Report from The Verge
In Brief – After years of effort to end the use of third-party cookies for tracking and targeted advertising in its Chrome browser, Google is shelving the plan and maintaining its current treatment of the tracking technology. The announcement comes more than five years after Google first said they intended to replace the key ad targeting tech with other tools they claimed would better address user privacy interests while still supporting effective advertising, a move widely seen as a response to Apple’s aggressive privacy critiques of Google and other ad-financed digital services. However, right from the start, digital advertising industry competitors argued that Google would use the changes to undermine competition. And regulators took note. Google repeatedly promised to work with industry stakeholders and reached a novel agreement with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for the agency to serve as a lead regulator certifying that the new ad targeting tools would not unfairly benefit Google. But the UK’s data privacy regulator later joined the review process and criticized the Google plan for falling short on user privacy. With the ad industry and privacy industry firmly opposed, the company is walking away.
Context – While most privacy advocates fervently hate effective digital ads, consumers are not of the same mind. Apple’s policy requiring apps to get up-front approval from users for ad tracking shows that most will reject tracking when it carries no cost, but most users prefer free online services funded by effective, meaning targeted, ads, rather than paying. Despite pursuing a policy like Apple’s, Google quickly ran into problems because their AdTech business dwarfs Apple’s, and Chrome is the top browser. Both are now tied up in Google antitrust losses to the US Department of Justice. Ironically, Apple’s ad-tracking “privacy” policy is itself running into antitrust problems in France, Germany, Italy and Poland. Meta, a chief foil of Apple due to its reliance on ad revenues, has had its targeted ad business model rejected by EU regulators who argue that the DMA requires free versions of their top platforms that only use less-targeted, less effective, ads.