Jeff Green, founder and chief executive of The Trade Desk, today published a long essay arguing that the open internet matters more in an AI economy than it did before, and that the largest advertisers will decide whether it survives. "The case for the Open Internet." is the opening piece of a relaunched version of The Current, a news and opinion site owned and operated by The Trade Desk, which Green said will now carry several op-eds a week from industry leaders, most of them from outside the company. The essay names Google and Amazon as walled gardens, warns that a handful of companies are positioned to charge everyone else rent, and cites no figures on where advertising money goes.

In Short

The boss of The Trade Desk, a company whose software buys ads on websites, apps and streaming TV outside the giant platforms, wrote an essay saying a few big tech and AI companies should not control how people find and pay for news, music and shows. He argues that big advertisers decide which way this goes, because their money pays for much of that content. It is an opinion from a company with a direct financial stake in the answer, published on a site that company owns, at a time when its own quarterly revenue is forecast to fall.

What Green published, and where

Green announced the essay in a LinkedIn post. "I've heard from friends in the industry that the Open Internet isn't the cause it used to be. A few went further and said The Trade Desk should rethink it," he wrote. "I think they're wrong, so I wrote down why."

The essay opens with the same anecdote in sharper form. "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," Green wrote. Some of those friends, according to the essay, followed up with something more pointed: "TTD should rethink the cause it stands for." TTD is The Trade Desk's ticker on Nasdaq. The byline describes Green as "CEO, Founder & Chairman, The Trade Desk," and a line at the foot of the page reads: "The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc."

The LinkedIn post presents the essay as the start of a new format. "Writing the piece reminded me of how rarely the people behind this industry get room to lay out their full reasoning. Most of what gets said publicly comes in pieces too short to show the thinking behind it," Green wrote. "That's what the new version of The Current, which launched today, is for." He added: "Every week it will carry multiple op-eds from industry leaders, most of them outside The Trade Desk. Their pieces start rolling out this week." The post does not name the contributors, say how many pieces "multiple" means, or describe how the outside op-eds will be edited or selected.

Outside opinion is not new to the site. The essay page links to an op-ed dated October 19 by Tim Brown, co-founder and chief executive of Fiducia, on optimising programmatic supply before scaling it through curation, and to a piece by Karsten Weide dated September 3 headlined "Google lost the antitrust case. Then, somehow, it won it anyway." Green has also used the site before to set out the company's position. His contributor page lists an essay on Google's Privacy Sandbox from January 17, 2024, a piece on the state of the open internet from June 11, 2025, a two-part series on the open internet published on September 30 and October 2, 2025, and a March 6 essay explaining why he bought about $150 million of Trade Desk shares.

Bigger than a browser

The essay's first move is to widen the definition of what is at stake. "The concept of the Open Internet is bigger than just display advertising or what happens in a browser," Green wrote. The LinkedIn post is blunter: "Part of the problem is that most people still picture the Open Internet as display ads in a browser. That's a small piece of it."

From there the scope expands in a run of short sentences. "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." The core issue, according to Green, "is not technological. It is how we, as a global society, manage information, power and ideas."

The essay frames the internet as a market for stories. For the people who build it, Green wrote, the decisions ahead are "about the economics of ideas and marketplace design," meaning who makes money from ideas carried in a hit song, an award-winning film or a magazine cover story. "An Open Internet is a particular marketplace design that recognizes that distributed power is safer than concentrated power," he wrote, and "a modern technologically powered marketplace of ideas."

Premium content sits at the centre of the model. "Polished ideas reach scale through premium mass media," according to the essay, and the cost of actors, writers, directors, editors, crews and promotion "requires media companies like Fox, Peacock, Spotify, Paramount, Netflix and others to spend billions of dollars a year on content." No content budget figures are given.

Green does not exempt the old media industry from his concern about concentration. "The power brokers of mass media have always flirted with having too much power. Or maybe they've always had too much power," he wrote. Even so, by his account, the power once concentrated in Michael Eisner, Oprah, Clive Davis, Rupert Murdoch or Abe Rosenthal looks "small in comparison to some of the tech, media, and AI company CEOs of today."

The book nobody writes

The sharpest passage concerns AI. "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," Green wrote. "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."

The essay attributes these risks to "some AI companies and their business models" and concludes that "stopping the power grab of the world's youngest big tech companies is more important now than ever." It does not say which companies it means. In the LinkedIn post Green put the same point in commercial terms: "The bigger question is who gets paid for ideas and who controls how people find them, and AI makes it all the more urgent."

The objection is to business models built on large language models, not to the technology itself. The Trade Desk works with AI developers too. At Marketecture Live in March 2026, Green said a closed beta lets advertisers create campaigns in The Trade Desk through Claude, and described prompts in AI chat products as a richer intent signal than the keywords of early search advertising.

The pressure on publishers that the essay describes is visible in recent data. Chartbeat's third-quarter report showed search falling to 12% of North American publisher pageviews in Q3 2026, from 21% a year earlier. The essay's image of gatekeepers that first index content and then take it also lands in the middle of a dispute over Meta's revised Commercial Terms, which add a clause letting Meta crawl, copy and train on websites linked to advertisers' products. Meta says the clause is narrower than critics claim and is aimed at product information. After complaints from publishers to regulators in the EU and the UK, it moved the effective date from October 30 to November 20 without changing the wording.

Google and Amazon, named

Green's definition of a walled garden is direct. "Walled Gardens are tech giants like Amazon and Google that are trying to scale systems that are centralized, closed, proprietary and opaque," he wrote. "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." According to the essay, these companies decide how content is monetised, share data that amounts to "a black box," and "make up their own self-serving rules for measurement." His counterpoint: "Independence is the only way to credibly promise advertisers that their insights stay theirs." The Trade Desk does not sell media of its own and has long presented that independence as the main difference between its demand-side platform and those run by Amazon and Google.

The essay also places Google's legal record in parentheses. "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)," Green wrote. Those setbacks include the April 17, 2025 ruling in which Judge Leonie Brinkema found that Google had illegally monopolised the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display. Her remedies decision on September 2, 2026 spared Google from selling AdX or its DFP ad server and instead required behavioural changes, including making AdX real-time bid data available to rival ad servers, deprecating unified pricing rules, letting publishers set different floors for individual bidders and ending first look and last look on open-web display. In Europe, the Commission adopted two Digital Markets Act non-compliance decisions in July 2026 with fines totalling 890 million euros, 460 million euros for search self-preferencing and 430 million euros for Google Play steering restrictions. Google said it was evaluating an appeal.

One claim in the essay does not match the most recent reported figures. "Google's business model centers around advertising. So does Meta's. Amazon's fastest growing scaled business is advertising," Green wrote. In Amazon's second quarter of 2026, advertising revenue rose 26% to $19.8 billion, while Amazon Web Services grew 36.7% to $42.2 billion, according to Amazon's July 30 results. By that measure the cloud business, not advertising, was the faster grower.

The company not mentioned

Apple does not appear in the essay. That absence is notable because the most direct restriction on The Trade Desk's open-web business this year came from a browser. After Apple released iOS 27 on September 14, 2026, Safari on affected iPhones and iPads stopped loading adsrvr.org, The Trade Desk's ad request and delivery domain, and uidapi.com, the domain tied to Unified ID 2.0, while Google's ad.doubleclick.net kept working. On October 5, Apple asked The Trade Desk to test an iOS 27.2 beta build that may unblock the ad domain. As of PPC Land's October 8 report, whether that change would reach the public release remained unconfirmed. An essay insisting the open internet is about more than "what happens in a browser" arrives six weeks after a browser maker cut The Trade Desk's main ad domain out of Safari.

Time spent, money spent

The essay's economic argument rests on a mismatch that it asserts rather than measures. "Right now, time spent is weighted towards the Open Internet," Green wrote. "However, advertising spend is currently weighted towards the Walled Gardens." He lists the reasons: 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." The next sentence, as published, reads: "But this is about improving access or quality." Its meaning is unclear in context, since the preceding sentence describes ease and cost rather than quality.

No time-spent or ad-spend figures accompany the claim. Other sources support the direction of the spend argument, with one complication. The UK's AA/WARC Expenditure Report put 2025 advertising at 46.7 billion pounds, up 6.4%, and an analysis of those figures found two of every three pounds going to Google, Meta and Amazon. Concentration is also rising inside programmatic buying itself. In data from Guideline, which tracks agency budgets, presented in May 2026, the share held by every DSP outside the four largest fell from 21% in 2022 to 5% in the first quarter of 2026. Google's DV360 rose from 34% to 41%, The Trade Desk from 22% to 31% and Amazon from 14% to 19%, while Yahoo fell from 9% to 5%. On that data, The Trade Desk is itself one of the platforms gaining share from the rest of the open-web buying market, second only to Google.

The essay then ties advertising budgets to the survival of large media companies. "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," Green wrote. The cost gap he describes is the economic difference between platforms that host user-generated content and studios that pay for production. "By this reasoning, advertisers determine the future of the Open Internet."

Netflix, one of the companies named, is also a Trade Desk partner. On October 20, 2026, Netflix and The Trade Desk said advertisers buying Netflix through the Kokai platform would be able to target with third-party data from more than four million segments, and with their own first-party lists, from November. The same day, Netflix cut its 2026 advertising revenue forecast to about $2.7 billion from roughly $3 billion.

The Fortune 500, or the 493

The essay's conclusion turns on the biggest advertisers. "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," Green wrote. "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 number appears to borrow from a market shorthand. The S&P 493 is a common label for the S&P 500 index minus its seven largest technology stocks, which together account for a large share of the index's value. The Fortune 500, the list the essay names, ranks US companies by revenue rather than by market capitalisation. The essay does not say which list it means. Nor does it offer evidence for the parenthetical claim that premium media "performs better."

What happens if advertisers do not move? "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," according to Green. He describes "the most plausible worst-case scenario" as "an oligopoly where a few warring and evolved Walled Gardens control information and idea monetization in a way we've never had." In that outcome, he wrote, "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."

The open internet he wants preserved "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 essay ends on a single line: "The bottom line - the Open Internet is more important than ever."

The Trade Desk's year, which the essay leaves out

Beyond the anecdote about friends urging TTD to rethink its cause, the essay names The Trade Desk once, as one of the things the issue is "bigger than." It does not refer to the company's results, its disputes with agencies or the Safari block, and it does not say why those friends had doubts. The year in which those conversations took place looked like this.

In February 2026, Adweek reported that Dentsu and WPP had quietly exited OpenPath, The Trade Desk's direct publisher supply route, citing fees and transparency. In March, Publicis told clients to stop transacting on the platform after an audit by FirmDecisions, the Ebiquity-owned compliance firm, found that The Trade Desk had applied its DSP fee to other fees and enrolled clients in fee-based products without documented authorisation. The Trade Desk disputed the findings. The two companies issued a joint statement on June 12, 2026 that resolved the dispute without saying what had changed. The essay's criticism of walled gardens that "make up their own self-serving rules for measurement" comes from a company that spent part of this year answering a holding company's questions about its own fees.

In the same month, on March 5, Green announced the roughly $150 million share purchase, at a point when the stock had fallen about 65% from its peak. Then came the second-quarter results on August 6. Revenue rose 3% to $715 million, and the company guided third-quarter revenue to at least $650 million, about 12% below the $739 million of a year earlier. Shares fell 24.22% after hours to $13.39. Green attributed the shortfall to pressure on large consumer packaged goods and automotive advertisers, which supply about a quarter of platform spend, and acknowledged that the company had not executed as well as it could have. On September 4, The Trade Desk cut about 575 jobs, roughly 15% of its workforce. Ten days later, iOS 27 shipped.

Why this matters for marketers

The essay is addressed, in the end, to the people who control budgets. Its central request is that the largest advertisers weigh who owns their data and whether to buy premium open-internet media. That is also the decision on which The Trade Desk's revenue depends, since the company earns fees on spend that passes through its platform. The essay acknowledges its author's position only in passing, by telling readers the issue is bigger than his company.

The essay supports its case with reasoning and historical examples rather than data. There are no figures on time spent, no comparison of performance between premium media and walled-garden inventory, and no named AI companies. The claim about Amazon's fastest-growing business does not match Amazon's latest quarterly figures. Several of the trends it describes are nonetheless documented elsewhere: the concentration of ad spend in the UK, the shrinking share of search referrals to publishers, the consolidation of programmatic buying into four platforms, and the dispute over Meta's crawling terms.

The relaunch of The Current matters too. A publication owned by a buying platform will now carry weekly op-eds from executives across the industry. The site discloses its ownership in a line at the foot of each page. Green's post does not say whether it will run pieces that argue against The Trade Desk's positions. The first outside contributions are due this week.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Jeff Green, founder, chief executive and chairman of The Trade Desk, writing in The Current, a news and opinion site owned and operated by The Trade Desk. The essay names Google and Amazon as walled gardens and Meta and TikTok as platforms built on user-generated content.

What: An essay titled "The case for the Open Internet." arguing that the open internet is a marketplace of ideas funded mainly by advertising, that AI business models threaten the incentive to create content, and that the largest advertisers will decide whether power on the internet stays distributed. It launches a new version of The Current that, according to Green, will carry multiple op-eds a week from industry leaders, most of them from outside The Trade Desk.

When: The essay and Green's LinkedIn post announcing it were published today. Outside contributors' pieces are due to start appearing this week.

Where: On The Current at thecurrent.com, with the announcement on Green's LinkedIn profile.

Why: Green wrote that industry friends had told him the open internet "may not be the cause it once was" and that The Trade Desk should rethink it. The essay arrives after a year in which The Trade Desk guided to a 12% year-over-year revenue decline for the third quarter, cut about 15% of its staff, settled a fee dispute with Publicis and had its main ad domain blocked by Safari on iOS 27, none of which the essay mentions.