Hey, everybody. It is Tuesday on this weekend startups and I wish I could tell you that Jason was resting because as his adopted mother, I keep trying to get him to do that, but he's not. He's on airplane traveling for work, of course.

So let's send him some good vibes and hope he heals up soon and doesn't make it worse.

I am going to start the show with some solo dole news because I'm really bomb that Jason is not here to talk about the DOJ suing Google to try to break up its digital ads business.

And we have a whole antitrust story arc today we're going to keep talking about antitrust because ticket master finally got called before congress to answer for it's alleged anti competitive practices thank you Taylor Swift.

We're going to cover some of that then producer Rachel joins to discuss her experience with an artist who is trying to find ticket master alternatives maybe the market can solve this problem for us.

And then we've got some startups for you to amazing launch accelerator founders join me to break down their businesses and their paths to a hundred million dollars is going to be an awesome show stick with me.

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All right let's get right into this breaking news the DOJ has teamed up with eight states to sue Google over its dominance in the digital ads market and they're asking for Google to spin off its ad business and maybe some more obviously this would be I don't even have the right word a tsunami totally massive like nine on the Richter scale earthquake.

For the entire ad tech industry if Google is forced to spin off its ads business not to mention kind of a big deal for alphabet the Biden department of justice has actually been signaling that it's going to get a lot more aggressive with the tech industry on antitrust specifically there have been some stories talking about how this lawsuit was coming and that like apple could be next maybe some scrutiny on Microsoft this is a big move though especially since big tech

lobbyists and a lot of big tech money have managed to effectively kill antitrust legislation that had been proposed in Congress.

Here's a little let's do a little context a little level set on Google's ad dominance and why they might be in the spotlight here I mean first of all the House of Representatives I think in 2020 did a report on the tech industry and its dominance overall as part of this kind of antitrust push and noted that Google specifically

specifically has put itself in a pretty great place Google controls more than a quarter of US digital ads.

It's currently number one in terms of digital ad market share with that more than a quarter 28.8% last year that's actually down a little bit from 36.7% in 2016 according to insider intelligence.

Another chart from Bloomberg using 2023 marketer data shows Google at 26.5% of the US digital ad market so significantly larger than meta and Amazon.

Last quarter Google's ad business made up about 79% of its total revenue so when I say it would be a big deal if they had to split or if there were some other remedy that affected that business.

That's what I mean ads generated 54.5 billion out of alphabets 69.1 billion total revenue Google remains the market leader by a significant margin so the lawsuit basically says that Google controls the vast majority of the tools that are used for digital advertising and is of course one of the only places what are the major places that those ads actually live.

And that that is all to the detriment of advertisers publishers and consumers. Here's some quotes from the lawsuit.

One industry behemoth Google has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swat of high tech tools used by publishers advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.

Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace Google has used anti competitive exclusionary and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.

The lawsuit also tries to explain how Google does this. I mean going all the way back to its acquisition of double click in 2000 I think.

Here are a couple more quotes from the lawsuit Google a single company with pervasive conflicts of interest now controls one the technology used by nearly every major website publisher to offer advertising space for sale to the leading tools used by advertisers to buy that advertising space and three the largest ad exchange that matches publishers with advertisers each time that ad space is sold.

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