Tech Won't Save Us - How Google & Facebook Dominate Digital Ads w/ Shoshana Wodinsky

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Shoshana Wodinsky to discuss how digital ad markets work, how Google and Facebook maintain their dominance, and why the TikTok saga wasn’t really about China getting people��s data at all.Shoshana Wodinsky is a data reporter at Gizmodo. She recently wrote how banning TikTok won’t do anything about data going to China and how the US Congress might break up the tech monopolies. Follow Shoshana on Twitter as @swodinsky.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

People are realizing this is an actual friggin economy that's happening right before our eyes, and we've just been ignoring it for like two decades. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that thinks it's important to understand the business models of Facebook and Google, but also not to think that they're controlling our minds. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Shoshana Wadinski. Shoshana is a reporter at Gizmodo who writes about data, ads, and so many other important topics to the critical conversations that we have on this podcast. Today on the show, Shoshana gives us a look into how the ad platforms of Google and

Facebook work and how they achieve such dominance over digital advertising because of their control of key nodes of that market. If you're not very familiar with this topic, I hope that this episode gives you a good foundation and a good understanding of how these ad markets actually work. Remember, if you like this conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. And make sure to share the episode with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making this podcast, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Shoshana, welcome to tech won't save us. Hey, thanks for having me. We're all good in the hood. I think it's what the kids say.

Yeah, perfect. So I've been following your reporting on, you know, ad tech, what's going on in like the digital ad market, tick tock, all of these really important and relevant questions. And so I wanted to start with this growing antitrust investigation into Google. And they had a hearing on September 15th, where the lawmakers finally asked Google a bunch of questions about the aspects of their business that they think are like going against competition laws. So can you give us some insight into how Google tried to push back against these arguments that it actually has a monopoly? Generally, when we've seen antitrust hearings in the past,

you know, I think a few months back, we had that meeting with Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, also touching on the topic of antitrust. But really, the only one that got grilled about antitrust issues was Jeff Bezos. I feel that's because you can really tell he's running like this concrete, real market. You have buyers and sellers, and Amazon creates its own products to kind of compete with those sellers. And it uses their data in order to do so. That is like a clear cut anti-competitive thing. It was also like in the middle of the pandemic, right? So it became really relevant that Amazon played this really important role as everyone shifted to like buying everything online, right? Right. And in fact, earlier this week, I don't know if you saw, I wrote this thing about Amazon rolling out basically this like luxury product for like people that want to buy hoity-toity couture online. And they rolled it out in this massive pandemic,

this massive economic downturn. Like they are very clearly just taking advantage of everybody's lives being turned into shit in order to sell overpriced clothes. And I'm just like, that is peak Amazon. But we're talking about dollars and cents. And when we talk about companies like Facebook and Google that are equally big and equally scary to a lot of people, it's hard to wrap your head around what market they're dominating and how they grew as big as they were. And the truth is, it's, you know, I call it internet economics. We're not talking about economics as we typically know them. We're talking about economics as they happen online. And they're governed by a completely different set of rules, a completely different set of like regulations. In fact, there's actually very little regulation,

which is kind of how we ended up in this space. And only now lawmakers are like, shit, these companies have grown too big and now they're desperately scrambling to kind of get back some control successfully or otherwise. So Facebook and Google kind of dominate the sphere, taking more than 60% of the pie together, which means that more than 60% of the dollars that are spent to advertise online go to Facebook and Google. And that translates to tens of billions of dollars per year. And during this antitrust hearing, for better or worse, in my mind, this was one of the first times that I saw some regulators actually treat the digital ad market as a market that people are buying and selling on and that Google

largely dominates. It's really interesting to see it that way, right? Because whenever these hearings happen, I feel like one of the reactions I hear from the tech press is like, oh, these tech leaders are going in front of Washington and the lawmakers are a bunch of old fogies who like don't understand anything about technology. So it's interesting you say that, you know, some of these lawmakers seem to really be getting it and understanding it. And obviously they have hired teams of people who really understand this, right? It's not just the lawmaker themselves having to understand it. They have teams of people who are preparing all of these questions and all of these documents for them. Right.

Because this is literally, it's literally kind of a new strain of economics that operate by its own rules and that people are still kind of figuring out. So even people that work within the field of digital advertising might not necessarily understand how it works. They just know they put money in the machine and ads come out, which is really all you need to know to be like a high ranking executive sometimes. But even during the last antitrust hearing, there was one senator who was literally asking about the buy and sell sides of Google's ad market. And that kind of like caused my ears to perk up because I'm like, oh, my God, they're treating this like an actual economy for the first time ever.

And I'm not sure what caused that kind of shift in perspective. Because like, you know, when we talk about like a monopoly that Google might own, I think until now, it was usually kind of regulated to like, oh, Google owns the dominant search platform. Google owns the dominant video watching platform, which like YouTube. And like both of those are true. And both of those are places where Google serves a lot of ads. And that's not a coincidence that those two things are happening at the same time. Because basically, Google knows that it owns these two platforms where people are spending a lot of time, not to mention the untold number of other publishers across the web that they also work with. We'll get to those later. But just for now, Google search and YouTube, people spend a ton of time there. And as you might have noticed, both of those platforms play their own kind of fair share of ads. I want to reach the most people possible in order to sell my product.

And Google's like, hey, we have a ton of data and a massive audience. So we can give you not only the numbers, but we can help you target them really effectively. And that's the pitch that has made Google kind of this massive behemoth because it's able to basically win advertisers over and then kind of funnel them not only to their own properties, but to publishers that they like directly kind of siphon off dollars from. The more and more you use these websites, I find at least, it seems like the more and more ads that you see. But are they relevant? That's the question.

No, they're never relevant. I know. I know. That's the thing. I know. And I'm not sure. I haven't listened to your interview with Corey. But a big criticism that I have with kind of this idea of surveillance capitalism is that a lot of folks think that ad targeting is this really scary, really precise thing, you know, especially with Cambridge Analytica and in the context of political ads. And that new movie on Netflix, The Social Dilemma is kind of pushing the very same thing, right, about how it's super addictive and like kind of brainwashing people into like falling for all these crazy things. Like it's a wild documentary. In my view, like it frames the problem completely the wrong way, right? Because it frames it as though technology is this problem, data is like making people crazy and completely ignores like all of these really important underlying like social and economic factors, right? If you ignore the economic kind of consequences of it all, it's completely pointless. It's just

like, okay, why are they collecting all this data to like, change the way we think about things? Like, that's what advertising does, but it's more about getting you to buy stuff more often than not. Not all advertising is political advertising. And even political advertising is typically getting you to donate to a campaign. So when it's tracking those click-throughs or whether or not you donate, it's just like any other ad. The backbone, I guess I should say, is typically the same. And it's actually, it's very rudimentary and the targeting isn't all that great. A lot of data gets collected and just not used, at least in my experience from when I used to kind of cover

this from the ad side. You know, a lot of people, I think, will hear you talk about how, you know, ads work on Google and how it controls these massive platforms and how there's this buy and sell side, but might not really understand what that actually means or how it works. So can you give us some insight into how Google's ad infrastructure is actually constructed and, you know, how that actually works from an advertiser side or a buyer side? It is so hard. As I'm sure even hearing you talk about this, in my head, it is really hard not to describe this visually. Because you do have... It's kind of like a layer cake where you have the advertiser funneling money in one end, you have the consumer staring at their computer screen on the other, giving up their data, and somewhere the money happens. And you have all of these kind of layers

in the middle. So generally, there was this really good academic paper that ran in Wired not too long ago that compared the ad market to kind of like the stock exchange, which is pretty accurate because one of the ways that ads get bought and sold is through these things called ad exchanges. So if you load up like a webpage and you see like that little like ad slot, like top of the New York Times, you have like this little ad slot in the milliseconds after you open that page, behind the scenes, there are countless advertisers and advertiser platforms that are plugged into this faux stock exchange. And what they're doing is they're bidding on that piece of real estate because these guys want to reach the best audience for the least amount of money possible. And by the way, all of this is completely automated and happening inside of a black box. And it is in reality way

more complicated than I'm explaining it right now. But in the, I think it's about like 300 milliseconds, somebody wins the auction, ad goes through, your data ends up in the middle. Let me back up a bit. Part of the value that these sorts of exchanges bring is that when web publishers like websites like the New York Times, gizmodo.com, the site that I write for, are plugged into them, they're also funneling in consumer data. So they're either doing it directly or they could be doing it through some third-party platform. They can work with as many third-party platforms as they like. And again, there's no transparency, which is part of

kind of the issue here. Let's say I'm logging on to Breitbart.com. I log on to Breitbart.com. My data gets kind of like sucked up to either one or five or 20 or 100 different exchanges that are all kind of like plugged in together. And each of those exchanges has an untold number of advertisers from like, it can be anywhere in the world, generally. And what happens is that advertisers can say, okay, I want to reach X, Y, or Z type of person on X, Y, or Z type of site. And if your data and website combo makes the mark for the right price, that guy's ad is going to play, or he's going to take part in what's called, like, it's literally, it's called header bidding. It's literally a bidding war that happens over the span of milliseconds before the ad eventually gets played in that particular

slot. There are many other players involved and every website is different. And again, there is no transparency. Let me see if I understand it correctly. So there are plenty of ad exchanges or ad markets or whatever. But Google has both a dominant product on kind of the publisher side and also on the advertiser side. And then that gives them privileged access to data and also to what both of these major players are looking for or inputting into the system. That gives them additional knowledge over the other players in the system, because a lot of this is not transparent, that they can then take advantage of to make additional money to make things sell at higher prices than they might have otherwise. Does that

sound about right? So one of the kind of arguments that Google's representative made in this recent ad ant about just like how many ads we see every day. Like literally every device with a screen now will generally play you some sort of ad. That includes smart TVs. That includes what's called out of home advertising. So like digital signage or billboards. That includes audio advertising that's increasingly happening through these programmatic channels and whatever the hell is happening next. So the kind of plummet in price might be happening

just because there's so many new ways to reach these people rather than who's controlling what. Because on the web, there's only one game in town and that game is Google or Facebook, but usually Google. And so if we're looking at the way that Google's advertising business is structured, how you not only have google.com, the search, you not only have YouTube, but you also have the control of these platforms that are made for publishers, that are made for advertisers, and that track data from around the Internet. And there are all these other pieces to it, right? And so now Congress and a bunch of other people are looking at potentially breaking Google up. So how difficult do you think it is to then unwind this system that Google has put together?

Or do you think if they just break these separate pieces off, then it creates like a more competitive market because Google is not controlling this really central piece that gives them privileged access to all of this knowledge? Right. That gives them access to supposedly the largest number of ad dollars and the highest amount of consumer data, because that's what's happening right now, not only across YouTube and Google search, but also remember Google is owned by Alphabet and Alphabet has its own ad kind of products itself. One of them is literally facing the out of home market. So literally, as you're walking down the street, Alphabet might be collecting data about you. And then that weaves its way into the Google ecosystem. And all of this, again,

is happening inside of a black box. So you would never know until it's too late. So not too long ago, I think it was Cicelyne, one of the ideas that he kind of floated as part of these antitrust investigations was something like a Glass-Steagall law. Glass-Steagall, yeah. Glass-Steagall, right. And just for the listeners, the Glass-Steagall Act kind of like regulated the financial system, but it basically put like a firewall between two different kinds of banks. So there couldn't be this back and forth that then led to stuff like the financial crash of 2008. Like insider trading. It's a separation of church and state between consumer facing products and investor facing products.

That's meant to prevent either side from like making information or like trading money behind the scenes, which might happen. So even though the kind of proposal that he made was vague, the way that I kind of understood when I was writing about it was that you would be separating the buy side products and the sell side products and the exchanges that both of them kind of compete inside into their own little bubbles. So they would all be owned by different companies. Granted, because there's so many intermediaries, they might find new ways to kind of weave their way back to dominance. But I do think, you know, this would keep Google from funneling ad dollars to its own properties. And it would keep it from using publisher data in order to create competing YouTube original series or stuff like that.

This is something that I've thought about a lot, but every time I start thinking about it, I get a massive migraine headache. And then I just think about how we have to gut the internet entirely and just start from scratch because the space is so poorly regulated. There might be partnerships that with Google that I don't know about. I only know about what they tell their advertisers. And from what they tell their advertisers, it's that I'm already screwed. The answer to your question about how to break up Google is I don't know. That is above my pay grade. No, I think that's completely fair. But you know what you say about how we might just kind of like need to start over with the internet, like,

I'm increasingly kind of on that side, it becomes really difficult, you know, especially when this is kind of the only internet that we have, it becomes difficult to imagine what some other internet might theoretically look like if we were to sort of dismantle these giants, right? Because this is the internet and there isn't a second internet that we could look at and be like, oh, actually, I like that internet better. Maybe we should replicate that one. Right. No, it's an internet that's dominated by private companies the same way that telecos are dominated by private companies. And similarly, they both, you know, hoover consumer data and basically pawn it off for profit. And it works. And people are really none the wiser until antitrust rolls around. But for some reason,

it hasn't hit the telcos yet. One of these days. I certainly hope it does. Or maybe it has. Admittedly, telcos are not my strong suit. Yeah, well, there used to be antitrust against telcos. They were conglomerates, and then they were kind of broken up, and there were regulations on how much they could own and all this sort of stuff.

But then those regulations were gutted, and they just merged all back up together again. But so we've talked about Google. That's obviously one of the giants in the digital ad market. Does Facebook work the same way or is there something a bit different about the way that Facebook operates? Facebook owns three incredibly popular apps. It has Facebook, which people still use.

It has WhatsApp and it has Instagram. And on the back end, when you're like looking at the ad systems, because I used to do that for my job, Facebook and Instagram use the same system. You're literally funneling money and data into the same kind of like beast. They're increasingly trying to merge more of it on like the consumer side as well. I think the messenger platforms they're talking about bringing together, and they're trying to get you to like share your Instagram stories on Facebook and all this sort of stuff, right? I mean, I have my own wacky conspiracy theories about that. I've had to kind of lay off of Facebook for a while while I bug Google with my reporting. But what Facebook and Google both have

is part of the reason that they have like such vast troves of consumer data is because they don't only have their own platforms but they also work with third-party publishers you know Google has this kind of like little widget that it can give publishers if they want to monetize their site or track who's coming and going because you know Google has the best tracking tech because they have the money to make the best tracking tech. So you have to use Google. And with Facebook, Facebook has this really kind of

popular software development kit that it can give app developers if they want to monetize their app. And then they can like advertise on Facebook. And then Facebook can like use that consumer data, like play ads on any other app

using something called the Facebook audience network. This sounds very complicated because it is. It's not just for websites or apps that are serving their ads, right? Because Google has, I guess, like the most used kind of website analytics dashboard. And so all of these websites, even if they don't use Google ads, often put Google's code on there. And then Google gets like privileged access to all of these websites, even if they don't use Google ads, often put Google's code on there. And then Google gets privileged access to all of the information about who's coming and going on the website. And for Facebook, often if you see a Facebook like button on a website, that means that Facebook is also kind of getting that privileged access to that data, right? Right, exactly.

For a while, there were stories that were going around where you had, oh, XYZ app is sending data to Facebook. Oh, it's sending data to Facebook. And they would like bring up like network monitoring logs, like that's a big friggin deal. And the truth is, generally, that was because the app or the site had some sort of like, like you said, like the Facebook like button or some sort of widget or the app was using that like particular kit. And the thing is, Facebook will take in a ton of data, but not all of that data is used for monetization. Because you know, like, I don't even want to imagine how many apps are out there. And not every developer wants the same thing. So they can like kind of plug in custom code and it'll look like that data is going to Facebook and it is, but Facebook isn't really using it to like inform some sort of

profile about you because Facebook has like specific modules that it wants to know about consumers. It wants to know where you shop, what you buy, your race, how old you are, that sort of thing, because it wants to target you with ads that you'll click on, which is why if you see stories that are just like this, like menstrual app is sending like your period tracker to Facebook. It's just like, what would Facebook do with that? How can that be used to sell you stuff? There are pharmaceutical companies that will use data like that, but they're not going to use Facebook to do it. So in the context of Facebook, we talked about how Google owns kind of like the publisher and the advertiser side, right? And so does Facebook have

its kind of dominance through the same means by having this privilege access to data, but then also controlling these two kind of important platforms for the two kind of major players that would be involved? Right, exactly. So Google owns every piece of the ecosystem for its own little thing. And it's largely splintered. So you have things like AdEx, AdSense. I can't even keep up with all the names that they use.

With Facebook, you have Facebook. It's very kind of streamlined. But that doesn't mean it doesn't control all of the pieces of the same ecosystem, because it does. There's a reason that Facebook and Google together control more than 60% of the ad market. And they're always kind of neck and neck with each other. So in Facebook's case, you have publishers that are either using these widgets, or you app developers or game people like from all over the world that are using this kit. And every time a person downloads one of these apps or clicks on one of these sites, that data is going back to Facebook too. So in its own way, it also kind of has dominance across the web.

Aside from these insanely popular apps that it owns under its name, like Facebook and Instagram and all that. So you have this, again, publisher dominance. And because you have publisher dominance and a ton of data from those publishers, you have advertisers that literally cannot quit. If you talk to advertisers, even with like all of the kind of hate speech and misinformation that spread across platforms like Google or Facebook, well, specifically YouTube, which I've covered in the past, you have advertisers that will tell you anonymously, of course, because they don't want to piss off these kind of like mafia overlords. They will tell you that they can't quit it because if they do, a competing

brand will just take their place. A competing brand with less scrupulous morals, I should say. And because this is so opaque and because people are just like, who's going to know? More often than not, they feel comfortable doing that. What you described there makes a lot of sense because these advertisers have very little power against these massive giants. And we saw that just recently where there was a big advertiser boycott against Facebook. And Mark Zuckerberg basically said, like, we're not going to change anything just because these people are pulling their ads for a bit like they'll be back. It's funny you mentioned that because I reported on that because I'm just like, there's no way that major brands are pulling out of Facebook.

I'm going to get to the bottom of this. And I was, I was right. God dang it. In my story, what I found was the issue for a lot of advertisers. And this is, and this is typically the case. It's not really about defunding hate speech, but it's, you know, they don't want their brand kind of showing up next to something icky. So if there's like a video of a literal genocide going on, they don't want you to see like drink Coke next to it because you are not gonna quit that.

So it's more about, it's called brand safety generally or brand suitability more often. And what happens is that these brands like Verizon, for example, were able to say, oh, I can jump on this bandwagon and get all of this good karma under the guys, wink, wink, of standing against Facebook when in reality, I'm just doing it to save my own ass. And something else that I found was that I think like in all of the brands that I asked, there was only one that actually pulled from all of Facebook's platforms globally. The others either only pulled from the US, because these are major brands with

international markets, and they didn't give a shit about running anywhere else. Or they were running through again, this Facebook audience network, which is running through third-party apps. And because they were running off of Facebook, the average discerning customer wouldn't know that it was using Facebook's tech to be served. And that way, these brands were able to get the micro-targeting that they love so much. Facebook was able to take a cut and nobody would ever know, except I wrote about it. That just sounds like capitalism, right? I was familiar with advertising as advertising. Like I'm familiar with it from the text side,

but ever since coming to Gizmodo specifically, and maybe it's because it's kind of like a punching up sort of publication. I've just been thinking about capitalistic forces more and more. And like so much of this is just like, follow the money, free market bullshit. It is literally like a freight train. And there is no stopping. Like people want to pour their money into these people are dying to pour their money into these companies, even as people are literally dying because of these companies. It's because there's really nowhere else to turn. And when there's nowhere else to turn, sometimes you'll do stuff that you're not proud of. I don't think the industry is full of shit. It mostly is. But

the fact of the matter is, you have these two companies, Facebook and Google, calling the shots. And when there's only two companies that call those shots, you have people that are desperately just trying to grab back any sort of power that they can. And because this entire market is wildly unregulated, sometimes people pull really gross stuff, which is why ad fraud is a multi-billion dollar problem. So you talk about how these two companies have this really massive global dominance over the digital ad market, but obviously they're not the only companies that exist here, right? So if we zoom out, what does the composition of the rest of

these companies kind of look like? And what do they do exactly if Facebook and Google have so much control here? I don't think there's anybody else covering international ad tech companies as much as I do. And what I found is that just like America has like its own wacky kiddie glove kind of laws, other countries have their own versions of that. So like they have their own ways of structuring this kind of like ad ecosystem with like its own set of acronyms and like names for stuff, which is why when I was covering TikToks kind of like ad framework a little while back, I was like coming across all of these like terms that I didn't understand, not because they were in Mandarin, but because they were just like

things I had never heard of. And then it's in that instance that I realized, oh no, data is going across the boundaries of these countries. So in order for me to kind of cover the way these companies work on an international scale, because everything is happening in a black box and every country uses its own kind of different framework with its own acronyms and its own language, you have to really just sit there and map it out, which is what I had to do in my TikTok article. If you read it, I literally included a goddamn diagram where I show here's how American companies talk to China. Here's why. If you snip TikTok out of the equation,

you're still left with Facebook and Twitter and everything else. Because the thing is, the dirty little secret that nobody outside of advertising ever talks about is that advertising isn't just Facebook and Google. In the US, there's more than 8,000 companies, and that number grows exponentially every year. And largely, this is something like I've covered mergers and acquisitions in other industries before, but ad tech in particular is rife with them. You have these tiny, they're called point solutions, tiny little companies that just emerge overnight only to be acquired. And that happens weekly, it seems like. And the reason is because there's so many black boxes and so little regulation and so much money, tens of billions of dollars being poured into this. Everyone wants a piece

and everyone can kind of, to a certain extent, pretend that they bring a certain amount of value to the particular buyer. And that's why you have companies like Facebook that got away with inflating their video metrics and single handedly toppling the journalism industry for so long. The pivot to video is something that only happened because ad tech is as opaque as it is. Then if we kind of look at this bigger picture and what it's showing us, you mentioned there that in your article about TikTok, you found that there's all this data transfer going back and forth and back and forth so that all of these companies can kind of trade the data that they have so that people can really effectively target consumers, target their ads, whether it's in the United States, whether it's in China, whether it's anywhere else, right? So what does that tell us

about what the US administration right now is trying to do by like shutting down TikTok and how really ineffective that's going to be if their actual argument is trying to shut off this kind of like flow of data to China? Well, I'm not sure if you've noticed, Paris, but ever since Oracle came out as essentially the buyer that TikTok's going to go with, nobody's been talking about security at all. It's almost like that was never even an issue. And you have to wonder how so many people kind of took that bait, hook, line, and sinker, because there are legitimate issues in China. There's legitimate like human rights abuses. Huawei is a genuine concern. But he got

away with conflating issues about hardware with like issues about the data economy. That doesn't make sense. They're both tech. But that's like saying a cheesecake and a pizza are the same thing because they both have like a crust and cheese. They're not the same thing. That's kind of the analogy that I like to use. I'm a little bit salty about this because people are just like, hey, why isn't he talking about the cybersecurity stuff when maybe it was never a problem? When I've been saying that for months and people were giving me so much garbage because of it. And they were just like, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. There are legitimate cybersecurity concerns with China. I know that with the Indian government in particular, you

know, they've had problems with like phishing attempts in apps before, particularly with their military. So a ban on apps there makes sense, particularly on like federal phones. Of course you want to do that. When American soldiers go on TikTok, that you might want to keep a close eye on. But like teenage girls, what are they afraid is going to happen? Like, that's my big question. It might be used to conduct human rights abuses in China, and that is horrifying. But I don't think that's what Trump is really concerned about. I completely agree. I think that makes a ton of sense. So then if we're looking at what's

actually happening here, because you have been covering how the US wants to increasingly keep Chinese tech out of the United States, at least ostensibly. So then if the data is not really the key concern here, what do you think is really behind the policy that Trump is trying to push when he's trying to ban TikTok or WeChat? At first blush, this does kind of seem to be more about money than security. The same way that companies like Facebook will actually have ties to mainland China, despite not being stationed there, not for years. And they do that not for political reasons, but because of money, because they want to work with people there.

It's about global trade. So I really think that's kind of more the concern here, though this isn't my bailiwick, but at the very least, I can tell you it's not about security. That's completely fair. I think that's a of more the concern here, though this isn't my bailiwick. But at the very least, I can tell you it's not about security. That's completely fair. I think that's a really good point. So just as a final question, you gave us a lot of great insight into Google, into Facebook, into TikTok and this broader group of companies. Is there anything else you think that we should understand about ad tech and these advertising technologies? The fact that we're even able to say ad tech and people outside of like the wheeziest sides of the trade press know what

you're talking about, that's a significant accomplishment. Because for a while, these companies were able to make literally billions of dollars by kind of hiding in the shadows. And the fact that regulators are talking about buys and sells sides, and the fact that you and I can say ad tech in a normal conversation and have it not be like, what the hell are these nerds talking about? Which, you know, people will probably still say, but that it's progress. It's slow, but it means that change is really happening. It is really hopeful to see that more people are recognizing that this is a problem and thinking about what it might look like if we were to actually address it, right? People are realizing this is an actual freaking economy that's happening right before

our eyes. And we've just been ignoring it for like two decades. We've been literally asleep at the wheel while an entire new economic structure has unfolded in front of us. And now we're desperately trying to be like, what have we created? It's a little bit late, but like, at least we got there. And I guess now we just need to see if these regulators can actually respond to it in an effective way, or if it just all eventually somehow implodes. Shoshana, it's been really great to speak with you and to get your insight on everything that's happening with these advertising technologies. I really

appreciate it. Mel, thanks for having me. Shoshana Wadinski is a data reporter at Gizmodo, and you can find links to some of her pieces that are relevant to today's conversation in the show notes. You can follow her on Twitter at at S Wadinski. You can also follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us, and you can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. If you liked our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Tech Won't Save Us is also part Thanks for listening. Thank you.