Welcome back. James Panicki with you. This is Emlex's weekly podcast covering the most pressing regulatory issues of the week, and it's great to have your company.

Now, regular listeners of this podcast

would be familiar with ad tech, that is online advertising services and the different

legal challenges on this front facing Google in the United States. We've talked about the state

attorneys general and the antitrust lawsuit lodged in a Texas court, which is taking Google

to task over its ad tech stack. And we'll get into that terminology in just a moment. As all of this

is unfolding in the Lone Star State, 13,000 kilometers away, that is 8,500 miles away in Sydney, Australia,

the competition regulator has just published its interim report into ad tech.

And again, it suggests that Google is facing a complex regulatory future in the country,

a country which the search giant has threatened to pull out of entirely fighting words

there. More on that in just over 10 minutes time. First up, though, two developments in the US,

and I'm joined by Mike Acton, MLEX senior correspondent and a member of our digital team in

San Francisco. Okay, Mike, for those who haven't followed this story,

let's start with a quick recap on what the Texas Attorney General's case against Google is all about.

So the case was brought in December by the Republican Attorney General of Texas and also nine other Republican Attorney Generals

across the US. And it was the last in a sort of spree of lawsuits that were filed by the enforcers

in the US against Google towards the end of last year in the backlash, which we saw in Congress, against

big tech.

So the Texas case looks specifically at what's called the ad tech stack.

Now, it's something that is an extremely complicated market.

And the best way to describe it would be a whole network of businesses that are the sort of middleman between a publisher.

So that could be, you know, a news website or any website webpage that you go and visit.

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