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Comment by kqvamxurcagg | Hacker News Reader

It's not difficult to see how the market could be reformed. YouTube would be required to offer ad space to Google ad customers and third party network customers at the same market rate. If this rate is market set in real time then that's one solution. The problem is Google (and other big tech companies) control and restricts all aspects of what is being termed the 'supply chain'. That restricts competition and reduces transparency.

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But Google and Youtube are the same company, they share many of the same engineers and servers and are bunded in the same annual reports. Not sure how you would get a market rate from that. What you are suggesting is that we split Google up from Youtube, but that is not on the table.

Edit: Lastly I am not sure how being able to put your own ads on your own website is bad for consumers. It means that people has to go via Google to put ads on a Google website. How can anyone view that as "anti competitive"? I mean, Google could just create a separate ad service for Youtube, say that Youtube now uses its own service and therefore is not anti competitive. Wouldn't that just circumvent this law completely? Or is the goal to be able to force arbitrary ads on any website?

I've dealt with this many times in the past. This is known as a carve-out or regulated entity status. Different parts of a group have to deal with each other at an arms-length basis and provide those same terms to other independent companies.

The timesheets of engineers or digital infrastructure isn't a barrier to making this happen, although it might involve some work for external APIs, authentication and reporting.

But almost all ad money Google gets comes from their own services, so if they had the choice to open up to other ad providers or stop accepting other sites ads in the market they would just stop running ads on third party sites.

Likely the solution would be to spin out a separate service for third party ads and make the main network only run on Google services. But that wouldn't help ad websites in Australia at all. The end result would be that websites would probably have a harder time getting money from Google, which would be good for competing ad tech systems but it wouldn't make more money go to those sites.

Parent could be thinking about forcing youtube to open up to other SSPs and basically do 'header bidding' so the most valuable bid wins, even if that bid didn't come from Google's network.

Still interesting dynamics though, what might theoretically increase bottom line for one part of the org is probably horrible for another.

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