Google has way too much power in the Online Ads biz. Period. This can't go on like that.

If the entire third party ad serving market imploded how would that be a bad thing?

Besides the usual pathos of all the folks losing their jobs, there's a whole subsection of the internet that would disappear / severely shrink.

You might argue that it probably wouldn't be a huge loss but that would be your perspective there.

Nevermind the fact that the ad serving market, once you remove FB/Google/AMZN, is actually quite broad and diverse, especially in the display/programmatic world.

This being said, Chrome recent announcement wrt privacy & 3rd party cookies might be the final blow for a lot of indies. Not that I disagree with you and I believe a culling and a new approach is required, one that purposely avoid the SV giants and centralisation of data.

So if we are worried about people losing their jobs, should we also care if the environment makes it harder for telemarketers?

Besides if your income is dependent on third party ads, what happens as more people start using ad blockers? A content blocking framework has been built into iOS for 5 years. I haven’t seen a Google ad in half a decade.

I also don’t have a problem with first party ads controlled by the site or podcast ads.

That being said, I put my money where my mouth is. I pay for ad free streaming services and will buy an in app purchase in apps to avoid ads.

Now that Ben Thompson (Stratechery) is offering a podcast version of his Daily Update, I’m thinking about buying a subscription to his newsletter.

Are you sure the "market" did that?

There were massive campaigns against it plus antitrust rulings in the EU.

To this day there is people out there suffering the consequences of MS' policies.

Same for Intel and others.

If the US and EU had not stepped in, what would MS done differently to stop the rise of the current big tech companies?