… until my next one

Hello!

If you looked at the latest US v Google trial and said, “Wake me when it’s over and I’ll catch up then,” I have great news for you: It’s over and you can catch up!

Arielle Garcia gave the broad strokes of the trial’s argument in an op-ed for Digital Content Next. “The crux of Google’s argument asserts that even if their conduct in isolation is bad for publishers, it could be good for advertisers on a whole,” she wrote. “And if it’s good for advertisers, it’s good for the market. The problem is that they were unable to really see this argument through.”

And this trial has bigger stakes than just Google as a company. “One of the witnesses talked about how basically a healthy digital ad market is central to democracy because of the fact that it funds journalism,” Arielle told Fast Company’s Rapid Response.

Let’s have some accountability for the adtech companies that currently control which publishers live and which publishers die. We’ll see what happens in November’s closing arguments.

Bonus Arielle: Talkin’ Google on Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast (yes, this is a different Better Offline episode than the one I linked earlier this week).

Global Witness Witnesses Witlessness  

Our report last week showed how adtech companies work with climate misinfo publishers, but it didn’t answer one question: What do these sites and adtech companies actually MAKE by publishing misinfo?

And while we can’t know the earnings of individual articles, our friends at Global Witness did the work to estimate what one company, Google, makes with one of the misinfo publishers it works with, The Epoch Times.

“We estimate that The Epoch Times webpages generated close to $1.5 million in combined revenue for Google and the website owners over the last 12 months,” Global Witness said in the report.

Google has rules about publishing partners putting ads on climate change denial. It’d be nice if it enforced them.

It's #WTFriday  

On Fridays we highlight whatever nonsense the adtech industry is cooking up, and this week it’s PayPal automatically opting in people to share their data with third-party partners.

Thanks clicking that little open button and getting all the way down here, and I’ll see you next time. Stay safe!

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