We forgot to build public roads on the internet. Now we’re paying the toll
Opinion
The media industry’s sustainability problem isn’t about trees. It’s about who owns the infrastructure your business depends on, writes Omar Oakes.
Whatever you think about media and advertising, you have to admit that it’s not sustainable.
I hate using the word “sustainability” because it’s become hijacked by stock images of trees, green arrows, and scenes of Greta Thunberg shaking her fist.
No, I don’t mean the ESG commitments your comms team quietly filed away when the economy turned. I mean the literal version. As in, I am literally telling you that this thing we’re doing called media and advertising is NOT SUSTAINABLE. As in: on the road to death unless things change. AKA: Emergency.
It is an ecosystem in which all the nutrition is consumed by a handful of giants who now roam the earth largely unimpeded by government constraints (or even shame). And for everyone else? You either do the honourable thing and die, or keep going by feeding off the giants’ scraps. Or, if you’re really desperate, whatever comes out the other end.
Because the thing about an industry is it needs a market. And markets need public property: roads, police, fire, ambulances, clean air, clean water.
When did we decide that “digital” didn’t need any of that?
We’ve been here before. We just didn’t notice
The other thing about a market is that it needs mess.
We buy and sell things as part of the messy, irrational human experience. Imperfect information, crazy biases, and everything else which we can’t really explain. Part of what keeps an ecosystem healthy is this mess because it creates conditions for adaptation and change.
The domination of Big Tech is, at its core, an attempt to remove that mess, and call it progress.
And it happens in waves, each of them more aggressive than the last.
A decade ago it was social media — the idea that people actually want to connect with complete strangers, share their opinions, and have brands interrupt the conversation. Then the metaverse, where we were all going to live as floating heads and play Minecraft all day. Now it’s AI, where we’re invited to record every moment of our working lives in the vain hope that a computer can make the whole mess perfectly ordered.
Each wave comes with grand claims that “nothing will ever be the same again”, whipping investors into a feeding frenzy of seed money and sky-high company valuations. Until one day, reality sets in, and they all become advertising platforms.
While we’re all wondering why life hasn’t changed all that much, each wave has done its job: delivering even more resources to the giants.
The destruction of classified advertising is the clearest example I can think of. For decades, jobs ads and classified listings were among the most reliable revenue streams in publishing. Almost overnight, they moved online — cheaper, faster, more efficient. Bye-bye Yellow Pages: literally just a book of ads with no content, which turned out to be the business model, not the problem.
That’s what a completely privatised internet tends towards. A book of ads with no content.
And fine — we’ve always needed bottom-of-funnel activity. People need to find the thing they already know they want. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — these are fancy search engines with chatbot interfaces.
Impressive fancy search engines, but bottom-of-funnel nonetheless.
What nobody is asking is what happens to the top.
The top of the funnel is a public good. We forgot to treat it like one
When I talk about ‘top of funnel’, I don’t just mean it in the narrow marketing sense — demand generation, brand building, all the things our industry endlessly argues about.
I mean the wider sense: the role media plays in sharing ideas, providing entertainment, and generating the cultural texture against which we fulfil our innate need to have an identity in the world. Really important stuff that we should want to ‘sustain’.
Platforms used to at least need that content. For years, they took advantage of our human need to share information — most of it generated by actual media owners, such as publishers and broadcasters — and monetised the attention it generated. Parasitic, but at least there was a relationship.
Now they don’t even want it. Try posting a link to a news article on LinkedIn and watch your reach go to zero. The platforms need you to create original content for them directly, so users never leave.
One winner takes all. The very definition of unsustainable.
Here’s my uncomfortable question for anyone running a media business: when did we decide that digital infrastructure should work differently from every other kind?
The 20th century media world wasn’t perfect. But it rested on something coherent: nobody owns the airwaves; they are public goods. You can run a private TV company or radio station, but you need a licence to use an antenna — and with that licence comes obligation: minimum standards, maybe public-interest requirements. The same logic we apply to drinking water and medicine: if people depend on it, it must be regulated.
Then the internet arrived through physical cables rather than invisible radio waves, and we quietly forgot to apply the same thinking. The infrastructure is privately owned by companies instead of publicly owned by people, and we all just… accepted it.
Of course there are massive benefits in a world where anyone can be a content creator. But, for every brilliant YouTuber or TikToker, there are armies of slop merchants and fraudsters that have created a miasma that now permeates everything in a digital dominant world.
If you want to open a shop on a high street, you expect public roads to bring customers to your door. You expect a police force. You take for granted that minimum standards apply to your trading environment.
No such public infrastructure is guaranteed online. And the world becomes so murky that it’s no longer possible to tell the good from the bad.
Mass blindness is not sustainable, either.
Don’t make our drum softer
The idea that 60% of UK advertising revenue flows to three American companies should be a three-alarm emergency for everyone in this industry.
Many of us will descend upon the south of France next month in the hope of ‘doing deals’ and winning awards. We should also be asking ourselves what the actual fuck are we going to do about this.
Rightly, the Advertising Association will be in Cannes banging the drum for the UK’s role in exporting marketing services.
But it should be trade bodies, not people like me, who read the room and see the risk of not changing course. Instead, they seem structurally prevented from doing so — because the companies whose model is the problem are also paying members and sponsors.
What happened to publishing is now happening to television. YouTube is already a gatekeeper for production companies. What will happen to drama, factual, formats — the creative exports this country has always punched above its weight on?
What will we actually export in 10 years?
This goes deeper than regulation
Alongside The Media Leader’s Jack Benjamin, I’m hosting a panel of publishers, editors and production company bosses to discuss this very issue at an ‘Advertising Who Cares’ event in London on 11 June. I hope you can join us if tickets are still available.
We can talk about regulation and other piecemeal solutions, but, as you now understand, I think the problem is much deeper. This industry is now unsustainable because it lacks public digital infrastructure.
This goes deeper than just regulating what we already have. It means new structures, such as a new digital identity network that must be recognised by platforms (to finally root out bots or fake profiles). It also means admitting that fateful 2009 decision to block the joint PSB streaming service Project Kangaroo was a mistake, and now looking with fresh eyes at what is needed now to ensure public-service programming is not starved to death.
That’s not anti-technology. It is the recognition that the model which sustained a diverse, commercially viable media ecosystem for the entire 20th century was built on a simple principle: some things are too important to be left entirely to whoever can afford to own them.
We knew that about the airwaves. We forgot it about the internet.
Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.