The Casino of Attention — AdTech did not “improve the internet.” | by Sylwester Mielniczuk | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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The Casino of Attention — AdTech did not “improve the internet.”

Sylwester Mielniczuk

3 min read·<br>May 5, 2026

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“Brutally honest: Google became the landlord.”<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

AdTech did not “improve the internet.”<br>It financialized attention and turned the web into a casino where every page view is chopped, auctioned, tracked, resold, measured, and re-measured until nobody knows what actually created value.

The damage:<br>1. It made websites worse.<br>Pages became overloaded with banners, popups, trackers, cookie walls, autoplay video, consent spam, lazy-loading garbage, and “recommended content” sludge. The user became the product, the page became inventory, and the content became bait.<br>2. It punished good publishing.<br>Instead of rewarding quality, programmatic advertising rewarded volume, arbitrage, cheap traffic, SEO spam, outrage, and “made-for-advertising” pages. Even industry reports admit ad fraud, MFA sites, and campaign measurement remain major concerns. (IAS Industry Ads Report 2025)<br>3. It created fake precision.<br>The industry sells dashboards as truth. Most attribution is modelling, guessing, platform self-reporting, or correlation dressed up as science. “Real-time actionability” often means: we can move money faster inside a broken machine.<br>4. Google captured the pipes.<br>Google was not just another participant. It owned key parts of the stack: publisher ad server, exchange, demand tools, browser, analytics, search, YouTube, Android. A US court held in 2025 that Google violated antitrust law by monopolizing open-web ad tech markets, including publisher ad servers and ad exchanges. The DOJ said the court found Google harmed publishers, competition, and consumers of information on the open web. (Department of Justice)<br>5. Google made “open web” dependent on a toll booth.<br>Publishers needed ads to survive, but the ad stack took fees, controlled access, controlled auctions, controlled measurement, and then told publishers this was innovation. The EU also fined Google €2.95 billion in 2025 over ad-tech abuse and conflicts of interest in the ad supply chain. (The Verge)<br>6. Privacy became theatre.<br>The industry tracked people for years, then rebranded tracking as consent, identity, clean rooms, cohorts, Topics, Privacy Sandbox, first-party data, retail media, and AI modelling. Google’s Privacy Sandbox/cookie saga became a multi-year mess under CMA scrutiny, with regulators concerned about replacing third-party cookies in ways that could shift power further into Chrome/Google-controlled systems. (GOV.UK)<br>7. Investment money made it worse.<br>The banker/VC/private-equity logic is: add layers, add fees, add acronyms, add dashboards, add “AI,” then sell the company or raise the valuation. The user experience is irrelevant. The publisher’s survival is secondary. The advertiser’s actual business outcome is often secondary. The real product is the spreadsheet story.<br>Google became the landlord.<br>The simple truth:<br>- AdTech became a tax on the internet.<br>- Google became the landlord.<br>- Publishers became tenants.<br>- Users became behavioural data.<br>- Advertisers became liquidity.<br>- Banks and investors sold the machine as growth.

The worst part: the system is not even elegant. It is bloated, leaky, adversarial, full of fraud, full of middlemen, and still sold as “optimization.”<br>A healthier internet would have had:<br>- fewer ads<br>- direct publisher relationships<br>- transparent pricing<br>- simple sponsorships<br>- contextual ads<br>- less tracking<br>- less auction theatre<br>- honest measurement<br>Instead, the industry built a surveillance auction machine and called it innovation.

“Nobody knows what actually created value.”

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Written by Sylwester Mielniczuk<br>56 followers<br>·137 following

Creating experiences with open and free web platforms by humans for humans. I believe that there is still a lot of fun in this. Focused recently on immersive.

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