Adam Heimlich’s Post

Best use of 25’ on a satuday morning ever 🤗 Thanks for dropping the knowledge Adam Heimlich 🙏🏻 Quick question: you refer to anti-competitive ties as one of the pillars of historical antitrust law, it feels like this should be a slam dunk wrt Google’s bundling of media (Youtube) and data (search) withing DV360, or ad revenue (Adex) with GAM. Do you know if this is an angle considered by the DOJ case?

Powerful segment and appreciate the historical connection between the monopolistic behaviors of the early railroad industry + Microsoft OS and tying it to DOJ's case on Google. So good! Cant wait for the next one. I got up to page 19 on Platform Annexation (I need a break lol) But the below excerpt is 👌 "When a downstream firm with market power is also a supplier to itself and to downstream competitors, it can use its market position to raise downstream competitors’ costs or refuse to supply the input. This is true both in traditional, physical supply markets and in digital markets..."

Thank you so much for posting this Adam, I really enjoyed it. I can't imagine more of a slam dunk argument for DOJ than for GAM and AdX's vertical integration reducing multi homing in sell side adserver selection -- It's rare to see a publisher who has banner traffic and monetizes programmatic for whom AdX is not a least 40% of their programmatic revenue (the rest of the exchange market competing for the remainder), the damning component of that statistic being that all exchanges EXCEPT AdX are capable of bidding into any adserver. AdX, through its refusal to bid into any other adserver, forces publishers to use GAM in order to have this irreplaceable monetization present in their business. This is the hammer by which Google has conquered the adserving market, and it is basically indisputable. If AdX operated like every other market participant, and bid into competitive adservers (not that very many have survived), the case would be harder to make that there's no multi homing in publisher adserving. But they don't!

Thank you Adam Heimlich. Engaging and clear. It's so important for everyone to understand what is really going on and engage with regulators if harmed. End Google's BS about PS! However looking ahead I'm not certain DoJ will win. Not a slam dunk. EC have a better chance. ⬇️ https://movementforanopenweb.com/commission-issues-google-with-a-statement-of-objections-what-next/ But both are missing important ties which will form the basis of future action. For example browsers bundling; payments, wallets, passwords, search, AI, authentication, and advertising. Wait... Advertising 🤔 Moving advertising into the web browser frustrates potential remedies in the DoJ AdTech case. Injunction anyone?!

Thank you Adam Heimlich, brillant popularization. I hope a jury will be able to focus on how Google killed the AdServer business when they decided Adex will not be available through Prebid, which also resulted in an unfair advantage as they can bid after all Prebid SSPs and Amazon (kind of insider trading). The Australian Competition Consumer Commission got it right…

Your journey and insights shared in this post are truly inspiring and resonate deeply. Thank you for opening up and allowing us to learn from your experiences.

The real question, scale of 1-10 how fired up are you by the end of each episode??

thanks for the education!

Great video!