What to know about the missing scientists alarming Congress

This is less a market story than a privacy-friction story. The key economic effect is incremental conversion loss in ad-tech and measurement layers: every extra click or setting change lowers addressable audience size and weakens optimization loops, which disproportionately hurts demand-side platforms, ad exchanges, and data brokers with the thinnest first-party relationships. The most exposed revenue buckets are the ones dependent on cross-site identity stitching; the more durable winners are publishers, commerce platforms, and login-based ecosystems that can replace third-party data with owned data.

The second-order dynamic is that compliance complexity itself becomes a moat. Large platforms can absorb consent-management, legal, and engineering costs, while smaller ad-tech vendors face higher CAC to maintain performance under fragmentation. Over the next 3-12 months, expect a widening performance gap between walled gardens and open-web ad tech as attribution quality deteriorates, especially on iOS/Safari-like environments where user friction compounds opt-out rates.

Contrarian view: this is not a binary bearish signal for all digital advertising. In the near term, some advertisers may see improved ROAS as low-quality traffic is filtered out, forcing the market to pay up for higher-intent inventory. The real risk is that investors underappreciate the pace at which “consent fatigue” can turn into structural share shift toward logged-in ecosystems, making the open web less monetizable even if headline ad spend stays flat.