Regulation looks backward

The Google remedies are the clearest example of the industry's centre of gravity moving while the law tries to catch up. Judge Brinkema's ruling forces interoperability into a desktop-era stack, AdX and DFP, just as Digiday's Ronan Shields notes that the proportion of AdWords impressions flowing into traditional display collapsed from over 40% in 2019 to 11% in 2025. The remedies apply to "open web display advertising," a market that is shrinking relative to CTV, video, retail media and, above all, AI. Danielle Coffey will take the accountability, but Scott Messer's read, that AdWords will still work better inside GAM and AdX, is the honest forecast. The law has finally won against Google, and the industry has already moved on to building the next closed loop.

The new platforms close the loop

While regulators pry open one vertically integrated stack, the AI platforms are assembling their own. Amazon opened ChatGPT inventory through its DSP to select US advertisers, and OpenAI's click-to-chat format means an ad no longer has to send a user anywhere; discovery, recommendation, advertising and the transaction can all happen inside ChatGPT. OpenAI is already self-preferencing, cutting off ChatGPT ads for Adobe and other image and voice products that rival its own. The Comscore numbers land on top of this: Gemini and Claude are taking share from ChatGPT precisely because they are bundled into Google, Android and Workspace, pulling in mainstream users who never went looking for a chatbot. Publishers are confronting the same shift from the other side, and the phrase used at Digiday's Publishing Summit is "Google Zero."

Consolidation is the honest response

If the open web's value is being squeezed, the answer from ad tech is to buy the scarce bits that still command a premium. Taboola is paying up to £27 million for a finance ad network; Infillion is acquiring location infrastructure; 33Across is rebranding into a finance-only platform. Every one of these moves is a bet that vertical data, finance, location, commerce, is the moat now that generic programmatic supply is a commodity. The same instinct shows up in the sell-side curation story, where Permutive and TransUnion are trying to make publisher first-party data portable enough to survive the cookie collapse. The buyers are consolidating around signal; the publishers who own the signal are the ones with leverage.

Trust becomes the product

The third thread is that attention and trust are being formalised into sellable inventory. Substack is pitching brands on the depth of its writers at the moment creator spend crosses $44 billion; Semafor is rebuilding video as an editorial-commercial product; creators are trying to negotiate like TV networks, with the top one percent imposing scarcity. Hearst UK's return to growth, driven by a million subscriptions and double-digit digital ad growth after years of decline, is the same story from the publisher side. The open web is not dead, but the value is concentrating in whoever owns a durable, trusted relationship with an audience, and everyone is racing to formalise that into a line item.