Playing both sides: Regulators aren't happy with Google's ad practices

6/15/23 8:00PM

The view from Brussels

‍The European Commission has charged Google with abusing its dominant position in the advertising tech industry, mirroring a similar lawsuit filed by the US DoJ back in January.

The EC alleges that Google has exploited its control on both the buy side, assisting advertisers in securing ad placements, and the sell side, helping publishers fill their available ad space. Essentially, putting the company in a position to dictate the meeting point of demand and supply.

Even though the charges relate to only a small part of Google's business, the prevailing view from Brussels is that a “structural remedy” is the best solution. That could see Google have to carve off parts of its behemoth ad business.

‍All about ads

‍Indeed, despite its many marvelous pieces of technology — Google Earth, its self-driving car project, Google Cloud — Alphabet still makes the vast majority of its revenue in the very same way that this humble newsletter does: advertising. Through serving billions of ads across Google Search, YouTube and the wider Google Network, Alphabet brought in a staggering $224bn in ad revenue last year — nearly 80% of the company’s total.

Google's dominance in the advertising realm is admittedly gradually diminishing. It currently captures 27% of all digital advertising revenue in the US — still the most of any company, but down from its 37% share in 2015. Meta holds the second position, but has seen a similar squeeze in its share — most notably from Amazon, which has quickly captured ~12% of the US market, as shoppers increasingly start their search for products on Amazon itself.

Rani Molla3h

Meta released a Reddit dupe. Reddit investors don’t like it.

Fresh on the heels of releasing a Snapchat dupe, which sent Snap down earlier this month, Meta seems to be meddling with Reddit, quietly releasing a Reddit-like Facebook app called Forum yesterday. After news of the “dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and the communities you care about,” Reddit’s stock is down 4.5% today.

Last month, Reddit’s earnings report handily beat analysts’ expectations, but it continues to struggle with the perception that bigger tech companies — including Meta — investing heavily in AI will eat its lunch. The stock is down nearly 40% year-to-date.

Jon Keegan22h

Report: OpenAI’s Q1 revenue was $5.7 billion, beating Anthropic

The neck-and-neck race between OpenAI and Anthropic as the AI companies barrel toward their expected IPOs this year is shaking out some internal numbers for would-be investors to ponder.

The Information is reporting that OpenAI’s first-quarter revenue was ~$5.7 billion, about $1 billion ahead of Anthropic’s revenue for the same period.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Anthropic is on course to more than double its first-quarter revenue of $4.8 billion to $10.9 billion in the second quarter. It is not known what OpenAI is projecting for Q2.

Recently, The New York Times reported that Anthropic’s current fundraising round seeking to raise between $30 billion and $50 billion comes with a valuation of up to $950 billion, putting it ahead of OpenAI’s latest reported valuation of $850 billion.

OpenAI Held $1 Billion Revenue Lead Over Anthropic in First Quarter

Rani Molla5/21/26

Alphabet’s Waymos are still getting caught in floods after recall

Waymo, the self-driving subsidiary of Alphabet, has paused operations in Atlanta after a new report of a vehicle driving into a flooded roadway and getting stuck, TechCrunch reports. The news comes just weeks after the company recalled its fleet of nearly 4,000 driverless cars to deal with a previous flood incident in San Antonio, where the service is also paused.

After that incident, Waymo instituted an “interim remedy” to make the vehicles “exclude additional operating conditions that present an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higherspeed roadway,” but added that it was still “developing the final remedy for this recall.”

As we’ve noted, Waymo has mostly kept its rollout — now public in 11 cities — to more temperate climates, as severe weather poses more challenges to autonomous vehicles.

Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods | TechCrunch

As we’ve noted, Waymo has mostly kept its rollout — now public in 11 cities — to more temperate climates, as severe weather poses more challenges to autonomous vehicles.

Jon Keegan5/21/26

Report: Anthropic is in talks to use Microsoft’s custom AI chips

Anthropic is in talks to rent custom AI chips from Microsoft, according to a report from The Information, as the Claude coder’s scramble for compute continues.

During the first wave of the generative-AI boom, companies rushed to get their hands on Nvidia’s GPUs, as they were the only game in town if you wanted to build new models.

But as the role of inference has shifted to a top priority, with companies focusing on actually running models to make money, they’ve started shopping around, buying chips tailored for the task, and in some cases decided to make their own.

Additionally, Anthropic has become something of a victim of its own success at rolling out products that can be quickly adopted by enterprise clients. That rapid, wide-scale adoption has revealed significant compute constraints. Anthropic is now, effectively, looking for any and all compute capacity it can find, striking deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google and Broadcom, and even xAI.

Amazon and Google have both seen hot demand for their custom inference chips. But Microsoft is still trying to get its custom Maia chips into the mix, after encountering delays.

If Microsoft lands Anthropic as a customer for its Azure-based Maia computing services, it could open the door for other companies seeking another option for meeting the sky-high demand for AI inference, as agentic models gobble up trillions of tokens.