I'm eagerly awaiting getting back an extension that let me strip the tracking tokens from social media sites, along with redirecting away from AMP. You'd think these would be baked into the browser's tracking protection.
As extensions those are fine, as core browser features, they sound a bit iffy.
Google being the main revenue source for Firefox is often cited and is true, but if you look at Brave, its competition, what they do is to block a publisher's ads, replacing them with their own, being essentially racketeering and I'm surprised how they weren't declared illegal already.
Fact of the matter is, if people don't pay money for browser licenses, and they don't, and if ads don't fund those browsers, and they currently do, then alternatives to Chrome cannot exist, if not funded by another mega corporation that can burn money just so Google can't be the only player, like what Apple does.
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But back to decision making — we are talking about AMP pages being served by searching on Google.com, because that's the major source of these links.
Given the search engine is Google's property and not some public utility, they can destroy any browser maker if they wanted to.
Speaking of which, if you're so bothered with Google.com serving AMP pages, well, why not choose an alternative instead?
https://searchengineland.com/report-google-to-pay-apple-9-bi...
Given Google's reach with their search engine, with YouTube, with Gmail, starting a war with Google would be a death sentence for a browser maker, no matter the supposed source of funding, which is basically ads across the board anyway, an industry also controlled by Google and Facebook.
It's racketeering because they piggyback on publishers for serving their ads contextually, while not allowing publishers to run their own ads, forcing publishers to join if they want any revenue from Brave users. Brave wants to be a gate keeper, coercing publishers in the process.
Again, I don't see how this isn't illegal. It's one thing to be a non-profit browser extension developed by a community on GitHub, it's quite another to do build ad blocking products for profit, because the later is clearly copyright infringement at the very least.
That said analytics software and publishers will simply adapt to using other names.
Also I highly doubt Google will ever change the utm parameter name. There’s thousands of JS libraries that extract it and use it for various additional analytics, hosted blog/wordpress hackery. and e-commerce/payment plugins that inject it across iframes and other stuff.
Plus tons of server side apps that pattern match on utm_ or simply injects them into urls and views.
It’d be a nightmare for tons of businesses which have complicated setups which reuse or inject the token for conversion tracking alone, not including all the other stuff.