[eykanal]

Because the theoretical "free market" is nothing like what actually happens in practice. The Economist had a great writeup on this a few days ago [1], but the short of it is that Google is the definitive market leader, with almost no one in second place. Moving to a different network is simply accepting that your ads will perform worse.

Additionally, responding to outright fraud by Google with the statement "move elsewhere" is a pretty incredible admission of the power they have. They can abuse their near-monopoly of the market with almost no fear of reprisal.

[1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/01/ec...

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EDIT: Just saw your below comment that you were trying to be sarcastic. Ah well, it was apparently lost on me.

[TeMPOraL]

Indeed, and that is precisely my point.

And this applies not just to Google - but also to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and probably few others, as proven by the amount of such stories popping up on HN in the past few years.

[voidlogic]

>They can abuse their near-monopoly of the market with almost no fear of reprisal.

What checkbox isn't Google checking to be hit by anti-trust action for its ad networks?

[lovich]

The government doesn't seem to prosecute those cases anymore. Internet ISP's with their geographically bound actual physical monopolies would be an even stronger case but you don't hear anything from the feds about prosecuting those companies either