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Comment by HillRat | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it’s worth noting that, roughly speaking, advertising supply chains provide 51% of spend to publishers and 7% to agencies, which means the middle of the chain (supply/demand-sides, DSPs, analytics, etc.) consumes 42%, or what GOOG allegedly takes at the high end. Given that they represent a fully-integrated supply chain, this doesn’t seem unreasonable, especially given how many competing ad networks are just bubble gum and duct tape.

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So, if they have access to more information than their competitors such that they can maximise their own chances of winning proifitable auctions, it's problematic as its unfair competition.

Making better decisions because you have done a better job collecting and analyzing info is not "unfair competition" a priori.

I think there are much more compelling arguments around regulating Google.

It’s unfair if only Google is capable of collecting the data.

Yeah, and I believe (based on past reporting) that this may be the case. They are essentially front-running other advertisers.

They sometimes (often) have "last look" -- so a bunch of companies compete to win an auction against each other, and then Google gets a chance to win against the winner of those. This means that Google can essentially maximize the profit they receive if they have a better bid, because they know exactly how much fee they can take without losing. Everyone else on the other hand, has to compete with _lower_ fees so they can win that first round of the auction.

If that's the case it is blatantly unfair. I don't think it is any longer though.

Capable and able are not the same. You can start collecting that data right now. It's also not a particularly complex task to collect information about people's habits.

I'm not capable of running a mile in 4minutes, that's not unfair for me to loose to someone that trained hard to be able to run that mile in 4 minutes.

I think the issue is more around GOOG allegedly using illegal tactics to keep people inside their integrated supply chain — e.g., trying to discourage header bidding.

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