On Friday, UK antitrust authority announced a new investigation into Google’s plan to end support for third-party cookies in Chrome. The investigation, he explained, aims to determine whether the change “could cause advertising spending to become even more concentrated in the Google ecosystem”, potentially suffocating competing companies that are – for the most part – already short of breath.
On the one hand, the full set of proposals that Google is presenting sounds like a good deal, especially for the focus on privacy between us. Generally speaking, changes in what Google calls “Privacy Sandbox”It would put a“ budget ”on the amount of data that web sites could obtain from the people who browsed them and prevent advertisers from tracking these surfers individually. Instead, users would be grouped into “interest groups”Based on their activity in the browser, and advertisers can target them. While all of this data is generally handled by a chain of intermediaries, part of Google’s proposal mandates that the browser – in this case, Chrome – would be solely responsible.
In short: Google is proposing to protect our personal data … preventing anyone that is not Google to gain access. As we said before, this looks a lot like a stratagem of power, not privacy.
And we were not the only ones. The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) survey is the result of several months of requests from Marketers for an open Web, a major commercial group representing digital media and adtech companies. In November, the group stated that Google’s proposal would lead the company to effectively control the means that any digital advertiser uses to reach the public – and that the change “will be irreversible”.
Even if you don’t give a damn about digital ads (which, in fact, who can blame you), that point should cause a pause. Some analysts have estimated This one Google’s parent company Alphabet raised $ 149 billion from digital ads in 2020– which means that about 25 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising ended up in Google’s pockets; Youtube alone is designed Tue has won around $ 18.5 billion, which would represent almost 30% of all online video ads are spent year-round.
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Unsurprisingly, Google has also become the subject of three separate antitrust lawsuits that claim, in one way or another, that the Iron fist on the digital advertising market was the result of a long history of anti-competitive behavior.
The CMA is the first authority to face the Sandbox proposed by Google head-on, and finding a balance between consumer privacy and Google control will not be easy. Everyone agrees that cookies are scary as hell, but the Department of Justice, dozens of Attorneys General, and the Chamber Antitrust Subcommittee everyone agrees that Google has grown a lot. The CMA is currently in the process of “engaging with Google” to understand the objectively byzantine technical roadmap that Google outlined. Your goal now is to find out how to deal with preservation of privacy aspects of the Sandbox, comparing them with those of Google swollen position in the digital advertising market. If all goes well, the CMA will come up with a “legal basis” for what should happen next.
“Creating a more private web, while allowing publishers and advertisers who support the free and open internet, requires the industry to make major changes to the way digital advertising works,” Google told Gizmodo in a statement. “The Privacy Sandbox has been an open initiative since the beginning and we appreciate the involvement of the CMA as we work to develop new proposals to support a healthy website with ad support without third party cookies. “