> I literally cannot imagine supporting monopolies/oligopolies over healthy competition.

Implicit in my post was that I don't want to support healthy competition in adtech, or any competition at all. I want this industry to disappear entirely. I have no tears for the small adtech businesses whose market got scooped up by Google; I only hope that by presenting a bigger target, Google's adtech activities will be easier to regulate.

So if I open a new small business and want to advertise it on AdWords or elsewhere on the internet I have no recourse? Word of mouth is random and unreliable even if you have a good product. Advertising is a healthy and essential signalling mechanism to broadcast the availability of a new service and there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with it in its self. The non-benneficial side-effects like extensive user tracking and practices that drastically harm user experience however are bad and a seperate issue to be dealt with.

> So if I open a new small business and want to advertise it on AdWords or elsewhere on the internet I have no recourse

Ad tech was extremely profitable before personalisation and wholesale trading of private data.

> Ad tech was extremely profitable

That was the era when marketers were dumb, drank the internet look aid and were taken for a ride by the industry. That's not quite true anymore.

They will work just fine today, too

The implication wasn't clear because, frankly, it's a silly thought. This post is ripe for that "that's not how any of this works" meme.

I can understand the emotional intent, but it's important to ensure that routes we take actually get us to the outcomes we want.

Although I generally agree with your sentiment, please don't forget that, unlike the US, the EU also has antitrust and anticartel laws with teeth and has applied them in the past against large quasi-monopolists like Microsoft and Google.

With all due respect, America has a long history of busting monopolies, and while we haven't gone on a busting spree this generation, we're awfully close to doing the one thing that Europe would never, ever be able to accomplish: Break up companies like Google and Facebook. (As this thread demonstrates, Europeans would potentially be against us doing so, and would be pro-monopoly?)

I actually think the Google reorganization under Alphabet was done in no small part to prepare for anti-trust activity and the breakup of the Google monster.

Question because I don't know European anti-cartel history, do European regulators have a history of big bust-ups like Ma Bell?

It seems like Europeans just try fining them and letting them be.

1) There's nothing the EU can do besides fine them. They're foreign companies; they have no power to break them up, only to fine them or prevent them from operating there. They probably decided that getting billions in fines is better than just shutting them out and hoping local companies can somehow come up with similar services.

2) When your country hasn't done something in over a generation, you need to stop touting it as something your country is good at. Just like we don't continue to criticize Germany for some terrible things they did 75 years ago, we need to stop thinking we're so great because we managed to land some people on the moon 50 years ago.

> we haven't gone on a busting spree this generation, we're awfully close to [..] break[ing] up companies like Google and Facebook

Source?

Don't you recall when we got really close to breaking up microsoft? I mean, in the end we didn't, but we sure did send a lot of _very_ strongly worded letters.

Outside of tech there are a lot of anti-competitive practices that have been left to grow while the cops been off the beat - I'd love to see the Pharma industry shaken up especially with PBM & Manufacturer relationships... additionally, Walmart.