For years, AT&T and its primary competitor Verizon have looked green-eyed at the ballooning advertising revenues of Silicon Valley. Combined, Facebook and Google control more than half of the $88 billion digital advertising market in the US, and both account for around 90 percent of its growth. Digital advertising now surpasses TV advertising as the largest sector of the market.

Telecoms don’t just see those companies’ domination of digital media, social networking, and search as an existential threat. Facebook and Google have dabbled in becoming internet service providers, and they both control global, distributed communications networks. Entities like AT&T also see digital advertising as a lucrative and untapped market it can uniquely compete in, thanks to the troves of user data it’s collected over the years.

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