16 Nov 2025 Search

Here’s a hypothetical situation for you.

Imagine that Walmart founder Sam Walton, on one of his unannounced visits to a company store, had found some executive running a criminal scheme out of the back room.

Asses would have been kicked.

For a conventional business, even a large one, the appearance of honesty and a clear offer of a win-win deal is vital.

Now that you’re picturing that, compare that to how the CEOs of Meta and Google have reacted to the FBI search ad fraud warning and the Facebook scam saga.

Crickets.

Why?

Those are bad news for a few news cycles, but could turn into never waste a crisis opportunities to build reputation for an advertising business in the same way that the Bill Gates Trustworthy Computing email launched a reputation-building effort for a software business.

But we’re not talking about Microsoft or Walmart here. It’s not that reputation is unimportant to Google and Meta. But the reputation they’re going for is a little different, and more like the kind of reputation-building that other criminal organizations do. They don’t intend to send a message that they’re an honest counterparty in a fair market. If that were the goal, Google’s go-to response to adtech antitrust cases wouldn’t be, well, actually, our [some adtech crime thing] isn’t doing crimes—regulators and competitors just aren’t smart enough to understand why it’s not doing crimes. An actual fair market depends on both ends of a deal understanding the deal well enough to be confident in it. Big Tech’s reputation-building goal is more intended to establish a different kind of reputation:

  • We are powerful enough to do crimes and get away with it

  • We have friends in high places

Jonathan Bellack covers how safety investments must contend with other uses of capital at Big Tech firms. But that doesn’t explain why some code and policy decisions at Meta and Google are set up to give an advantage to scams even at some cost to the company involved.

Once you understand Big Tech’s real reputation-building goals, the decision to sponsor the White House’s “Epstein Ballroom” looks like a no-brainer. It’s a relatively cheap signal that Meta and Google are in the crime is legal now club. And a company in the club can, for example, demand that taxpayers clean up the mess created by its own ad system while taking only token action.

For Big Tech, the crime isn’t about oversight or understaffing. It’s a flex. Considering the extent to which the quasi-state ad duopoly has the whole regulatory capture thing sewn up, I guess the next step is private right of action.