How’s that for an attention grabber! But it seems the shit is really getting real. For the last two days (day 1 and day 2), I’ve been following the ‘Proposed Surveillance Advertising Ban.’
I won’t continue to harp on that topic. But two articles seemed to slide under the radar today.
The first – ‘Senate Committee Advances Antitrust Bill Targeting Large Tech Platforms‘ is moving forward with an act that will ‘bar the largest platforms from engaging in a wide variety of practices, including “misusing” a business’s data to complete against it, and returning search results that are biased in favor of the dominant platform.’ This may seem inconsequential. But if you have been following this for months, as I have, you will see an interesting shift. For months and months big tech have gotten acts like these ‘dismissed’ for one reason or another (generally not enough information/data to prove these allegations. But, my take was that they were not really understood).
The fact this and other acts are actually getting traction is a good thing (when it is good and there is an understanding of the ask and the implications) and a bad thing (when the ask is unclear and repositioned to use for political posturing).
The second, semi-related article was about how Google manipulated auctions and therefore pricing.
This newfound moving forward of such acts and allegations, combined with the focus on ‘survelliance advertising’ seems to indicate an increased interest in the government stepping more quickly to ‘regulate’ digital advertising. Perhaps we thought there was a reprieve until late 2023 (Chrome’s deprecation of the third party cookie) to try to get our first party marketing solutions in place. But maybe not….
