Hello there. Welcome to Emlex's weekly podcast covering the top regulatory stories of the moment. I'm James Panicki. I'm a senior editor with Emlex's Asia Pacific Operations. It's great to be in your feed once again.

This week, one of the biggest tech issues around digital advertising or ad tech. Why is it that the

platform of your choice knows your tastes, your biases, your prejudices, sometimes better than you

know them yourself? The answer is, of course,

data. Every virtual step you take, indeed arguably every real step you take with a device in your

pocket is being examined and scrutinized and all in the name of delivering you a tailor-made

advertising experience. It's a world that has long been of

interest to regulators, which is why the decision by the EU's antitrust watchdog to launch a

fresh probe into Google's ad tech practices was big news, although arguably not that surprising.

In fact, Emlex's faithful subscribers are only too aware that there is

plenty of regulatory action going on around the world on this front, and will touch base with

our correspondence in Seoul and Sydney to get a sense of where things stand in Asia.

First up, though, Nicholas Hurst is Mlex's chief correspondent on the EU antitrust

beat, and he joins me now from Brussels. Now, Nicholas, I tried to explain AdTech just now,

but how would you describe it? Oh, that's complicated. AdTech is this complex chain of technology

that basically puts adverts on websites when you open them.

Now, behind these adverts is a whole series of events such as auctions, multiple auctions,

informing advertisers about who the person that's browsing is and so on and so on.

And all of this happens in the flicker of an eye, the time it takes to load the web page. So what we're talking about is advertisements, as you and I have always understood them,

but they are powered by personal data, which makes them particularly effective in targeting people

in telling them exactly what they what they do want

rather than what they may or may not want. That's right. So the internet, you know, the ad tech world

...