Nicole B. Meissner

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is making its first major move under the new digital markets regime and it has the potential to fundamentally shift the economics of the platform-publisher relationship. For the first time, a major regulator is publicly consulting on a requirement that would allow publishers to opt out of having their content used in Google’s AI Overviews or in training AI models without being removed from general search results. Previously, publishers who wanted to stop Google from using their content in AI summaries had to risk losing all visibility on Search. Why this matters: Decoupling changes the incentives. Until now, publishers were effectively forced into an all-or-nothing choice: allow Google’s AI to scrape and summarize your content for free, or withdraw your site from search entirely. This proposal, if enacted, would change that calculus. It could unlock meaningful licensing. In a recent column for Nieman Lab, I explained why a truly sustainable licensing market has remained elusive. But if Google can no longer automatically incorporate content into AI features without permission, the company may need to negotiate or pay for access to high-quality material that makes its AI features useful. Which would result in others following suit. A global precedent. Although this is a UK consultation, the implications won’t stay local. If a major regulator forces this kind of unbundling of search services and AI usage, it sets a blueprint for policymakers in other markets. The CMA’s consultation runs through late February 2026. It isn’t a final rule yet but it’s a massive step toward the “fairer deal” creators and publishers have been calling for. 👉 Read more on the strategic shift here: https://lnkd.in/gXd6RyHS 👉 Details on the CMA proposal here: https://lnkd.in/gbvan7Cn

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Enjoyed chatting with Mimi Billing at Sifted earlier this week about Brickanta's seed round and why Europe, and the Nordics in particular (Silicon Valhalla!), is the perfect home turf for us and innovative ConTech AI! “Europe is actually the perfect place for us to start. Here, you have common building regulations and a much higher degree of digitalisation in northern Europe. In the US, there are less federal building protocols, so in Europe, all that regulation is a huge advantage for an AI that reads and checks construction documents.”

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Coffee Post, Stardate 80001 I was asked by you, my lovely readers, to talk about a number of new innovations in our ad tech world and compare and contrast them, an example being AdCP and the new IAB Tech Lab agentic roadmap. As I sat down to write this post, another theme bubbled up, almost unbidden. Our industry has always been deeply entrenched in a hype cycle, marketing folks spinning tales of conversions, social shifts, and users with infinite Lifetime Value. We have all been guilty of spinning yarns to feed the ad tech zeitgeist, hinged on truth with sprinkles of stardust and hope. Through it all, I have been proud that ad tech partners have found ways to work together to push the industry forward. On the technical side this has most recently been achieved through the work of the IAB Tech Lab. When I ran the organization we rallied measurement companies to share their metrics in a shared SDK and we pushed out ads.txt in short order to help publishers declare their resellers. (not to help Google as was reported in a recent book. ahem.) These were marks of real collaboration. When Dennis Buchheim took the helm he innovated on these ideas and grew the Tech Lab Board to include even more industry players, teeing up the future of Tech Lab nicely for the current CEO, Anthony Katsur. Our industry needs a home for our standards, especially now when technical prowess is increasingly becoming a commodity with the advent of LLMs. Claude built me a website in 3 minutes. What are valuable now more than ever are ideas. Innovative ideas. Ideas need standards frameworks on which to be built. Software that will communicate with the agents and humans that drive our new paradigm. These standards will also be the touchstone between industry players and industry regulators. We can't confuse the market spinning up more non profits to regulate bits and pieces of a standard. It weakens our position both as an industry and in the regulatory world. We need a source of truth for information and standards details. We need a convener and neutral third party to help gather submissions and wrangle the members so everyone can be heard. We need to translate ad tech to the rest of the world and to each other. Thus this article, which was meant to be a technical comparison of new innovative ideas, has morphed into a rallying cry. Our industry requires a strong home for standards. Innovative ideas and robust frameworks are essential for developing software that interacts with both agents and humans in our evolving landscape. Standards organizations must serve as a bridge between industry players and regulators. We must avoid the dilution of our influence by allowing multiple nonprofits to regulate fragmented aspects of standards. Clear communication is vital, and we need a unified source of accurate information—a Rosetta Stone for ad tech. We need the IAB Tech Lab. Let’s get behind them. Get involved. Submit code. Grow our industry open source footprint. Coffee time.

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