Dear everyone,

Sarah here. Today is a special day — we are launching our first Policy Platform. This new roadmap to build a healthier digital economy has been an effort months in the making, and we are so excited to finally share it with you all.

Why Did We Build This Policy Platform? 

In the field of tech policy the conversation about online harm has focused for a long time on content moderation; what stays up, what comes down, and who decides. But this narrow focus misses the deeper forces shaping our digital environment: the systems of monetization that quietly fuel, reward, and perpetuate harm across the internet.

I’m talking about the opaque digital advertising infrastructure that enables ad dollars to flow to content that would never make money from advertising under normal circumstances—websites and platforms promoting scams, disinformation, graphic violence, and even child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This is a system where advertisers often don't know where their money ends up, and where platforms can profit from harm while disclaiming responsibility.

This is an industry dominated by just a handful of major players. The consolidation of which, especially the vertically integrated dominance of companies like Google, has led to higher transaction fees, less competition, and less revenue for publishers, especially independent newsrooms. These adtech giants have inserted layer upon layer of intermediaries between advertisers and publishers, each one taking a cut, but none held accountable when something goes wrong.

This is also an industry built on a dangerous myth: that harvesting and trading personal data is the best way to sell a product. It’s not. It’s simply the most lucrative for brokers and platforms. Data brokers churn out junk inferences that are little more than flawed, invasive guesses about people’s mental health, sexual orientation, or financial status, and sell them with little oversight. As our COO Arielle has detailed, these guesses aren’t just wrong — they’re harmful. And in many cases, they’re weaponized against the most vulnerable.

These problems aren’t fundamentally about content—they’re about incentives. That’s why our policy solutions move beyond content moderation and start addressing the financial plumbing underneath.

By applying proven principles from the financial and consumer protection sectors, our Policy Platform outlines five urgent solutions that together, would restore integrity to the digital ecosystem. You can read our whole platform here, but in short they are:

1. Common Ownership Rules and Antitrust Enforcement: Dominant platforms must not be allowed to preference their own inventory or shut out competitors. We call for expanded divestiture authority and clearer rules against self-dealing practices.
2. Due Diligence and Know Your Customer Rules (KYC): Ad brokers must verify the beneficial owners, locations, and legitimacy of every vendor, ad network, and verification firm they transact with.
3. Best Interest Duty Between Clients and Vendors: Adtech intermediaries must use reasonable diligence, care, and skill to serve their clients faithfully.
4. Transparency Requirements: We call for mandatory log- and page URL-level data sharing. Advertisers must receive detailed reports on where, when, and to whom ads are served including the full supply path, and compensation breakdown for every intermediary.
5. Privacy-Respecting Advertising Practices: Advertisers don’t need your sexual details to sell shoes. We advocate for data minimization, protection of sensitive data, universal opt-out mechanisms, and first-party data rules.

This Platform is a roadmap for change, a way to realign incentives, curb abuse, and put people and businesses, not platforms and monopolies, back at the center of the digital economy. These reforms are ambitious, but they are achievable. They borrow from proven safeguards in finance and consumer protection, adapted to meet the challenges of today’s adtech ecosystem.

We built this Platform by listening to researchers, regulators, publishers, and advocates like you. And now, we’re inviting you to help us take it forward. Together, we can build a digital marketplace that rewards accountability, restores trust, and supports the kind of information ecosystem democracy needs to thrive.

Thank you for standing with us. We’re just getting started.

In solidarity,

Sarah Kay Wiley, Director of Policy

If you have ideas or questions we would love to hear from you. Get in contact with the policy team at [email protected].

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