The case for the Open Internet.

More than one industry friend has said some version of this to me over the last year: the Open Internet may not be the cause it once was. Often, they’ve followed that assertion with something even more pointed like—TTD should rethink the cause it stands for.

Here in the final quarter of 2026—with the AI world we’re shaping—the Open Internet is essential for a healthy global infrastructure. If we are not intentional about the world that we create, we may end up with a world that won’t feel like progress in retrospect.

The concept of the Open Internet is bigger than just display advertising or what happens in a browser. This is a discussion that is also bigger than the walled garden versus Open Internet discussion that we’ve been having for the last 20 years. It is bigger than ad tech. It is bigger than advertising. It is bigger than AI. And it is bigger than The Trade Desk. It is about the well-being of society.

As we head toward another major transition of the media landscape with AI — it’s another opportunity to re-examine why the Open Internet is still so important.

The foundational issue at play is not technological. It is how we, as a global society, manage information, power and ideas.

For those of us that shape the internet, the discussions and decisions before us are really about the economics of ideas and marketplace design. It’s about who makes money from sharing ideas wrapped in stories—whether in a hit song, an award-winning movie or cover-story journalism.

An Open Internet is a particular marketplace design that recognizes that distributed power is safer than concentrated power. An Open Internet is a modern technologically powered marketplace of ideas.

The world is full of ideas—some good, some bad—but most ideas never make it onto a stage or a screen. They are exchanged on the subway, over dinner, at coffee shops and in conference rooms. But a very small minority of ideas cause thousands, or millions, or even billions of people to shift their world view.

The greatest books, films, movies, songs and journalism wrestle with tough concepts because that is how we change humanity—we consider ideas. We consider them carefully, embracing the good ones and learning from the bad ones. We wrestle with them. Most academy award winning films take on hard concepts—war and freedom, equality and discrimination, power and vulnerability, and the downfall of nations and the rise of others. By considering ideas, we test them, we refine them and we internalize them. We refine our values. And media in turn, refines us.

The marketplace of ideas is the place where good and bad ideas compete to survive. Polished ideas reach scale through premium mass media. And premium mass media is essential for humanity to have a marketplace of ideas where people can pay to make an idea or concept considered widely. But it has a lot of costs. From actors, to writers, to directors, to editors, to crew, to promotion costs—this all requires media companies like Fox, Peacock, Spotify, Paramount, Netflix and others to spend billions of dollars a year on content.

Since the inception of the internet—the vehicle for these ideas—there has been a power struggle over control. Most antitrust cases of the last few decades involve the most powerful internet companies and how they limit competition and consumer access to information, ideas and media.

The power brokers of mass media have always flirted with having too much power.  Or maybe they’ve always had too much power.

However, the power concentrated in Michael Eisner, or Oprah, or Clive Davis, or Rupert Murdoch, or Abe Rosenthal seem small in comparison to some of the tech, media, and AI company CEOs of today. From another angle, the Open Internet is the way to minimize the power concentration of monetizing and controlling media.

Not that long ago, someone would write a book, promote it, sell it, and profit from the ideas. Today, LLMs can read the book in a second and answer anything about it. Our “progress” has disincentivized younger generations from reading books, and this system of ingesting ideas, data, and IP is also disincentivizing people from even writing books.

These systemic risks are growing due to some AI companies and their business models. So, stopping the power grab of the world’s youngest big tech companies is more important now than ever.

Decentralization creates competition. It thrives on it. In an Open Internet, consumers win. Like democracy, the Open Internet distributes the power so no one player can be draconian, and ideas can be monetized by new players.

The Open Internet allows for competition that facilitates the marketplace of ideas. Advertising is generally the engine that funds its progress.

IBM was once the tech giant that MSFT later became. Google took the baton from them as the player who controlled the gateway to the world’s information. With a new power system being implemented due to AI, we will once again reshuffle who will control it. But we must first acknowledge what history has repeatedly shown us—that power concentration almost always leads to elevated human suffering and anemic economic structures.

In a centralized system, where power is concentrated, there are a few players that control the marketplace of ideas, and their leverage (even over governments) is high enough that they can charge rent. This has always been the case, and AI efficiencies make it even easier. Walled Gardens are tech giants like Amazon and Google that are trying to scale systems that are centralized, closed, proprietary and opaque. In Google’s case, their content is provided by users, and ultimately, owned by Google.  Their cost of goods sold is close to zero, so the margins are great.

They own your ideas, and your media. They monetize it how they want. What they share with you (if anything) is a black box. They make up their own self-serving rules for measurement, so they can tell you it’s all working. Independence is the only way to credibly promise advertisers that their insights stay theirs.

No player has been more powerful in controlling the internet than Google (even with seemingly minor setbacks like losing more than a few antitrust and anti-competitive cases around the world). Google’s business model centers around advertising. So does Meta’s.  Amazon’s fastest growing scaled business is advertising.

Advertising may be the kingpin that determines the fate of the Open Internet. And there is no way for media companies to avoid the advertising business.

Right now, time spent is weighted towards the Open Internet. People gravitate to the best of music, movies, TV, sports and journalism—the premium content.  And in an AI world, human stories of struggle are even more important.

However, advertising spend is currently weighted towards the Walled Gardens. Walled Gardens make it easy to spend, reach is cheap, the supply chains are simple, and their self-serving measurement metrics always suggest that it is worth it. But this is about improving access or quality.

Because premium content is expensive and user-generated content (UGC) is not (at least for the Googles, Metas and TikToks of the world)—the fate of Netflix, Disney and others depend on this balance being rightsized.

By this reasoning, advertisers determine the future of the Open Internet.

In the next few years, the die will once again be cast, determining the fate of the Open Internet. And the stakes seem higher than our previous turns.

At the core of a thriving Open Internet is a marketplace of ideas fueled by advertising. It is one that has a thriving Netflix, Paramount, Spotify, Peacock, Fox, Sky, NYT, WSJ and so many others. Without it, stand-alone scaled media companies do not exist. Journalism is struggling now, but it will be worse without an Open Internet.

The most plausible worst-case scenario is an oligopoly where a few warring and evolved Walled Gardens control information and idea monetization in a way we’ve never had.  In this dystopia, media companies are anemic and paying rent to a few tech companies who became the gatekeepers for the marketplace of ideas—first by indexing the world’s information and then by just taking it.

What is most important to remember is that the fate of the Open Internet is determined by the Fortune 500 and the 493-ish of them that comprise the minority of market cap, for now. What they do with their data, who owns their data, and whether they buy premium media (because it performs better) is central to the future of the Open Internet and a distributed power system in an increasingly complex world of supply.

The bottom line—the Open Internet is more important than ever.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.