Sounds like a bargain to acquihire pkhuong... https://www.pvk.ca/ ;-)
too late.
AT&T confirms it is buying ad platform AppNexus reportedly for between $1.6B-$2B
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Re: AT&T confirms it is buying ad platform AppNexus reportedly for between $1.6B-$2B
#62Well, since ISPs are now free to sell / monetize consumer traffic data [0], this makes some sense. They are pretty desperate for ways to be something more than a dumb pipe for other's content. [0] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sjres34/summary
they were always free to do that...
Absence (with the threat of regulation) is a very different state than an explicit ban on regulation (via the CRA) and what amounts to a governmental endorsement of their move into ad tech.
You're correct that the rules never went into effect, but they also had no reason to invest in ad tech with the (increasingly probable) regulation looming in the future.
Re: AT&T confirms it is buying ad platform AppNexus reportedly for between $1.6B-$2B
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
There ought to be some sort of regulation preventing this sort of thing - like the Glass-Steagall Act in banking that mandated separation of investment banking and commercial banking operations.
GS was created so an implosion on the banking side didn’t kill our savings accounts. In general antitrust is more about preventing Coke from buying Pepsi than Coke buying It’s bottlers or Kroger. The idea was vertical integration isn’t as harmful on consumer prices as horizontal. I think in this case it’s more about something like GDPR.
My analogy was based on means, not ends. GS split investment banking ops from consumer banking. Similarly something could separate the consumer data business from the telco/infrastructure business.
But sure, GDPR works just as well; even better perhaps. Although GOOD LUCK getting something like that to pass through US legislature. Especially when the legislative has already allowed ISPs to freely trade in consumer traffic (meta)data. You can find a preliminary coverage here https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/28/house-vote-sj-34-isp-regul...
But indeed, I do agree that a GDPR-clone is overdue in the US. While I hope it comes to fruition, I also hope it isn’t hopelessly bastardized and rendered toothless by the lobbyist lot.