I’m Alan Chapell. Over the past 20+ years, I’ve been outside privacy counsel to hundreds of digital media companies and write a monthly syndicated report called The Chapell Regulatory Insider. I’m also a regulatory analyst for The Monopoly Report.

Editor’s Note: This article builds on some points I made in front of the ads privacy community in Washington, DC, a few weeks ago at the NAI Summit. I believe that the ads business community would be well served by embracing some of these lessons. If you’re too lazy to read what’s below, a video of the presentation can be found here.

Robert Moses (1888–1981) was a highly influential and controversial urban planner who designed the New York metropolitan landscape in his own image. Known as the "master builder," he reshaped the region with massive infrastructure projects—including highways, bridges, and parks—while often displacing low-income and minority communities to realize his grand vision.

He never held elected office. Yet for roughly 40 years, from the late 1920s through the late 1960s, Robert Moses ran New York. He simultaneously held something like 12 appointed positions: Parks Commissioner, Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, head of the State Power Commission.

So what did he build? Jones Beach. The Triborough bridge. The Verrazzano bridge. The Cross Bronx Expressway. Lincoln Center. The 1964 World's Fair.

Moses built roughly 658 playgrounds, 416 miles of parkway, and 13 bridges. If you have driven, walked, or swum anywhere in metropolitan New York, you have almost certainly moved through Robert Moses's imagination.

Moses understood something most of his contemporaries did not. He understood that infrastructure is policy. The shape of a road is a law. The height of a bridge is a regulation. And he used that insight to carry out his own vision for New York.

According to the legends, the most infamous example of using infrastructure as policy was the plan to build the Southern State Parkway out to Jones Beach. Moses designed the overpasses on that parkway to sit roughly nine feet off the ground. Cars could pass underneath. Public buses could not. And in the New York of that era, guess who rode public buses to the beach? Working-class families… and people of color.

Robert Moses didn't have to write a segregation statute. He poured one in concrete. On some level, the bridge itself was the rule.

I’m sharing this piece of history because it is easy to forget that the internet is still being built. And whether we acknowledge it or not, somebody is choosing the height of the bridges—and making a determination regarding who gets to pass through.

Let this serve as a reminder of how important it is to be in the room as building decisions are being made.

I believe it is fair and potentially helpful to have a clear look at the way the internet is being regulated today. And ask the question: What is it that those rules are designed to address?

In my view, much of our current privacy ruleset was designed to create friction for data brokers and ad techs. That approach had a logic to it at one point in time. But it also produced a side effect: It under-regulated first-party processing. In 2010, a big first party was The New York Times. In 2026, a big first party is a company that operates an OS, a browser, a search engine, an app store, and an LLM—and processes your data across all of them.

The bridges that were poured back then might have been the right height for that era. They are not the right height for the traffic of 2026.

I’ve certainly made these points before. But what’s noteworthy is that others—even lawmakers—are making similar arguments. There’s no point in creating privacy laws if they are so watered down that they don’t address the most significant privacy harms.

I'm not here to call out any organization in particular. But I'll say this. When a standards body decides what a "privacy-enhancing technology" is, it is making a Robert Moses decision. That standards body is, in effect, setting the height of the bridge. And when the engineers in the room overwhelmingly draw paychecks from a small group of companies, the bridges being built tend to come in at a height those platforms can comfortably clear.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, too many "privacy-enhancing technologies" are vaguely defined and don’t map well to legal requirements or consumer expectations. And the cost of all this is paid in transparency. The ad tech industry's original sin is a transparency deficit. PETs that move processing into black boxes do not cure that deficit. If anything, they deepen it.

When an AI agent books your flight, fills your shopping cart, or chooses which insurance quote to surface, that agent is making a media decision. And as agentic systems and processes are being created to enable the creation of a campaign on the open web, there are decisions being made. Somebody is going to define the protocols by which agents discover ad opportunities, evaluate them, and transact. Somebody is going to decide whether agents see the open web's inventory.

As we are reinventing a whole bunch of commercial relationships through agentic, we are, on some level, rebuilding the Southern State Parkway. And we’re making a decision as to whether the buses driven by many within independent ad tech are able to get to Jones Beach.

So there's an interesting paradox in play here. How do we craft policy that does not exclude third-party ad tech from the future internet, but also does not incentivize or even enable ad tech to operate as pirates?

That is the needle we're trying to thread here. We need rules that are not designed to quietly disqualify the independent ecosystem. But we also need to create incentives for individual actors to do what's right.

I am not here to plead for exemption for ad techs. I'm here to challenge the folks in the ads space to be the most credible, most thoughtful, most auditable participants in the ecosystem so that we continue to have the credibility to push others to do the same.

Tony Katsur’s gym membership analogy is well taken. But also, every standard, every protocol, every PET specification that gets written without the third-party ad tech community in the room is a bridge built nine feet off the ground. We can complain about the buses that don't fit. Or we can show up to the planning meeting.

Relationships are important. Knowing who your friends are is critical. Your friends aren’t just those who invite you to the best parties in Cannes. Your real friends are those who are willing to invest in an open, inclusive ecosystem.

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If there’s an area that you want to see covered on these pages, if you agree or disagree with something I’ve written, if you want to tell me you dig my music, or if you just want to yell at me, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or in the comments below.

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