is crucial not only for upholding the rule of law
Lahore: Speaker Punjab Assembly Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan wrote a letter to the Election Commission of Pakistan, urging the ECP to take note of the legislative amendments made by the Parliament and to ensure that the provisions of the Amended Election Act are implemented fully and without delay.
He said this is crucial not only for upholding the rule of law, but also for maintaining public confidence in our electoral process and institutions.
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