Google Brings Clarity To An Ad Space Long Blurred By Wine And Guesses

“We could sell you a page of advertising for $100,000, tell you it was going to reach a lot of influential and wealthy people, take you out to dinner, dangle an invite to the Oscar party, order expensive wine, get you drunk, and hope you forgot to ask any questions.” Those are the words of Dana Brown, former Deputy Editor of Vanity Fair, from his 2022 autobiography, Dilettante.

Brown described how advertising used to be, and how in the dark occasionally overserved ad buyers once were. Ad purchases from editors who “weren’t data people” set the stage for change. It’s capitalism’s greatest feature: competing away high margins.

It rates serious thought as the Department of Justice (DOJ) inches toward the conclusion of its antitrust case against Google. The lawsuit was instigated by Google’s supposed “monopoly” over search, along with its alleged failure to provide advertisers with “transparency.” It’s a look backwards, in concert with a failure to understand just how much Google has vastly enhanced transparency and sales for advertisers. The speculation here is that Brown would agree.

All it takes to understand this is to compare search results on Google from July 25, 2022 to July 25, 2025. What users see based on any search or question is profoundly different.

The difference is an effect of intense competition within the search space, and particularly the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The release of ChatGPT and a myriad of other AI-trained search locales since very much calls into question the DOJ’s case. If Google had a monopoly on search, it would reflect in a lack of search-result evolution at Google. Why compete when you’re a monopoly? Why indeed.

Also, why invest in an uncertain AI future to the tune of $85 billion (the amount Google’s parent, Alphabet, is investing in AI in 2025 alone) if your future is already secure; the future born of your control of the present and future? In the words of DOJ attorney David Dahlquist, “This court has an opportunity to remedy a monopoly that has controlled the internet for today’s generation and restore competition for decades to come.”

Except that there’s no monopoly. See the profound evolution of search results on the alleged monopoly offender in Google. Then see Alphabet’s substantial investment in the very technology that promises to render search results from today unrecognizable relative to the future. Or see yet again Dana Brown’s memoirs.

While the Brown quote that opened this opinion piece has already vivified just how in-the-dark ad buyers used to be, there’s more to know. Brown’s memoirs explain why the old ways of ad sales were rendered obsolete. Google and Facebook loom large. In Brown’s words, Facebook and Google “were able to target advertising at very specific demographics and then show advertisers actual figures of who saw the ad, who clicked on it, and who made a purchase.”

Contrast the above with the days when ad buyers were plied with alcohol so that they wouldn’t ask difficult questions from people who probably couldn’t answer them to begin with. Not so with Google and Facebook. As Brown recalls, “They were data-driven businesses.”

Yet the DOJ claims Google hasn’t been transparent enough with buyers? More realistically, its success is an effect of bringing transparency and data to purchases that were formerly a speculation. Which is just a comment that the DOJ isn’t just looking backwards with its lawsuit, it also looking into the past without understanding just how substantially Google has improved the present and future by ending for good the opaque nature of ad-buying from the past.