Their competitors knew this was happening. It's pretty easy to see occurring when you run a system that competes in Google header bidding for a publisher you also control.
I suspect the reason it wasn’t a bigger bombshell is that ad exchanges are hard to understand beyond the surface level “it’s an exchange for ads”, and other ad exchanges were also dirty. Google wasn’t the only one doing questionable things being on both sell and buy sides of transactions:
https://www.businessinsider.com/guardian-takes-legal-action-...
One of the most astounding things I learned in my time in ad tech was just how wide the gulf is between how much the advertiser pays and how much the website owner gets. It’s one to two orders of magnitude difference, mostly made up in fees for all of the platforms and data and other value add in between.
Bingo.
I'm glad to be out, tbh. I built some cool stuff, but Jesus.