For AdNews Perspectives last year, I wrote about a transformative period for our industry. Today, I’d argue we’re in a state of unravelling.
The neat threads of digital advertising — privacy, platform neutrality, and search — are being pulled apart by political inertia, geopolitical manoeuvres, and the monopolistic ambitions of Big Tech. What was meant to be a year of recalibration has become a period of fragmentation, leaving Australian brands and marketers standing at a precarious crossroads.
The foundational promises of a more private, transparent, and competitive digital ecosystem are not just unmet; they feel further away than ever. While we busy ourselves with campaign optimisation and ROI, the very ground beneath our feet is shifting, threatening to splinter into something unrecognisable.
The slow burn of privacy inaction
A year ago, the industry was bracing for the impact of sweeping reforms to the Privacy Act. We anticipated new rules, stricter consent requirements, and a fundamental shift in how we handle data. And yet, here we are in late 2025, and the hard-hitting sections of the act remain on the shelf. The engine of reform has stalled.
We must ask the hard question: why? Is it simply bureaucratic lethargy, or are more powerful commercial interests quietly lobbying for the status quo, comfortable with the ambiguity that allows data practices to continue unchecked? This delay is not a benign pause; it’s a strategic vacuum. In the absence of clear Australian legislation, we are creating a dangerous imbalance. On one side, consumer trust erodes as data breaches continue to make headlines. On the other, businesses are left in a state of regulatory limbo, unable to invest with certainty in privacy-centric technology and processes.
This legislative void has a gravitational pull. Are we inadvertently positioning Australia as a ‘data haven lite’, a market with just enough regulatory teeth to look respectable, but not enough to truly disrupt the lucrative data economy? While Europe enforces GDPR and states like California push ahead, Australia’s inaction leaves our citizens’ data less protected and our businesses unprepared for the inevitable global standard. The slow burn of reform is creating more smoke than heat, obscuring the path forward and leaving the promise of a privacy-first future to go up in flames.
With ‘TrumpTok’, the splinternet arrives down under
The concept of a ‘Splinternet’ may sound like a dystopian future, but the fracture lines are already appearing in the apps on our phones. As I’m writing this (October 9, 2025), it’s just been reported that Apple has just removed an app called ‘Eyes Up’ from its App Store. Its crime? Archiving publicly available videos of US immigration agents. The justification was flimsy, but the political context was crystal clear. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario about a future ‘TrumpTok‘; this is a stark warning that the political battles of an increasingly polarised United States are now being fought and won on the devices in our pockets here in Australia. For decades, we’ve piggybacked on US tech dominance, accepting their rules as our baseline. That social contract is now broken.
This politicisation of platform gatekeepers is the fertile ground upon which a truly splintered internet will grow. The ongoing saga of TikTok’s ownership is simply the most visible battlefront. Let’s play out the scenario: TikTok is forced into a sale to American owners, with figures sympathetic to a particular political agenda taking the helm. Suddenly, the world’s most powerful cultural engine isn’t just a neutral entertainment platform; it becomes an instrument of American soft power with an algorithm potentially tuned to a specific frequency.
Where does that leave Australia? We are, as always, caught between the two global superpowers. Will our access be rerouted to this new, Americanised version? If so, what does a right-leaning, US-centric algorithm mean for Australian creators, trends, and public discourse? Will content that doesn’t align with its new ideological framework be subtly deprioritised?
This isn’t just about what teenagers are dancing to. It’s about the algorithmic colonisation of our culture. The splinternet forces a choice: do we align with the Chinese-controlled digital sphere or the American one? This fragmentation erodes the dream of a connected global community, replacing it with digital echo chambers carved out along geopolitical fault lines. For brands, this means navigating a far more complex and politically charged landscape where platform choice is no longer just a media decision, but an unavoidable political one.
Google’s AI gamble in the Third Browser War
While social platforms splinter, the world of search is consolidating its power in a high-stakes, winner-takes-all gamble. Google is currently fighting a landmark antitrust case in the US that threatens to dismantle its ad tech empire. Its response? Not caution, but audacious acceleration.
Welcome to the Third Browser War, fought not over features, but with the brute force of artificial intelligence. Google is aggressively rolling out its AI-powered Search, fundamentally changing how users find information. It’s a direct response to threats from ChatGPT and AI-native search engines, but it’s also a strategic masterstroke in its antitrust battle. By embedding AI answers directly into search results, Google is creating a new, stickier ecosystem that keeps users within its walls, further marginalising organic results and the open web.
This isn’t just an upgrade; it’s a moat-building exercise on a colossal scale. While regulators debate how to break up its existing ad tech stack, Google is building the next generation of its monopoly in plain sight. For advertisers, this means paying more for less visibility as organic reach plummets. We are being pushed towards a future where the only way to guarantee a place in the AI-generated answer is through Google’s own ad products.
The great unravelling is seeing the open web—the very ecosystem that allowed Google to thrive—being walled off by its biggest beneficiary. Google’s AI gamble is a bet that it can reshape the internet in its own image faster than regulators can catch up.
Finding (digital) balance in the rubble
The threads of our digital world are unravelling into a mess of legislative inaction, a splintering internet, and the audacious power plays of a tech monopoly. The path forward for Australian marketers is unclear and fraught with risk. Relying on the old rules is no longer an option.
We must find a new equilibrium. This means aggressively pursuing first-party data strategies not just as a marketing tactic, but as a hedge against regulatory failure. It means diversifying our media mix to mitigate the risks of a politically volatile splinternet. And it demands that we, as an industry, advocate for a more competitive and transparent ecosystem, rather than silently accepting the future being built for us. The great unravelling is here. The question is whether we will be tangled in the fallout or find a new way to weave the threads back together.
