Google Slams Apple Over iPhone Ad Ban

crimeandpunishment writes "This real-life clash of the titans could be much more interesting than the movie. Today Google fired the latest volley in its war of words with Apple over mobile advertising. In a blog posting, the head of Google's mobile ad service, Admob, had harsh words for Apple's new restrictions concerning the iPhone and iPad ... calling them a threat to competition. There's a lot of money at stake ... the US mobile ad market, which is about $600 million, is expected to more than double by 2013."

Comments

And thus there was Android

[ergo98]

One of the reasons Android is an important project for Google -- it makes them little, if any, money, despite a half-baked plan to sell their own handset -- is exactly this scenario. Google's fear was that a single vendor would have too much control to cut them out. So Android was birthed, and there are many vendors. And for those who might not know, any Android handset vendor has the full ability to replace Google with Bing, or to cut out Google ads in other forms, yet the "fragmentation" of the market ensures that there isn't an overly one-sided power distribution.

So is Apple being testy because of Android....or is this the gameplan all along, and Android was a good pre-emptive strike?

Re:Only the Analytics are banned

[ergo98]

You can't reasonably run ads without analytics. The entire ad industry depends upon analytics.

When is a monopoly not a monopoly?

[sortadan]

When it's Apple and their closed platform apparently...

Re:When is a monopoly not a monopoly?

[HermMunster]

First, this is Jobs (reality distortion fields envelop those emanating them), so no, they don't have 28%. Not even close. What do the other manufacturers claim they have? RIM is still number one. Android is growing much faster than Apple is, or did.

Second, they don't have a monopoly. Not even close.

Third, this is restraint of trade and illegal.

Re:When is a monopoly not a monopoly?

[Barsteward]

You're making perfect sense, but you have to understand that Toyota does not allow Google to put ads all over every Prius and track the location and store information about every Prius driver and therefore Toyota is a monopoly.
But Toyota can't stop Google putting an advert on a Prius, maybe not in the Toyota factory but once it leaves the factory it can.

Re:Are they...surprised?

[ergo98]

I mean it's not exactly startling that your direct competition doesn't want you advertising on their device.

So when you buy an iPhone, you accept that it's still Steve's? Wow.

Note that we're talking about ads in third-party applications. Meaning as a third-party application developer, Apple has now said "Oh, and by the way if you want to advertise, your only real choice is us." How is that defensible?

And do you accept that the Safari browser on the iOS devices has the right to purge all web ads and replace them with Apple ads? Why not, right?

Re:Cry me a river

[recoiledsnake]

So Google gets into smartphones, browsers and operating systems, and then cries "Foul!" when Apple gets into online advertising? (OK, I know Apple's hardware restrictions are a valid issue, but still....)

Google is crying foul not because Apple got into advertising, but because Apple banned companies owned by makers of other mobile operating systems from using analytics(critical for ads) on the iDevices. i.e Apple is specifically targeting Google just like it targeted Adobe last time around

Re:Cry me a river

[jpmorgan]

Uh, no. Google is crying "Foul!" because Apple is banning developers from using Google's ad platform in their apps. Conveniently, right at the same time as they introduce their own: iAd. Yes, ads suck and it's weird defending an advertising platform, but this is Google: the company that made ads useful and unoffensive (and just that slight bit creepy).

Apple are truly becoming the kings of rent-seeking and platform lock-in. It's far worse than anything Microsoft ever did.

Re:Google should have stayed silent

[Anonymous Coward]

> Some already calls them private data leeching vampires.
Generally just people who have an entirely different grudge with google, usually something along the lines of sour grapes that google doesn't let them unfairly twist the search/ad results in their favor.

> Steve Jobs saw this coming and used "privacy" as excuse to lock down the "real" advertising (location/analytics) to their own network. Now Google pops up and complains, people will say to them "look to mirror".

Steve wants to own his cake and eat it too. First apple makes the hardware, which it owns. Oh, but you can install third party apps! But only through the store which apple owns and controls. Oh, but it's also a communication device, it has web access! But apple controls what aspects of the web you're allowed to use. Apple and Google are on the extreme opposite ends of the lock-in control freak scale. Google may want a finger in every pie, but they don't prevent any other company from entering any layer of the market at any time.

Re:Google is hypocritical

[powerspike]

*IF* you bothered to look, you'll see that while it is googles own advertising platform on all of their products, they DO display ads from 3rd party networks,
In my adsense account, i even have an option to allow 3rd party ads via the google network, (my account -> account settings -> "Third Party Ads Preference" for reference).
Been able to show 3rd party ads on my own website via google's own network defeates alot of what people are saying here.
In *my* website i get to choose my ad provider if i want one. In my iphone app, i have to use apple's ad network, i built the app, why should i be restricted to apples own software/property for how to monitize it? locking out analytics for 3rd parties makes them useless, i'm not going to want to show ads about uk tv shows to american visitors and vice versa, this means any ads showen will be poorly targeted because of this, and the income per click is going to be extremely low.

Re:When you gain it fair and square.

[Hognoxious]

Not having a monopoly is illegal

Shit, I'd better run out and get one!

Re:Google is hypocritical

[Gudeldar]

Talk about the a false equivalency. Google owns their web site and search results. Apple doesn't own the mobile apps in the app store, at least until they change the developer agreement to say they do. A real equivalent would be if Google said that anyone who wanted to show up in their search results had to use AdSense or they were banned from the index. People would be outraged, and rightly so. The FTC/DOJ would come down them very hard if they ever tried anything like that.

Do you know what a monopoly is?

[fredmosby]

Apple literally does not have a monopoly on smart phones.

Of coarse that doesn't make a ban on Google's advertisements OK. But the article says Google's ads themselves are not being banned, just the collection of personal data under certain circumstances. The article itself doesn't say that Apple is collecting the kind of data it is preventing Google from collecting. If Apple isn't collecting that data then it doesn't gain a competitive advantage by banning Google's data collection, it just levels the playing field while allowing Apple to protect user's privacy.

Re:When you gain it fair and square.

[mcferguson]

So, a corollary: 1) Apple has a majority of the market share in smart phone app sales. Good for them. 2) Apple uses its majority market share in smart phone app sales to force everyone into their mobile ad platform. Monopolistic behavior, bad for the economy.

Re:WebKit is based of of the KHTML

[TheRaven64]

I think you'll find if you look at the underlying codebase that the lion's share of development was still done as KHTML

Spoken like someone who has never looked at the code. If you exclude:

• The JavaScript engine.
• Most of the SVG support.
• Most of the DOM stuff.
• Most of the CSS support.
• All of the HTML 5 stuff (canvas, websocket, and so on).

then yes, most of it was done as part of KHTML. If you look at KHTML now, you'll see a lot of changes back-ported from WebKit. If you compare WebKit now to KHTML in 2002 (when WebKit was forked), you won't see very much common code at all. When WebKit was forked, KHTML was about 140KLoC. According to Ohloh.net, WebKit now is 715K lines of C++, 75K lines of ObjC, 34K lines of C, and a lot of various other things. Even if Apple had retained 100% of the KHTML code, it would now account for 10% of the total codebase. In reality, large chunks have been rewritten (KJS, for example), so it's now less than 5%.