The governance fight

Ricky Sutton's stage with Paul Fletcher in Madrid is the sharpest statement yet of where the money actually comes from. Fletcher's News Media Bargaining Code extracted more than AU$200 million a year from Google and Meta, not by winning a copyright argument but by writing the code into competition law and holding political resolve "led from the very top". The platforms folded only after Australia proved it would not blink, and the single detail that explains the whole fight is the scale: the ask was two-hundredths of one per cent of Google and Meta's revenue. The successor law is now a tax, 2.75% of digital ad revenue, with no deals done to date, which means the same platforms that paid when threatened are now testing the walls again. The parallel is exact on the ad-tech side: the DOJ's remedy now forces Google to open AdX to Prebid and share win/loss data, the same shift from market power to enforceable rules.

The AI extraction squeeze

Meta's 30 October terms change is the moment the content question stops being theoretical. By extending scraping consent to every website linked from a business account, Meta has written itself a route around licensing, and the News/Media Alliance's Danielle Coffey has already named it as a bad-faith abuse of market power. It lands on the same revenue line that search traffic is already evacuating: The Independent's social-commerce revenue has passed SEO commerce for the first time, and The Verge has rebuilt its audience team around newsletters, registration and direct readers precisely because the referred audience is gone. The scraper economy makes the stakes concrete: a multi-billion-dollar automated harvest against which 76% of publishers now license content, meaning the publishers still "waiting and seeing" are the ones being harvested for free.

The agentic re-plumbing

The buying side is being rebuilt at the same moment. PurePlay's Eric Steigelfest wants to move buying from spray-and-pray to outcome guarantees by curating inventory inside the SSP before it reaches a DSP, Minerva's Jackson Engles is absorbing the CDP into an agent layer that resolves identity and automates the marketing stack, and Boathouse's Sonia Chung is warning that the measurement now being automated is not automatically trustworthy, the same data produced 75% and under-1% answers. The through-line for a publisher is the same in all three: whoever controls the outcome signal and the first-party identity captures the margin, and the only asset that grants a publisher a seat at that table is direct, logged-in, data-rich audience.