THIS deserves and will receive significantly more antitrust attention. Google reportedly designed the coalition’s research approach, propped it up and will use its dominant browser to block a video ad format which *conveniently* doesn’t impact YouTube. /1 inc.com/jason-aten/goo… 
For those out of the loop on adblocking, we’ve seen this playbook previously as Google was reported to subsidize and fund top adblockers to whitelist Google’s own search ads so they wouldn’t be blocked by Adblock Plus. See @RonWyden letter last month. /2 theverge.com/2020/1/14/2106…
Now in video, the idea that midroll ads which, yes interrupt a piece of video content, are going to be blocked by the browser because they don’t conform to YouTube’s preferred format which drives a majority of video ad spend? That’s entirely bs. /3
YouTube is already a piece of massive antitrust scrutiny of Google’s ad business as it was used as a vehicle to capture and dominate the adtech industry by allegedly only making YouTube inventory available to advertisers who used Google’s adtech. /4
