The industry group that represents the publishers here is not talking about the sell-side ad tech, they're perfectly happy showing ads to their users. They have lots of choices for sell-side platforms anyway, it's a very robust and competitive market. They're talking about search results and Google News, their belief being that Google should share search advertising revenue with them because their content contributes to the value of search results.

I think it's all related to the sell-side of adtech, publisher revenues have been going down for years while Google keeps on growing, with AMP and Google News as weapons to keep revenue hostage from publishers.

Added to that the permanent threat of SEO de-ranking (as the Daily Mail complained about recently), the relationship between publishers and Google is fragile.

> Not to mention how much they push AMP and they whitelist which ad networks are allowed to serve ads on AMP

One can only hope that AMP will be the court case of the digital century. Whether Google's obscenely obvious anti-competitive projects are allowed to flourish or wither will have a major impact in the development of the World Wide Web going forward.

This article wasn't about profits from ads on news sites though. You're replying to a strawman.