[wannabag]

Funny enough that Google is exactly in that position. Google owns a company called double click who does adword bidding optimization in between other things. As I work in the business, one thing that is clear is that the only way to do that efficiently is to keep track of conversion data. This puts Google in a highly unfair position since they manage the auction and own the data which drives the auction. That said, this is not even close to what Google knows about businesses in general...

[timthelion]

But the really interesting thing is not what Google can do with the ad exchange. But what they can do with that ad buy data in order to reconstruct the sales numbers for a company and unfairly play the derivitives markets around it's earnings call. When I say unfairly, I mean that ONLY google is privy to such knowlege. If there is any reason to think that insider trading is wrong, then Google would be similarly in the wrong here.