Google and Facebook's dominance in digital advertising and news discovery in the US is a threat to diversity of ideas in the country
A political website pulled an article after Google's AdSense team threatened to withdraw advertising. — 'A monopoly on the means of communication," … Tweets: @flyagaric2019 Tweets: Steve Fly Agaric / @flyagaric2019 : PaywallStreet? 'A monopoly on the means of communication," Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote in “Leviathan,” their 1975 novel, “may define a ruling elite more precisely: The Google-Facebook duopoly threatens diversity of thought” http://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJOpinion
Context & Ripple Effects
This WSJ opinion piece lands four months after Talking Points Memo documented how publishers' extreme reliance on Google services hands the company effective monopoly power and can chill criticism — including unexpected revenue losses for sites that displease it. The new wrinkle here is a concrete censorship mechanism: a political website pulled an article after Google's AdSense team threatened to withdraw advertising, turning dependence on ad infrastructure into editorial leverage.
The op-ed frames the Google-Facebook duopoly over advertising and news discovery as a threat to diversity of ideas itself, quoting Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's warning that 'a monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite.' It is an early argumentative building block for the policy fight that followed.
First-order effects
- Publishers dependent on AdSense now face direct content pressure: the named site self-censored rather than lose advertising, showing that monetization access functions as an editorial veto.
- Google and Facebook's dual role as dominant ad sellers and primary news-discovery channels means dissenting outlets have few alternative routes to either revenue or audience.
Second-order effects
- Antitrust scholars push for structural remedies — as when a leading voice argued Google's ad marketplace should be regulated precisely because it runs the market while competing as its biggest buyer and seller (Wired).
- Publishers and their allies escalate to Washington: by 2020 a Senate report attributes the local journalism crisis partly to Facebook and Google's alleged anticompetitive behavior, including AMP, and calls for FTC policing (Senate report).
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, gatekeeper leverage over speech gets adjudicated as a competition problem rather than a free-press one — a shift experts say arrived when two federal judges declared Google a monopoly within a year (judicial findings), signaling courts are willing to address anticompetitive behavior in digital markets.
- The longer-term risk the op-ed names is structural: whoever controls ad distribution and discovery controls which ideas are economically viable, making platform neutrality a regulatory question rather than a corporate promise.
The trend: Economic dependence on a small set of advertising-and-discovery gatekeepers is converting publisher speech concerns into antitrust cases, with regulators and courts progressively treating platform leverage over media as a competition violation.