Orange County, California Correspondent — The advertising market is where the strongest case sits and it’s the one least understood publicly.
The structure is that one firm operates the buying platform, the selling platform, and the exchange where they meet, and takes a cut at each stage. In any other market that arrangement would be described as a broker who also owns the exchange and trades on his own account, and it would be illegal.
That’s a conventional competition case, not a novel theory about platforms. It should be brought as one.
Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — When a small number of firms control both information distribution and the advertising market, they shape what is seen and what is economically viable.
Existing doctrine can reach exclusionary conduct if it’s applied with attention to how these markets work.
I’d want it grounded in competitive harm rather than becoming a general instrument for disciplining unpopular companies, because the second version will be aimed at whoever is unpopular in four years and that changes.
Novi, Michigan Correspondent — Dominant control of a bottleneck deserves attention and targeted cases on exclusionary practice are the right start.
The industrial analogy is a supplier who also owns the only distributor. We’ve dealt with that and the remedy was never to break up the supplier. It was to require access on published terms.
Access remedies are underrated here. They’re faster than structural cases and they can be adjusted when they turn out to be wrong.
Myrtle Beach, SC Correspondent — I buy digital advertising every day so let me describe the customer experience.
I cannot verify what I’m buying. I place a budget, a system decides where it goes, and I receive a report generated by the same company that sold me the placement and took a fee from the publisher on the other side.
There’s no independent audit and there’s no alternative. In any other market I’d be described as a mark, and I’d have somewhere else to go.
Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — If four desks sell the advertisement and rank the speech, you don’t have a market. You have a toll road.
Scrutiny is overdue on the self-dealing — the house buying its own inventory, burying a rival publisher, tying the advertising system to the store.
Scrutiny isn’t a demolition button. It’s documents, remedies that open the stack, and a stop to acquisitions that are obviously about removing the only rival.
Long Island, NY Correspondent — Advertising markets that can’t be escaped are a competition question. Distribution that can’t be escaped is a speech question. They meet inside the same firms, and the meeting is the case.
Prefer remedies that restore entry — a buyer who can leave with data, a publisher who can reach an audience without kneeling.
The procedural observation is that the American cases move at the speed of litigation and the European ones now move at the speed of regulation. The digital markets rules took effect there last month and impose obligations directly rather than requiring a decade-long case.
We’ll find out whether that works. What’s certain is that American firms will comply with it globally because building two products is expensive, which means Brussels is writing our rules while we’re still in discovery.
Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent — Posted dockage rules. If a firm owns the dock, the cargo, and the newspaper about the dock, look harder.
Looking harder is the job. Keep it a case rather than a personality.
Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — If you can’t reach a customer except through one window, the window is the case.
Open the window or split it.
Don’t write a hymn about entrepreneurship while charging rent on the only street in town.
Sydney, Australia Correspondent — We legislated on the news side of this and I can report the outcome, which is mixed and instructive.
Our bargaining code forced the platforms to pay news businesses. Money moved — a couple of hundred million a year — and it went overwhelmingly to the largest publishers with the most leverage, which is what I predicted and I’d rather have been wrong.
Small and regional outlets got very little. So the intervention worked mechanically and failed distributionally, which is the usual result when you require a negotiation between parties of unequal size.
If you do this, structure the payment rather than the negotiation.
Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — We buy advertising at scale and we have no visibility either.
The gaming parallel is exact and it’s why this bothers me. A regulated house has to file its odds, submit its systems for audit, and let a patron contest an outcome to a person.
An advertising exchange does none of that, runs an auction it also participates in, and reports its own results. If a casino operated that way the license would be gone in a week.
Gastonia, NC Correspondent — The publisher side of this is my trade and the arithmetic is brutal.
A newspaper that sold its own advertising kept most of the revenue. A newspaper that sells through this stack keeps a fraction, and the fraction has fallen every year, and nobody can tell it where the rest went because the accounting is inside the firm that runs all three sides.
That’s the mechanism that defunded local reporting. Not readers leaving. A margin extracted by an intermediary nobody can audit.
Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — For a small market the concentration is total rather than substantial.
Our publishers have no leverage, no regulator with capacity to bring a case, and no alternative distribution. Whatever remedies emerge from Washington or Brussels will apply here by extension or not at all.
I’d only ask that the American case be pleaded on the conduct rather than on the nationality of the firms, because the second version travels badly and gives every government an excuse to do the same to somebody else’s companies.
