Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules

I don't think this article explains it well. Google sells ad space on behalf of the publishers and also sells the ads on behalf of the advertisers. It also runs the auction that places the ads into the ad space. See this graphic https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7. Parts of this can definately be broken up without destroying Google.

When a media buyer puts $1.00 in on one side of the system, on average only $0.60 makes it to the publisher. In some cases less than $0.50 gets to them.

Advertising is an intentionally complex system so that companies can clip the ticket at multiple stages throughout the process. Google should be broken up, but the whole ad tech system needs to go into the bin if these problems are going to ever get fixed.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/02/15/how-muc...

As someone who has worked in AdTech I would respectfully disagree. It is indeed complex but it is incredibly efficient. Also it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue. What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.

Some companies like Google are incredible at this. Google is not a "monopoly" in this space. In fact the world has far too many Google equivalents but absolutely no one comes close to Google in generating top dollars for publishers. I am saying this after working for 10+ years competing against Google.

Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do they do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both because what's good for one group is bad for another. Fortunately with healthy competition we solve this problem since alternatives could be used.

But since Google is playing both sides and has so much sway over the market, they're able to manipulate things. Even if they're not manipulating things to their benefit, it's still not great to have a single party have so much control.

> Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both

but that is the value of a marketplace, aligning buyers and sellers via the price mechanism