Google's monopoly status means it fulfills 90+% of the ads. I can guarantee you that CNN has no control. There is no competition. So, erm, maybe the onus is on Google?
That is totally silly - What in the world makes you think I think about the advertisement industry more than the absolute minimum amount possible?
Anyway, the other options are:
- They run their own ad platform - They don't run ads
Can you cite that as your previous accusation was already proven to be incorrect.
>When one company owns the whole space, finding just one vulnerability is enormously economically attractive.
Google doesn't own the whole space.
Just to be clear, I think they are talking about advertisements placed via Google's platform, not ad campaigns by Google.
I think there is only one way to solve this: programmatic ads cannot contain executable code (no access to local storage or network) and ads must come from the same origin as the page they are on. For example, YouTube will host an ad for Subaru on YouTube's servers. The sticking point as people have pointed to me before on HN is fraud. The customer (in this case Subaru) does not trust Google to be honest in counting the number of impressions.
Perhaps what we need is legislation banning this behavior across the board. When no ad vendor is able to allow customers to do what they please on user's web browsers, the customer has no recourse other than to accept that this is not possible. I don't know how such a legislation would work though. Perhaps it needs to be an industry alliance instead of legislation?