We don’t usually report rumors and this item is a couple of days old.  But it’s huge news so I wanted you to see it.  The specific item is that, to avert EU anti-trust action, Alphabet may drop its requirement that YouTube ads be placed through its Ad Manager and Google Ads products.  What makes it huge is the implication that regulators may finally start to take serious action against Big Tech monopolies.

At $4+ billion revenue, Shopify is big but not Big Tech.  But it’s taking a page from the Big Tech playbook with Audiences, which will aggregate customer behaviors from participating merchants to develop target audiences that can then reached through Facebook and LinkedIn.  The new feature will help to overcome the loss in targeting capabilities resulting from Apple’s tighter privacy rules.  

CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million.  It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge.  (See this blog post for more analysis.)