Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Cory Doctorow
“The news is in trouble. It’s not just the mass closures of newsrooms — it’s also the physical and ideological attacks on journalists. News websites are plastered with ads, but more than half of the money those ads generate is siphoned off by ad-tech companies, with the lion’s share going to just two companies, Google and Meta, whose ad-tech duopoly has allowed them to claim an ever-greater share of the income generated by ads placed alongside of news content. … The ad-tech market isn’t a market at all: it’s a big store con where everyone the publisher sees is in on the game: the buyer’s agent, the seller’s agent and the marketplace where they bring the publisher’s product are all run by a single company, or by two companies that have secretly agreed not to compete. If you can’t spot the sucker at the poker-table … you’re the sucker.” (05/24/23)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech