April 2026 | Chapell 1

CHAPELL’S KEY INSIGHT FOR APRIL:

By 2027, adtechs and other digital media companies that have not restructured their consent architecture will face compounding legal and commercial exposure across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously as a result of the following: (1) expanding CIPA liability into the adtech supply chain, (2) EU data protection law’s push to hold adtechs as joint controllers of data, (3) browser-level OOPs signal requirements that at least some CMPs have not yet mapped, and (4) Google’s new Consent Mode policy.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

Five Key Regulatory Themes for April 2026

CIPA Is Expanding Its Reach further into identifiable world — and HEMs Are Next

The Riganian v. LiveRamp ruling is the most consequential ongoing CIPA case for the adtech community. Judge Tigar's refusal to dismiss the case — centered on LiveRamp's RampID system and its Attribute Enrichment feature — signals that courts are prepared to treat pseudonymous identifiers as functionally identifiable when a single lookup collapses the distinction. The logical next question: if RampIDs generate CIPA exposure, what about hashed email addresses? The answer is not yet settled, but the direction of travel is clear. The Reform CIPA coalition launched in early April, and there is early-stage momentum around an industry amicus brief. Neither is likely to move fast enough to stop the current wave of complaints.

EU Enforcement Is Getting More Procedurally Complex

Luxembourg's Higher Administrative Court may have confirmed that legitimate interest is not valid for targeted ads, but in doing so they annulled Amazon's €746 million GDPR fine on procedural grounds. What’s worse: EU data protection regulators now face a higher procedural bar to impose fines. If you’ve got the legal budget and can make a straight-faced argument that you at least attempted to comply, you can’t be fined.

CMP Config Processes are Broken, yet Adtechs are Responsible for Upstream Consents

For the past five years CMPs fail to function properly between 60-75% of the time. The IAB EU TCF has raised the bar when it comes to documenting consent requests (see V2.3), and France and Germany are each pushing Adtech into joint controller roles and holding them responsible for consents obtained upstream. Smart adtechs will build out audit and

Consent Is No Longer Just a European Problem

The gap between U.S. and European consent adoption rates among top publishers is narrowing faster than most in the industry acknowledge. CIPA litigation, VPPA exposure, and state privacy law definitions that increasingly mirror GDPR's consent standard are pushing U.S. publishers toward CMP deployment at scale. Meanwhile, Europe is actively debating where to reset the consent bar under the Digital Omnibus initiative. Publishers on both sides of the Atlantic are operating in an environment where the consent question is no longer whether — it's how, and at what level of targeting intrusiveness.

More Joy for the Plaintiff’s Bar as they find a Way Around Section 230's Liability Shield

The California and New Mexico jury verdicts against Meta and Google, combined with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's April 2026 ruling in Commonwealth v. Meta, have established a replicable litigation framework that bypasses Section 230 entirely. Don't sue over content — sue over design. Infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmic recommendation systems are now being treated as defective products independent of the content they deliver.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

April 2026 arrives with the regulatory environment for digital media and adtech under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously — and the pressure is not letting up. The primary issue is that consent management platforms (CMPs) continue to be mis-configured at an alarming rate of between 60-75% of the time depending on whose estimates you believe. Even if you think that many of the estimates of CMP failure are significantly overstated (e.g., the April 2026 WebXray research), the fact is that a failure rate of even 25% still carries significant risk. The CMP failure rate has been consistent going back to at least 2020. What’s changed is that adtechs are increasingly on the hook for ensuring that consents are obtained.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

CIPA Escalation. The continued rise of CIPA litigation is exacerbating problems with CMPs as the plaintiff’s bar is increasingly coming after adtechs in addition to website operators. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the number of CIPA claims seem to have escalated to the point where CIPA litigants are now coming after even the small to mid-sized adtech players. This is all part of a larger bet being placed by plaintiff’s counsel: (1) That judges will continue to entertain CIPA claims against adtech companies (thus, holding adtechs responsible for CMP configurations), and (2) that the push to amend CIPA in the California Legislature will be stalled at least through 2026. One key data point in all this is Judge Tigar's ruling in Riganian v. LiveRamp – as it moves the identifiability question to the center of adtech's legal exposure. LiveRamp's argument that RampIDs are pseudonymous (i.e., and therefore outside CIPA's reach) failed because the court looked at what LiveRamp’s system actually does. LiveRamp's own Attribute Enrichment feature, which allows any customer to submit a name or email address and receive back a full consumer profile, collapsed LiveRamp’s pseudonymity argument entirely.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

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Once upon a time, pixels linking to Precise Location and PII via social platform pixels represented the biggest CIPA risk factors. Now that some courts consider RAMPIDs as identifiable (and thus, enforceable under a CIPA analysis) the question is: does this identifiability risk extend to HEMs, UID2’s and even cookie UID? The broader lesson is that courts are increasingly willing to look past identifier labels to functional identifiability. If CIPA litigants have their way (and given the persistence of these folks, I suspect they eventually will), the doors will soon be blown wide open on CIPA liability for adtechs.

FTC Enforcement Actions. The two-Commissioner FTC is not exactly off to a roaring start on competition or privacy grounds during the Trump II Administration. There’s been some nominal thinking on how to address children’s privacy issues. But much of the effort over the past 16 months has been focused on rolling back the initiatives of the Lina Kahn era (e.g., non-competes), and targeted enforcement against companies exhibiting “anti-conservative bias” and Democrats are questioning whether the Administration is exerting undue influence over this FTC. The below chart suggests that the activity legal of the current FTC is behind the Kahn era FTC.

Note: This list covers major, publicly documented actions. It is not exhaustive — the FTC has brought hundreds of enforcement actions over this period, and many smaller or consent-decree-only matters are not individually catalogued in public summaries.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

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End of Section 230? The social media liability story has been simmering for some time. We now have three decisions in the space of weeks (California, New Mexico, Massachusetts) that have established that design choices about how to present third-party content can be treated as product defects, independent of Section 230's content liability shield. While the critics of social platforms can rejoice in getting their ounce of flesh, but will it be worth it if the price they pay is the implosion of everything that’s good about the Internet? The appellate path for Meta and Google is not hopeless. The First Amendment argument following Moody v. NetChoice is valid, and causation will be contested vigorously. But the litigation template is now established, and every platform that makes editorial decisions about how to present user-generated content — which is every platform — is now a potential defendant. The mid-term outlook looks bleak for anyone that doesn’t have thousands of lawyers on retainer.

Amazon case makes issuing GDPR fines SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult. In Europe, the Amazon GDPR fine annulment is being read in two directions at once, and both readings are correct. Overall, it’s a bad deal for EU data protection regulators. Sure, they got yet another confirmation that legitimate interested is not viable for cookies or profiling. But we’ve known that for at least two years. But going forward, EU data protection regulators face a more demanding procedural standard before imposing fines — negligence must be affirmatively assessed, proportionality must be genuinely evaluated, and remediation efforts must factor into the fine decision itself, not just its size. This will make the imposition of fines all but impossible in Europe. (See below chart)

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

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The through-line across all of this is consent. Consent requirements that were once solely a European compliance concern are now a key part of the U.S. digital media regulatory landscape. CIPA, VPPA, and state privacy law definitions that increasingly mirror GDPR's standard are pushing U.S. publishers toward CMP deployment whether they planned for it or not. And Google’s recent policy shift re: Consent Mode is not only exacerbating the CMP consent issues faced by most websites, Google is conditioning ads functionality on website operator’s agreement to provide Google with additional data.

Prior to Google’s Consent Mode policy shift, the question for publishers and adtech vendors in 2026 was not whether consent is required — it was where to set the targeting intrusiveness threshold to maximize yield while maintaining defensible consent rates. That is a business question as much as a legal one, and most publishers are not yet treating it that way. Consent Mode ads an entirely different set of considerations for website operators.

No Relief from U.S. Congress. In the United States, the prospect of a Republican-led federal privacy bill has resurfaced, carrying the familiar industry wish list: preemption of state laws, no private right of action, and a notice-and-choice framework that stops well short of what California, Colorado, and Connecticut have already put in place. The political math has not changed. Democrats will not accept preemption without meaningful enforcement teeth and a private right of action. The current bill as described offers nothing that Democrats are likely to support.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

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Privacy & Data Protection

Federal preemption push resurfaces. House Energy & Commerce is expected to release a Republican-led federal privacy bill by end of April. The reported framework — notice and choice, no private right of action, full state preemption — is a non-starter for Democrats. It’s probably too early to say that this initiative isn’t going anywhere. (But it isn’t).

What exactly is the FTC doing? Just two years ago, the digital media space was operating in fear of the FTC’s enforcement capabilities. CIDs seemed to be going out into the adtech marketplace on a weekly basis. Today, we have a two-commissioner FTC that opted to settle a case involving concealed facial recognition data, active obstruction of its own investigation, and a data transfer that violated the company's own privacy policy — and produces nothing more than a 20-year injunction against misrepresentation. The FTC as Monty Python’s Dark Knight.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

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CIPA exposure is expanding upstream. Riganian v. LiveRamp establishes that pseudonymous identifiers are functionally identifiable when a single lookup collapses the distinction. Hashed email addresses are the next logical target. The Reform CIPA coalition and a proposed industry amicus brief are early-stage responses that are unlikely to move fast enough to slow the current complaint wave.

Google’s new Consent Mode Shift is yet another Google power grab – The policy is sold as a form of streamlining, but it forces website operators to turn over additional data or lose certain functionality – the very type of anti-competitive behavioral that Google was trying to avoid until recently.

GPC signal compliance remains opaque. WebXray research published in April 2026 found that Google, Meta, and Microsoft continue to set ad related cookies despite active GPC opt-outs, and that 100% of Google-certified cookie banners failed to provide full protection. I believe that WebXray’s research is a bit misleading, as GPC was never designed to stop advertising altogether – just cross-context behavioral advertising of California data subjects. Nonetheless, with California's Opt-Me-Out Act going into force in January 2027, GPC non-compliance is an increasingly direct CIPA attack vector.

EU finds yet one more way to insist on consent. The Amazon fine annulment affirmed that legitimate interest fails the necessity test for behavioral advertising. The ICO's March 2026 lawful basis guidance reinforces the same conclusion for the UK. Adtech companies still running legitimate interest assessments for ad targeting purposes should treat both decisions as a hard stop and focus their energies on upstream audits of CMPs.

EU enforcement procedures are further bureaucratized. Following the Amazon ruling, EU data protection regulators must affirmatively assess negligence, genuinely evaluate proportionality, and factor remediation efforts into fine decisions before imposing penalties. Compliance documentation (e.g., DPIAs, LIAs, legal opinions, internal audit records) is now a direct legal asset. U.S. based legal teams are sometimes reluctant to put things in writing for fear of regulators using that documentation against them. In Europe, your best bet at this point is to document everything. If you document diligently and in good faith, it’ll be much more difficult for EU regulators to assess fines for non-compliance.

DSAR abuse has a new, limited defense. The CJEU's Brillen Rottler ruling establishes that even a first access request from a data subject can be deemed excessive where abusive intent is demonstrable. The threshold remains high, and the burden of proof sits with the controller. Nonetheless, adtech companies should update response protocols while maintaining rigorous documentation standards for any refusal.

Consent adoption among top U.S. publishers is accelerating. Based on aggregated data from Princeton WebTAP, Cookiebot/Usercentrics reports, BuiltWith tracking, and IAB Europe TCF metrics, CMP deployment among the top 1,000 U.S. websites has risen sharply since 2022, driven primarily by CIPA litigation rather than statutory consent requirements. The U.S. is catching up to Europe faster than most in the industry acknowledge.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

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EU Publishers would be wise to ascertain their consent “sweet spot” – European policymakers seem at least somewhat open to providing a limited consent mulligan to publishers (particularly news pubs). Maybe there’s appetite for “lightly targeted” ads. See chart below.

Australia's age verification experiment is producing early data — and early failures. Despite removing or restricting 4.7 million accounts at launch, current estimates suggest roughly 7 in 10 children retained access to major platforms by March 2026. Five active investigations are underway, with enforcement decisions expected by mid-2026. The experiment is still worth watching, but preliminary results are not giving me confidence.

CalPrivacy rulemaking on authorized agents and GPC signals continues. In my view, CalPrivacy has unleashed Authorized Agents and GPC on the marketplace without the benefit of competitive or consumer protection guardrails. In my public comments, I’ve implored CalPrivacy to address those issues – we’ll see if they do. The Opt-Me-Out Act's January 2027 effective date and the proposed launch of the DROP Deletion mechanism in August of 2026 makes this rulemaking time-sensitive.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

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Artificial Intelligence

Grok's CSAM liability is now a court order. The Amsterdam District Court ordered X and X.AI to cease generating non-consensual intimate imagery and CSAM, with daily penalties of €100,000 per violation capped at €10 million per defendant. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated approximately 23,000 images depicting minors were generated in the eleven days following Grok's December 2025 image-editing launch. As of publication, there is no evidence either way that X has complied. At some point, EU law enforcement will need to enforce the court order.

AI-generated content liability is moving toward product design theory. The same design-versus-content distinction that plaintiffs' attorneys used to bypass Section 230 in the social media cases applies with equal force to AI-generated outputs. Grok's image generation feature was treated by the Amsterdam court as a product design problem, not a content moderation failure. That framing has direct implications for any AI company deploying generative image or video tools at scale.

Browser AI integrations are creating new privacy risk vectors. As noted in the GPC and OOPs discussion, browsers are no longer operating solely as user agents. Perplexity's CEO publicly stated that its browser will track everything users do online to sell hyper-personalized ads. The convergence of AI-native browsers, OOPs signals, and CIPA exposure creates a compliance surface that most adtech vendors have not yet mapped.

Competition & Antitrust

Private antitrust cases against Big Tech remain hard to pull off. The dismissal of Helena World Chronicle v. Google is a reminder that colorable antitrust grievances do not survive without proper pleading. The publishers arrived years late on acquisition claims, lacked standing in the relevant market, and relied on traffic data that no credible expert would endorse. The underlying grievance — that Google crawls and monetizes publisher content while controlling the traffic those publishers depend on — remains unresolved. An appeal is likely.

Branch Metrics v. Google proceeds to discovery. A federal court in the Eastern District of Texas denied Google's motion to dismiss an antitrust suit alleging that Google deliberately killed Branch's Discovery Search product to protect its core search business. Samsung executives' on-the-record characterization that Google was "afraid" Discovery Search would "cannibalize" its main business is now properly pled fact.

The Chapell Regulatory Insider – April 2026

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CalPrivacy's OOPs anti-preferencing mandate remains unaddressed. The statutoryrequirement under Civil Code Section 1798.185(a)(18)(A) that OOPs cannot be used to"unfairly disadvantage another business" has not been operationalized in existing CCPAregulations. With 90% of the U.S. browser market held by Google, Apple, and Microsoft— each with a documented history of gatekeeper behavior — the failure to address thisrequirement is not a technical oversight. Colorado and Connecticut have already acted.CalPrivacy has not. The Opt-Me-Out Act's January 2027 effective date makes the windowfor corrective rulemaking narrow. If CalPrivacy does not act before browsers arestatutorily required to support GPC signals, the anti-preferencing problem becomessignificantly harder to remedy after the fact.

GOP looks to push through a mild Federal U.S. Privacy Law to pre-empt States

FTC Settlement with dating apps shows that the FTC is at best a paper tiger

Chapell’s Comments to CalPrivacy re: Authorized Agents and GPC Signals

Riganian v. LiveRamp: The most significant ongoing CIPA case for the Adtech Community

Social Media Liability: Implications of the recent Meta and Google Verdicts & Decisions

Helena World Chronicle v. Google: “It can be hard to bring private antitrust cases”

Branch Metrics v. Google: Privacy Antitrust Case

Amazon's €746 Million Targeted Ads GDPR Fine is annulled – and what it means for Adtechs

The ICO's Lawful Basis Guidance: What AdTech Companies Need to Know Now

CJEU Sets restrictions on “abuse” of DSAR request process

X is ordered to stop enabling CSAM in the Netherlands.

EU Cookies Part I: What to do now that the EU has raised the bar on cookie consents under TCFEU Cookies Part II: What steps should EU Adtech vendors take to “audit” EU consents?

EU Cookies Part III: Chapell’s EU Compliance Checklist for Adtechs

Australia provides an update on its experiment in age verification

Research Demonstrating Good Privacy Practices as a Business Growth Strategy

Academic Research on the Relevance of Privacy Expectations for Default Opt-out Settings

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