People are realizing this is an actual freaking economy that's happening right before our eyes, and we've just been ignoring it for like two decades.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that thinks it's important to understand the business models of Facebook and Google, but also not to think that they're controlling our minds.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Shoshana Wadinsky. Shoshana is a reporter at Gizmodo who writes about data, ads, and so many other important topics to the critical conversations that we have on this podcast.

Today on the show, Shishana gives us a look into how the ad platforms of Google and Facebook work and how they achieve such dominance over digital advertising because of their control of key nodes of that market. If you're not very familiar with this topic,

I hope that this episode gives you a good foundation and a good understanding of how these ad markets

actually work. Remember, if you like this conversation, please leave a five-star review on

Apple Podcasts and make sure to share the episode with any friends or colleagues who you think

would enjoy it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making this podcast, you can go

to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Shoshana, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

Hey, thanks for having me.

We're all good in the hood.

I think it's what the kids say.

Yeah, perfect.

So I've been following your reporting on ad tech, what's going on in like the digital

ad market, TikTok, all of these really important and relevant questions.

And so I wanted to start with this growing antitrust investigation into Google. And they had a hearing on September 15th where

the lawmakers finally asked Google a bunch of questions about the aspects of their business that

they think are like going against competition laws. So can you give us some

insight into how Google tried to push back against these arguments that it actually has a monopoly?

Generally, when we've seen antitrust hearings in the past, you know, I think a few months

back, we had that meeting with Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Center of Pichai.

Also touching on the topic of antitrust, but really the only one that got grilled about

...