Last week, in this space, we watched The Trade Desk spend an entire earnings call explaining why nobody left, and never once explain whether anybody stayed. Those are different questions.

The gap between them is where we stopped.

So here is where we pick up. Joy. I’m sure both you, and Jeff Green appreciate these columns, equally.

A man on LinkedIn told me I talk about tollbooths too much.

He wasn't being cruel about it. He was being tired, which is worse, because tired is what happens when a criticism has stopped landing and started echoing. Fine, he said. We get it. The middlemen take a cut. Everyone knows the middlemen take a cut. Find a new bit.

So I did what any reasonable journalist does when accused of repeating himself. I went and counted.

Let me save my critic the trouble of compiling the evidence, because if there's one thing I believe in, it's doing the opposition research on myself before someone bills me for it. I have called ad tech middlemen highway robbers, money-grubbing gatekeepers, and digital parasites, all in one sentence, in 2024. I have called The Trade Desk a toll booth operator, a gatekeeper, and a traffic cop, again all in one sentence, because apparently I cannot be trusted with a metaphor and a comma in the same room. I have said Google built the highway and The Trade Desk installed the booths. I have compared supply path optimization to a shopping mall where every store has a hidden toll booth outside charging you a random amount just to walk in. I have described a Google product launch by saying the pitch is seamless and the subtext is toll booth.

That was five. It gets worse.

Six. April 2025, "The Ad Tech Racket: How The Trade Desk Is Taxing Your Campaigns Into Oblivion." Not the word tollbooth, but the whole piece is the tax version, which is the same offense in a different costume.

Seven. May 2024, "Taking Out the Trash." Middlemen as highway robbers, money-grubbing gatekeepers, digital parasites. Same road, different noun.

Eight. June 2026, The ADOTAT Show. The episode description literally asks whether Google is a utility or a toll booth. Two months ago. On the record. In a podcast title card.

And here is the part that actually stung. Somebody beat me to monetizing my own tic. A whole SEO page went up in April 2026 called "The Middleman Tax," pitching the roughly 30% of every ad dollar absorbed before delivery, complete with a calculator that estimates your monthly skim. My recurring complaint has been commoditized into lead-gen. When your outrage becomes someone else's landing page, the outrage is no longer edgy. It is infrastructure.

And then the metaphor went and got respectable on me, which frankly hurt more. In May 2025, Justin Billingsley, the former chief marketing officer of Publicis Group (do we include the e at the end, do we not?), published an essay titled "The $179.5 Billion Tollbooth," arguing that brands pouring money into retail media are funding the construction of marketing's most expensive tollbooth.

Sit with the org chart on that one for a second.

The former top marketer of the holding company that would, ten months later, send auditors into The Trade Desk and detonate the most public fee fight in recent memory, reached for my word. When the holding companies start borrowing your metaphors, the metaphor is not tired. It is consensus.

So the count is at minimum eight, across three years, plus a podcast two months ago, plus a stranger's conversion funnel, plus a former Publicis Groupe CMO. The man on LinkedIn is not wrong. He is just wrong about why I keep saying it, which is that I was being generous.

Because think, actually think, about what a tollbooth is.

A tollbooth is honest. One charge, one road, one operator you can name. The rate is posted before you approach the gate. You get a receipt. The money goes somewhere identifiable, usually a highway authority with a budget you can FOIA and a director whose salary is public record. Somewhere there is a human being whose job title includes the word toll, and if you have a complaint, there is a booth to walk up to and complain at. A tollbooth is what an honest fee looks like when it puts on a vest and stands in the weather.

Every time I called this industry a tollbooth, I was paying it a compliment it never earned. I was describing a world where you know the charge, the charger, and the road. That world does not exist. It has never existed.

And this week I am going to show you what actually does.

You have been paying to drive a road where the pavement itself bills you, where the booths are invisible, where nobody staffing them will give a name, and where the one thing every operator agrees on is that you may not count them.