Reading the various horror stories in here, clearly there is an opportunity for a startup to make lots of cash and clean house in this space. It sounds like Google arbitrarily are jerks just for the fun of it. Displacing them should be a piece of cake -- post your new ad network on HN and see the network effect kick in as it takes over the net.

Or maybe Google actually has a difficult problem they are dealing with, which is a market with endless ranks of scammers and shady con artists (some of whom will colour their story to make them a victim, posting it in HN).