Professor Mark Patterson was quoted in a Vox article about Google’s latest initiative to build an ad blocker for its web browser, Chrome.
“Google has a lot of power,” says Mark Patterson, a Fordham legal scholar who has written a book on antitrust in the internet age. “This is dictating what sort of ads will be permitted if you use Chrome.” And given Chrome’s popularity, those rules are likely to become de facto standards across the web.
Patterson worries about a private company having so much power over the kinds of ads that appear online. But he doesn’t think Google has much to worry about on the regulatory front.
“It’s hard to see a court getting really agitated about Google trying to eliminate annoying ads,” he says. “Annoying ads are annoying. Any effort to get rid of them could be seen as a good thing.”
Antitrust officials are likely to decide they have bigger issues to worry about, Patterson predicts.
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Essentially, Patterson says, “it’s a cartel orchestrated by Google.” Publishers and ad networks that are already enforcing high standards have every reason to want spammier ad networks driven off the web.