The open internet needs open identity

A streaming platform was racing to promote a new series. The plan sounded simple: Reach lapsed viewers, avoid current subscribers and measure lift across CTV, social and display. But execution was anything but simple. Each partner needed different identifiers. CTV required residential IP addresses to match against, social platforms needed hashed emails and phone numbers, and display matched on MAIDs and alternative IDs. Plus, every connection required passing data through an expensive middleman and setup required weeks of data engineering that ate into the campaign calendar. By the time the campaigns went live, the show was old news and the audience had moved on.

That’s the open internet at its worst: pay‑to‑pass identity gates that crank up cost, pile on busywork and slow everything down.

The fix is open identity: consented IDs that you control, sent over direct APIs, portable across partners (not welded to one vendor) and transparent enough to audit. When identity flows freely and directly, campaigns ship faster, more budget reaches people instead of tolls and brands and publishers stay in control.

Now is the time for open identity

A few quiet shifts have tipped the balance, making open identity not just an idea but a reality. The shift away from cookies toward first-party data has produced a deep bench of identity providers, making core identity data broadly accessible and reasonably priced.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure is finally catching up. APIs and standardized data sharing across publishers, SSPs and DSPs are maturing. The market now accepts that brand first‑party data is the backbone of effective advertising, and it has to be easy to activate. On the demand side, marketers live in a world where campaigns can be up and running in hours, not quarters. They expect the same from ad tech: configure, click, go. The gap between expectation and reality is forcing change.

What ‘open’ actually means

Think of open identity as your brand’s reusable keycard: valid at every door, no concierge required and you can see every swipe.

Start with the cost of access. In a closed system, privacy-conscious identity comes bundled with premiums and gatekeeping. You pay extra for every new use case — audience activation, conversion APIs, measurement logs — even though the identity data is all the same. In an open model, privacy tools are widely available (often open source with options like UID2), and the economics are sane. You don’t pay three times to do one thing. You make a single investment and use it wherever you’re permitted to use it.

Then there’s ease of access. Closed systems treat every activation like a mini‑IT project, with bespoke engineering to get data in and a complex setup to get data out. On top of the vendor fees, you pay an IT tax. In an open world, the simplest description is also the truest: You send a consented identifier straight from the brand’s source of truth to the SSP, DSP or publisher — cutting out the bloat and simplifying the identity supply chain so it finally just works. Fewer handoffs. Fewer surprises. Fewer meetings about meetings.

Portability is what makes it work. Closed systems weld identity to their own tech. If you buy the ID, you’re buying the stack, the graph, and the rules that come with it. In an open ecosystem, identity is decoupled from execution. Your customer data can travel across platforms and partners while keeping privacy intact, so you aren’t locked into any given platform.

Finally, transparency. Too many identity graphs are still black boxes. Providers can’t explain how they work. You can’t tune them and you can’t audit them when numbers don’t add up. With open identity, transparency is a feature, not a favor.

What a more open world looks like

When identity is open, value flows to the people making the content, products and audiences — not the rent-seekers who relabel the same data. The pace changes too. Campaigns move from weeks or months of setup to days of iteration. Results get closer to real time, so you adjust while it still matters.

With open identity, the middle layer of third-party identity becomes optional instead of mandatory. Brands can work directly with SSPs, DSPs and publishers. In this new world, costs are predictable and realistic, and brands keep control of how consented data moves.

Execution speeds up and gets steadier too. Teams launch, learn and adjust data-driven campaigns while the moment still matters. And measurement gets cleaner. You can see what matched where and why, and you can fix issues quickly.

In short, the market shifts from rent-seeking and wrestling with data plumbing to focusing on creative, performance and outcomes — exactly what an open internet promises.

The path forward

A world built on open identity doesn’t require a revolution so much as each brand and publisher making a series of choices. Pick portable identifiers. Reject targeting tolls. Keep identity separate from execution so you can negotiate each on its merits. Demand transparency so you can debug and improve. If you believe in the open internet, choose an identity strategy that behaves like it too: easy to access, full of choices and transparent to everyone.

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.