ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — It happens in milliseconds, ideally, as you browse the web. Networks of computers and software analyze who you are, what you are looking at and buy and sell the advertisements you see on web pages.
The company that most likely determines which ads you get, and how much an advertiser paid to get on your screen, is Google.
In fact, the Justice Department and a coalition of states say Google's dominance over the technology that controls the sale of billions of Internet display ads every day is so thorough that it constitutes an illegal monopoly that should be broken up.
A trial under way in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, will determine if Google's ad tech stack constitutes an illegal monopoly. The first week has included a deep dive into exactly how Google's products work together to conduct behind-the-scenes electronic auctions that place ads in front of consumers in the blink of an eye.
Online advertising has rapidly evolved. Fifteen or so years ago, if you saw an internet display ad, there was a pretty good chance it featured people dancing over their enthusiasm for low mortgage rates, and those ads were foisted on you whether you were looking at real estate or searching for baseball scores.
Now, the algorithms that match ads to your interests are carefully calibrated, sometimes to an almost creepy extent.
Google, for its part, says it has invested billions of dollars to improve the quality of ads that consumers see, and ensure that advertisers can reach the consumers they're seeking.
The Justice Department contends that what Google has also done over the years is rig the automated auctions of ad sales to favor itself over other would-be players in the industry, and also deprived the publishing industry of hundreds of millions of dollars it would have received if the auctions were truly competitive.
Government witnesses have explained the auction process and how it has evolved over the years in detail at the Virginia trial.
In the government’s depiction, there are three distinct tools that interact to sell an ad and place it in front of a consumer. There’s the ad servers used by publishers to sell space on their websites, particularly the rectangular ads that appear on the top and right-hand side of a web page. Ad networks are used by advertisers to buy ad space across an array of relevant websites.
And in between is the ad exchange, which matches the website publisher to the would-be advertiser by hosting an instant auction.
Publishers naturally want to receive as high a price as possible for their ad space, but testimony at trial has shown that didn't always happen due to the rules Google imposed.
For years, Google gave its ad exchange, called AdX, the first chance to match a publisher's proposed floor price. For instance, if a publisher wanted to sell a specific ad impression for a minimum of 50 cents, Google's software would give its own ad exchange the first chance to purchase. If Google's ad exchange bid 50 cents, it would win the auction, even if competing ad exchanges down the line were willing to pay more.
Google said the system was necessary to ensure ads loaded quickly. If the computers entertained bids from every ad exchange, it would take too long.
Publishers, dissatisfied with this system, found a workaround to conduct the auctions outside of Google's purview, a process that became known as “header bidding.” Internal Google documents introduced at trial described header bidding as an “existential threat” to Google's market share.
Google's response relied on its control of all three components of the process. If publishers conducted an auction outside Google's purview but they still used Google's publisher ad server, called DoubleClick For Publishers, that software forced the winning bid back into Google's Ad Exchange. If Google was willing to match the price that publishers had received under the header-bidding auction, Google would win the auction.
Professor Ramamoorthi Ravi, an expert at Carnegie Mellon University, said rules imposed by Google failed to maximize value for publishers and “seem to have been designed to advantage Google's own products.”
Publishers could stop using Google's ad exchange entirely, but at trial said they were reluctant to do so because then they would also lose access to Google's huge, exclusive cache of advertisers in its Google Ads network, which was only available through Google's ad exchange.
Google, for its part, says it hasn't run auctions this way since 2019, and that in the last five years Google's share of the display ad market has begun to erode. It says that tying its buy side, sell side and middleman products together helps them run seamlessly and quickly, and minimizes fraudulent ads or malware risks.
Google also says its innovations over the last 15 years fueled the improvements in matching online ads to consumer interests. Google says it was at the forefront of introducing “real-time bidding,” which allowed an advertiser selling shoes, for instance, to be paired up with a consumer whose online profile indicated an interest in purchasing shoes.
Those innovations, according to Google, allowed publishers to sell their available ad space at a premium because the advertiser would know that the ad was going to the eyeballs of someone interested in their product or service.
The Justice Department says that even though Google no longer runs its auctions in the ways described, it helped Google maintain its monopoly in the ad tech market in the years leading up to 2019, and that its existing monopoly allows Google to keep up to 36 cents on the dollar of every ad purchase it brokers when the transaction runs through all of its various products.
The Virginia trial comes just a month after a judge in Washington ruling that Google's search engine also constitutes an illegal monopoly. No decision in that case has been made on what, if any, remedies the judge will impose.
Lawyers and legal assistants leave the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for a lunch break in the Department of Justice's antitrust trial against tech giant Google, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, in Alexandria, Va. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Jeannie Rhee, a lawyer representing Google in the Department of Justice's antitrust case against the tech giant, leaves the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for a break in the trial, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, in Alexandria, Va. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is seen Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, in Alexandria, Va. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
NEW YORK (AP) — In what appears to be a sophisticated, remote attack, pagers used by hundreds of members of Hezbollah exploded almost simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria Tuesday, killing at least nine people — including an 8-year-old girl — and wounding thousands more.
A U.S. official said Israel briefed the U.S. on the operation — in which small amounts of explosive secreted in the pagers were detonated — on Tuesday after it was concluded. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly.
The Iran-backed militant group blamed Israel for the deadly explosions, which targeted an extraordinary breadth of people and showed signs of being a long-planned operation. Details on how the attack was executed are largely uncertain and investigators have not immediately said how the pagers were detonated. The Israeli military has declined to comment.
Here's what we know so far.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously warned the group’s members not to carry cellphones, saying they could be used by Israel to track the group's movements. As a result, the organization uses pagers to communicate.
A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the exploded devices were from a new brand the group had not used before. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, did not identify the brand name or supplier.
Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said Wednesday it had authorized use of its brand on the AR-924 pager model and a Budapest, Hungary-based company called BAC Consulting produced and sold the pagers. Further information on BAC wasn't immediately available.
Nicholas Reese, adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies, explains smart phones carry a higher risk for intercepted communications in contrast to the simpler technology of pagers.
This type of attack will also force Hezbollah to change their communication strategies, said Reese, who previously worked as an intelligence officer, adding that survivors of Tuesday's explosions are likely to throw away "not just their pagers, but their phones, and leaving their tablets or any other electronic devices.”
Even with a U.S. official confirming it was a planned operation by Israel, multiple theories have emerged Tuesday around how the attack might have been carried out. Several experts who spoke with The Associated Press explained how the explosions were most likely the result of supply-chain interference.
Very small explosive devices may have been built into the pagers prior to their delivery to Hezbollah, and then all remotely triggered simultaneously, possibly with a radio signal.
By the time of the attack, “the battery was probably half-explosive and half-actual battery," said Carlos Perez, director of security intelligence at TrustedSec.
A former British Army bomb disposal officer explained that an explosive device has five main components: A container, a battery, a triggering device, a detonator and an explosive charge.
“A pager has three of those already,” explained the ex-officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he now works as a consultant with clients on the Middle East. “You would only need to add the detonator and the charge.”
After security camera footage appeared on social media Tuesday purporting to show one of the pagers explode on a man’s hip in a Lebanese market, two munitions experts offered opinions that corroborate the U.S. official's statement that the blast appeared to be the result of a tiny explosive device.
“Looking at the video, the size of the detonation is similar to that caused by an electric detonator alone or one that incorporates an extremely small, high-explosive charge,” said Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordinance disposal expert.
This signals involvement of a state actor, Moorhouse said. He adds that Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, is the most obvious suspect to have the resources to carry out such an attack.
N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an expert in military arms who is director of the Australian-based Armament Research Services, notes that Israel had been accused of carrying out similar operations in the past. Last year, AP reported that Iran accused Israel of trying to sabotage its ballistic missile program through faulty foreign parts that could explode, damaging or destroying the weapons before they could be used.
It would take a long time to plan an attack of this scale. The exact specifics are still unknown, but experts who spoke with the AP shared estimates ranging anywhere between several months to two years.
The sophistication of the attack suggests that the culprit has been collecting intelligence for a long time, Reese explained. An attack of this caliber requires building the relationships needed to gain physical access to the pagers before they were sold; developing the technology that would be embedded in the devices; and developing sources who can confirm that the targets were carrying the pagers.
And it's likely the compromised pagers seemed normal to their users for some time before the attack. Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based veteran and a senior political risk analyst with over 37 years experience in the region, said he has had conversations with members of Hezbollah and survivors of Tuesday's pager attack. He said the pagers were procured more than six months ago.
“The pagers functioned perfectly for six months," Magnier said. What triggered the explosion, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the devices.
Based on his conversations with Hezbollah members, Magnier also said that many pagers didn’t go off, allowing the group to inspect them. They came to the conclusion that between 3 to 5 grams of a highly explosive material were concealed or embedded in the circuitry, he said.
Jenzen-Jones also adds that “such a large-scale operation also raises questions of targeting" — stressing the number of causalities and enormous impact reported so far.
“How can the party initiating the explosive be sure that a target’s child, for example, is not playing with the pager at the time it functions?” he said.
Hezbollah issued a statement confirming at least two members were killed in the bombings. One of them was the son of a Hezbollah member in parliament, according to the Hezbollah official who spoke anonymously. The group later issued announcements that six other members were killed Tuesday, though it did not specify how.
“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel will “for sure get its just punishment.”
Associated Press journalist Johnson Lai in Taipei
People donate blood for those who were injured by their exploded handheld pagers, at a Red Cross center, in the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)
