This is the principle at work in the US bipartisan #AMERICAAct, which would force Google and Meta to spin off the parts of their ad-tech business that put them in a conflict of interest. Right now, #Googbook represents both publishers *and* advertisers, while operating the marketplace where ad sales take place, and they take 51% out of every ad dollar:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

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How does tech steal money from the news? Lots of ways! One important one: tech steals ad revenue. 51% of every ad dollar gets gobbled up by tech companies - primarily the cozy, collusive #AdTech duopoly of #Google/#Facebook (AKA #Googbook). If we can shatter the market power of the concentrated ad-tech industry, news companies would go back to getting 80-90% of the ad revenue their reporting generated, which would pay for more reporting.

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The ad-exchange receives a constant stream of chances to place ads. This stream is generated by the "#SupplySidePlatform" (#SSP), a service that represents publishers who want to sell ads.

Meta/#Facebook and Google both the "full stack" of ads: they represent buyers *and* sellers, and they operate the marketplace. When the sale closes, #Googbook collects a commission from the advertiser, another from the publisher, *and* a fee for running the market.

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Whenever discussions of #adtech monopolization comes up, someone will inevitably point out that the market isn't as stagnant as it seems - after all, Amazon was able to enter the market despite the dominance of the #Googbook duopoly, and build a $31b/year advertising product. But Amazon's advertising isn't like Google or Meta's advertising (not that those are good - just different).

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And consent-theater or no, targeted ads reach fewer users every day, thanks to #AdBlockers, AKA, "the biggest boycott in world history":

https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

And when a publisher *does* manage to display a targeted ad, they get *screwed*. The #Googbook #dupololy is a crooked affair, with the two tech companies illegally colluding (via the #JediBlue conspiracy) to divert money from publishers to their own pockets:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

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The answer is in Amazon's $31b "ad" business. Amazon touts this widely, and analysts repeat it without any critical interrogation, proclaiming that Amazon is catching up with the #Googbook #AdTech #duopoly. But nearly all of that "ad" business isn't ads at all - it's #payola.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/not-an-ad/#shakedowns

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