Taboola/Outbrain are the only major players that don’t run through Ad Manager (DFP) because they build their own stack from scratch outside of the standardized IAB formats. All others must kiss the ring and pay the toll to Google. Facebook bought and killed Atlas, it’s only credible competition.

For a full decade Google has own the display ad server wholly, Ad selling and buying tools for automated and manual transactions, the lions share of web analytics traffic, most of the display, video, mobile, and search inventory on the entire web, and first and last bid option on all auctions against their competitors. Don’t forget the myriad of ways they collect exclusive purchase, behavior, demographic, and location data with meaningless consent. All of that data is used to multiply the value of ad sales, and is otherwise unobtainable.

If you look at their business models abstractly, you’ll see what it looks like to have Horizontal and Vertical integration, regulatory capture, price control, and centralized censorship powers. The amount of influence and operational responsibility that Google has for various aspects of US government+military would shock most cynics.

If there is justice in this world, most of what they have been doing will soon be illegal and should have been the whole time. It’s a dangerous duopoly with all non FAANG publishers and tech fighting over the remaining 10% and still getting fabulously wealthy from it.

All of froth from the quarter trillion it makes each year has flowed into AI for at least a decade. It has all of the ingredients to have an exclusively owned AGI, and may have had one for several years already. I’m now well into the realm of speculation, but I submit that the AGI has or will have access to the worlds largest corpus of human knowledge along with intimate accounts of individual human behaviors. All to sell fucking ads.