The New York Times – “Regulators are relying on insiders like Dina Srinivasan, who left her digital ad job after concluding that “Facebook and Google were going to win and everybody else is going to lose…With no background in academia but an insider’s understanding of the digital ad world and a stack of economics books, she wrote a paper with a novel theory — that Facebook harmed consumers by extracting more and more personal data for using its free services. This year, she argued in another paper that Google’s monopoly in advertising technology allowed for the type of self-dealing and insider trading that would be illegal on Wall Street. Her arguments reframed the antitrust thinking about the companies. And her timing was perfect…

When Texas and nine other states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google last week, the complaint identified many of the same conflicts of interest as Ms. Srinivasan’s paper, “Why Google Dominates Advertising Markets” in the Stanford Technology Law Review. The lawsuit said Google controlled every part of the digital advertising pipeline and used it to give priority to its own services, acting as “pitcher, batter and umpire, all at the same time.”…