Six items today, and they're all basically the same story wearing different colorful clothes: an institution tells you it's not doing the thing it's doing, and the paper trail says otherwise. S4 Capital, the FTC, the FCC, a federal appeals court, NBC News, and one sell-side ad tech founder all made a claim about who's really losing money, or who's really in control, this week.

Most of them don't survive the second paragraph.

Three former CitrusByte/TheoremOne executives filed suit in Delaware Superior Court alleging S4 Capital owes at least $7 million in withheld escrow plus undelivered stock from the 2022 acquisition of their company. S4's stated justification traces back to a single incentive-pay dispute filed by Yoav Cohen, worth two-thirds of $940,000, dismissed with prejudice about a week after it landed in March 2025.

Here's what didn't make the trade coverage: S4 itself promoted Cohen to president of CitrusByte/TheoremOne in August 2022, months after the acquisition closed. That makes his dispute a liability S4 created after the deal, not one it inherited before it, which is the whole spine of the founders' contract argument. The hold is eleven times the size of the claim it's supposedly covering, and it's not an isolated mechanism. S4 has more than 20 other legacy earnout deals built on the same structure, which means the same lever exists everywhere else it's already promised money to people who sold it their companies. S4 has not filed a formal court response and declined to comment.

The FTC proposed an enforcement policy Wednesday saying companies using personal data to set individualized prices need to disclose it when consumers wouldn't expect it, citing scenarios like a hotel charging more to someone it believes is traveling for a funeral. The agency says it lacks authority to ban the practice outright but intends to "enforce aggressively" against nondisclosure under Section 5.

The part worth remembering: this same agency spent early 2025 collecting public input on surveillance pricing under Lina Khan, then withdrew the request for information within days of Andrew Ferguson taking over. The current proposal arrives as states move faster than Washington. New Jersey banned data-driven grocery pricing outright last month. New York's disclosure law is currently being challenged by the National Retail Federation on First Amendment grounds, with the 2nd Circuit still deciding. Consumer Reports, which caught Instacart charging three different prices for the same energy bars at the same Seattle store, wants an outright ban. The FTC gave them a form to fill out instead.

ABC sued the FCC Tuesday over an early license review of eight ABC-owned stations, calling it an "intolerable situation" where every editorial decision now carries the risk of losing a broadcast license years ahead of schedule. FCC Chair Brendan Carr says the review, opened one day after Trump demanded Jimmy Kimmel's firing, isn't about content.

ABC's own filing says otherwise, and it's specific about it: the network admits it livestreamed Trump's July 16 address, something it "ordinarily would not have done," because it was weighing how the FCC chairman might react if it didn't. That's not a company describing a hypothetical chilling effect. That's a company describing a decision it already made under the threat. The FCC is also reviewing whether "The View" violated equal-time rules for a Senate candidate interview, a question its own Media Bureau settled in 2002. Sole Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez called it a "campaign of censorship and control." The FCC's spokesperson says it's just following the facts.

Amazon asked the 9th Circuit for a full-panel rehearing Tuesday after a three-judge panel ruled Perplexity's Comet assistant can keep shopping on Amazon.com, finding that it's the user, not Perplexity, who "accesses" Amazon's servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Amazon's rebuttal names the actual mechanic the panel glossed over: a user asks for "paper towels," and it's Perplexity's reasoning layer, not the user, that decides to enter the Amazon store, present stored credentials, and click through checkout. "Perplexity made all the decisions and took all the actions," Amazon writes, arguing the user never chose to visit Amazon at all, only to ask for an outcome. The panel's theory works fine for a browser extension that clicks where you tell it to. It gets shakier once the thing making the purchasing decisions is the same company that also, per its "reasoning layer," has products of its own to make money on.

Taboola announced Wednesday that NBC News is expanding a decade-old relationship into an exclusive deal: Taboola's Realize platform now handles all of NBC News's global programmatic display advertising, across NBCNews.com and TODAY.com, with Taboola as the only outside vendor NBC's automated ad sales run through. NBCUniversal News Group has been a Taboola native-ad partner since at least 2016. Taboola CEO Adam Singolda called it the future of advertising on the open web.

What that glosses over has NBC's own byline on it. Years before Taboola's format had a name people threw around casually, msnbc.com ran a piece coining the term "the fakeosphere" to describe the economy of fake blogs, fake testimonials, and fake news sites built to sell products, citing an internet-marketing analyst who pegged the industry at $500 million a year even then and flagging that the FTC considered fake blog testimonials a form of false advertising. Taboola's chumbox, the bottom-of-article grid of lurid thumbnails trade press has called clickbait for a decade, is the direct commercial descendant of exactly what that story warned readers about. NBC's own reporting once treated this ecosystem as a story to investigate. This week, its business side put its entire display inventory behind the company that scaled it.

CTV supply-chain opacity usually gets framed as a buy-side headache, advertisers unable to see what they're actually bidding on. Shinka founder Kieran Greene says that framing has it backwards. The bigger cost, he argues, lands on publishers, who leave 20 to 40 percent of potential revenue on the table when bid requests go out malformed or missing the signals the buy side would pay more for.

Greene traces the problem to his time at Google, where AdX's ties to Google Ad Manager meant publishers couldn't run auctions he'd call genuinely fair or transparent. The deeper issue, per Greene, is architectural rather than malicious: vertically integrated ad stacks do the enrichment and translation work for their own tied exchange and nobody else, which quietly starves every other demand path of bid density and pushes CPMs down. He also says opacity sometimes benefits advertisers directly, since fuller signals would occasionally reveal they got a bargain. One caveat before this runs: Greene runs the company selling the fix, and no publisher or buy-side source independently confirms the 20-40 percent figure here.

How we reported this: This issue draws on court filings and litigation documents (the CitrusByte founders' Delaware Superior Court suit against S4 Capital), primary regulatory and agency materials (the FTC's proposed personalized-pricing enforcement policy, ABC's federal complaint against the FCC), original appellate filings (Amazon's 9th Circuit rehearing petition against Perplexity), company disclosures and SEC-filed financials (Taboola's FY2025 results and 2026 guidance), one archived 2009 msnbc.com investigative piece and a 2020 peer-reviewed academic study on native-ad quality for the NBC/Taboola item, and a single vendor interview for the Shinka CTV piece, which carries no independent verification of its central revenue-uplift figure and is flagged as such in that section; figures attributed to a company or executive are that party's own disclosed numbers unless otherwise noted, not independently audited by ADOTAT, and right-of-reply outreach for the NBC/Taboola piece specifically was still outstanding as of this draft.