Requirement for Publishers to be listed in the supply chain?

[hillslatt]

While it is agreed that all third parties should be listed, there is an open debate around wether or not 1st party publisher technology should be listed in the supply chain.Discuss.

[bmayd]

A principal value of the schain is that maps commercial accountability by identifying supply-chain relationship owners; in other words, the business entities that have contractual responsibility for what bid requests contain and who they are sent to. Put simply: the schain tells participants who to contact to resolve supply-path problems. Technology vendors and service providers acting strictly on behalf of principals should be excluded from the schain object: if there are problems with bid requests supply partners don't contact Prebid, they contact the publisher or SSP who configured and deployed Prebid.js wrapper.

If we want to ask participants to provide information about the technologies and service providers they are employing, I think it should be:

• Extended to all participants, not just publishers.
• Captured in a separate ORTB structure outside schain.
• Deferred and pursued after version 1.1 is complete to give us time to stabilize the hp=0 update and evaluate the impact of it before expanding scope.

[ChrisBasis]

The value is supply chain completeness, not per-impression technology attribution, so we should avoid listing first-party tech as schain nodes.
I would propose instead an optional ads.txt variable letting a publisher declare the technology for a respective seller ID.

[sryan-tviq]

@ChrisBasis I agree. This dovetails with the expanded domain definitions TVIQ proposed several weeks ago. Especially in the CTV space, there are too many nuanced relationships between publisher and seller for a narrow owner/manager defintion. Extending these defintions into the schain creates more transparency & control without limiting the seller's choices for who they sell to. Schain initiatives should account for who the seller wants to sell to as much as where the buyer wants to buy.