Q&A with Dina Srinivasan, author of The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, on Meta and Google's ad duopoly, the US antitrust cases, concerns about Apple, and more
Patrick McGee / Financial Times : LinkedIn: Patrick McGee . Tweets: @rasmus_kleis , @simonjharris , @anshublog , @paultang , @patrickmcgee_ , @spignal , and @dinasrinivasan LinkedIn: Patrick McGee : Just published - a new Financial Times “Tech Exchange” interview with Dina H. Srinivasan, “exposing the monopoly power of Facebook and Google” … Tweets: Rasmus Kleis Nielsen / @rasmus_kleis : “You want to manage conflicts of interest between four nodes: the buyside; the sellside; the exchange in the middle; and then any entity that is buying and selling for its own account. And you have a similar situation in ad markets” https://www.ft.com/... Simon J Harris / @simonjharris : Fascinating interview of @DinaSrinivasan by @PatrickMcGee_, read it twice. I do remain a little skeptical though of the harms of personalisation around interest & intent, especially when it's linked by consent, pseudonymous, non persistent identifiers https://www.ft.com/... Anshu Sharma / @anshublog : One of the best interviews on privacy and the power it bestows and takes away. Must read: https://twitter.com/... Paul Tang / @paultang : Freaking scary but real “ I could use public data sets to determine whether two people had been meeting in the same place at the same time. And somebody in the ad market literally walked me through how to do that. ” https://www.ft.com/... Patrick McGee / @patrickmcgee_ : I have several favourite bits of this interview. This is one: https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Stanley Pignal / @spignal : Ask a teenager about the monopoly power of Facebook. Expect to be laughed at. https://twitter.com/... Dina Srinivasan / @dinasrinivasan : What a treat to sit down with one of my favorite journalists @PatrickMcGee_ to chat about research and antitrust https://www.ft.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Dina Srinivasan has spent years reshaping how antitrust enforcers see digital advertising: her treatises on Facebook and Google helped reframe the Texas AG's investigation of Google, and she argues that ad-tech's real problem is structural — four nodes (buyside, sellside, exchange, and any player trading for its own account) whose conflicts of interest must be managed separately.
This new Financial Times interview extends that framework to the live US antitrust cases against Meta and Google as a duopoly, adds a warning about Apple, and lands in a lineage running from Foundem's case against Google — which dismantled the 'self-correcting internet' argument — through the bipartisan questioning at the House antitrust hearing to today's formal litigation.
First-order effects
- Meta and Google face litigation built on Srinivasan's core claim — that owning buyside, sellside, and exchange at once lets each favor its own inventory — so their immediate exposure is forced separation or conduct remedies across the ad stack.
- Advertisers and publishers on both sides of these platforms now have a named intellectual author of the case against them, which raises pressure for transparency into pricing and auction mechanics they currently don't get.
Second-order effects
- Srinivasan's Apple concern signals that if the Meta-Google cases land, scrutiny shifts toward the other gatekeeper controlling demand — pushing Apple to defend its own position in the ad and distribution stack before it becomes the next target.
- Rival ad-tech intermediaries gain an opening: if regulators force the duopolies to unbundle exchange from buy- and sellside, independent exchanges and DSPs inherit volume and pricing leverage currently captured by Google.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — academic reframing (Foundem, then Srinivasan) preceding enforcement — tech antitrust becomes institutionalized as a pipeline where scholarly conflict-of-interest analysis directly shapes case theory, not just commentary.
- As the related coverage notes the cases may play out for years while behavior continues, deterrence likely migrates toward personal liability for executives rather than waiting on slow civil remedies — a structural change in how platform power is policed.
The trend: Digital-advertising antitrust is moving from academic reframing to formal enforcement against the Meta-Google duopoly, with Apple positioned as the next contested gatekeeper.