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As a result of recent Department of Justice actions, the nearly $300 billion-a-year U.S. digital advertising landscape is poised to undergo its most consequential transformation in a generation.
If we take this opportunity to build smarter—and many advertisers and publishers are already planning to do this—the open internet will reemerge as the world’s most dynamic marketplace for ideas, information, and commerce. This shift isn’t theoretical—it’s a direct result of regulatory balance, renewed technological innovation, and an industrywide demand for fairness.
Why this moment matters
For over a decade, monopolistic practices have distorted pricing, limited choice, and stifled innovation in digital advertising. Publishers lost control of their revenue streams, advertisers lacked transparency, and consumers endured a fractured web experience, to say the least. Now, with barriers coming down, publishers can finally take back control of their revenue strategies, unlocking new opportunities to reinvest in delivering great ad-supported content across the open internet.
The recent court ruling against Google’s anticompetitive adtech practices marks a watershed moment, foretelling the dismantling of gatekeeping systems that prioritize scale over fairness and transparency. By addressing exclusionary conduct and dominant control, the DOJ has reaffirmed a fundamental truth: Transparency and open competition are nonnegotiable pillars of a healthy internet.
The advertiser’s advantage
Even though focus has been primarily placed on the publisher side of the business, it’s advertisers who stand to gain the most from this new era. And while we brace ourselves for a lengthy appeals process, the publishers and buyers that can make quick and incremental changes will.
Three shifts will define leadership in this new era:
- Supply diversification: Buyers will prioritize supply paths and curation offering unbiased and direct access to premium inventory, reducing reliance on opaque platforms and unleashing both innovation and competition.
- AI-driven efficiency: Open ecosystems, free from data silos, will leverage AI to optimize campaigns, detect fraud, and measure performance with unprecedented precision. The industry should also expect to see novel, proprietary AI-driven innovations being developed. Those that move to adopt these tools quickly will gain an edge.
- Transparency mandates: Industrywide fairness will outrun the black boxes. Initiatives like the IAB’s Programmatic Fee Transparency Calculator will expose hidden costs, ensuring advertisers pay for value—not hops.
The result? Brands will achieve better ROI and funnel ad dollars directly into publishers where quality content thrives, all while using the most innovative and transparent adtech platforms to do it.
Safeguarding the future from new monopolies
Big Tech players aren’t the only ones that should be learning the lessons handed down by antitrust regulation. To prevent consolidation under another name, the industry needs to embrace:
- A compatible open internet. Keeping the internet open with APIs, data portability, and measurement standardization will be necessary to prevent vendor lock-ins. We saw this in the past with the Microsoft antitrust case, which mandated API access to break browser monopolies. This enabled competitors like Firefox to flourish. It should be easier, not harder, to buy and measure across the full ecosystem; success should be measured by actual performance, not by restrictive practices or system compatibility.
- Actual collaboration. Competition and collaboration aren’t mutually exclusive, and we should be prioritizing the health of the industry (inclusive of competition and innovation) as a means of future-proofing all our businesses. The Great Cookie Deprecation Crisis proved this: When third-party cookies seemingly faced extinction, the industry rallied around alternative IDs, privacy-preserving AI tools, and collaborative testing of multiple solutions. When presented with a challenge (even an imaginary one), the industry rallied, to our joint success.
- Regulatory vigilance, not vigilantism. Antitrust watchdogs should be proactive but informed, particularly as privacy reforms risk becoming the next monopolizing Trojan horse. Let’s be careful where we raise our pitchforks next, as we risk a future where “privacy” becomes a luxury only Big Tech can afford to provide, replicating the very gatekeeping dynamics we’re trying to dismantle. (See, for example, recent French antitrust findings against Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework.)
The road ahead
The opening up of walled gardens isn’t the end of collaboration—it’s the start of smarter partnerships. Independent retail media networks like Instacart and Intuit, for example, drive meaningful business outside of the Amazon loop by leveraging open internet demand and monetizing data without sacrificing exclusivity or privacy, proving that closed ecosystems can coexist with transparent infrastructure. Social platforms, too, are increasingly collaborating with independent tech partners to monetize open internet budgets, signaling a $100 billion opportunity for neutral intermediaries.
Despite the company names and jargon involved, the changes ahead won’t just impact adtech—they’ll impact the internet as we know it. If handled right, the next steps we take as an industry will reposition the open internet as the force it should have been all along for economic mobility, cultural exchange, and free expression. The stakes are too high to settle for less.
The open internet isn’t just surviving—it’s thriving. And its best days lie ahead.
