Whatever Google chooses you know it will for Google's benefit and on user's disadvantage.
But this is not to a user's dis-advantage. Google genuinely is trying to find a good path forward. The proof to me comes in the quest for alternatives. Find anything else pro-user being suggested. Find ANYTHING. There's nothing. It's barren.
There is a huge astroturfed war going on. Google is trying to do good. It's trying to find some compromise between content-holders & users. The content-holders are stirring up a colossal storm because they want what they have, which is everything. They're winning this PR blitz. Low, cheap, pervasive attacks on Google are winning this war, & it's users who are losing.
Google is that earns 80% of its money from online ads. There's literally no incentive for Google to "find a good path forward".
Every major browser other than Google is taking proactive steps to limit cookies right now. Firefox very recently announced better cookie deletion for sites; they'll now try to delete cookies from other domains that are linked to those sites. This is going to get progressively better and better.
But the sentiment here is exactly what Google promotes. It begs the question over whether or not we need to compromise with content-holders on privacy. We don't, no browser other than Chrome views user tracking as a necessary compromise with advertisers. There was a point in the past where we might honestly worry about whether it was feasible to block 3rd-party cookies, but since then multiple efforts and improvements from Mozilla and Safari have made it clear that browser manufactures don't have to get advertisers' permission to push code.
Google is refusing to proactively move forward with steps that everyone else has agreed are necessary, because Google is mad that we're not thinking enough about their business interests. We have a good path forward, Google is blocking it for a large number of users, and then Google is complaining "why is no one else except us coming up with solutions?" But we have come up with solutions, they're just not solutions that Google likes.
The caution from Chrome about cookies is really interesting. Chrome broke web audio, alerts, the dev team is regularly openly hostile to suggestions that the consensus process moves too quickly. They tried tried to deprecate the url for crying out loud, but now they want to be all cautious about cookies? Sure.
> There is a huge astroturfed war going on.
Agreed, but not in the direction that you're suggesting. The general public wants better privacy, they don't care about whether or not it makes advertisers happy. Nontechnical users are often misinformed about tracking and they often lack technical skills or willpower to increase their privacy on their own. But that doesn't mean the public doesn't care about privacy, ordinary users do support the figerprinting protections Apple is building into iOS, they support the privacy changes Mozilla is building into Firefox. Most ordinary people are on the side of privacy in this debate.
Advertisers are desperate to argue that users are being harmed or that moving forward without an alternative tracking system is impossible, when the reality is that even the nontechnical public has turned out to have overwhelmingly positive feelings towards on-by-default technical measures to reduce tracking. The astroturfing here is the FUD coming out of companies claiming that we need (for either moral, technical, or PR reasons) to compromise with advertisers before we can move forward removing 3rd-party cookies.
It's really only Google who is lagging on this stuff. If they want the least private browser on the market, then they can have it. I don't think we need to hold back everyone else while we wait for Google to make up their mind about this.
This is exactly how the rollout of DoH has worked, different regions have had rollouts at different rates, particularly in regions where legislators are concerned about market effects. If the UK moves to block that too, then maybe then we have a more serious problem. But Google should be trying to roll out these protections in areas where it can.
It also doesn't mean that the UK is opposed to restricting 3rd-party cookies. The UK is worried about Google privileging their own ads. That's not the same thing as demanding a compromise with advertisers to enable cross-site tracking before cookies are removed, it's a requirement that Google not use the removal of 3rd-party cookies to give themselves outsized control over the advertising ecosystem.
As for the first point, do you have a region in mind where the regulatory authorities have greenlit this? Certainly not anywhere in the EU, given they launched a pre-emptive probe into the plans before anything was launched. Or in the US, where the unlaunched plans are included in the antitrust complaint being driven by the states.
Look, there's a lot of complaints one can direct at Google. But this isn't one of those things. Given the amount of scrutiny how could they possibly unilaterally launch anything related to this, beyond tiny experiments?
My suggestion is literally that they not unilaterally launch this across every region.
> The position of the CMA is that other advertisers need 3p cookies but Google doesn't. [...] They will demand there to be some mechanism that gives small ad tech companies more data than FLOC did.
I disagree with your connection of those two points. Google's job is to convince regulators that the removal of 3rd-party cookies won't advantage them. There are multiple ways they could attack that problem, including limiting the amount of data they collect. The UK's position is not that it is fundamentally important for advertisers to track users, the UK's position is that is important that there not be one advertiser who can track users.
It's particularly galling for Google to ignore this, because it assumes that of course Google can't possibly collect less information about its users or use less information in ad targeting, so the only solution is to make sure everyone else has the same amount of information as Google. But that's a false premise in my mind. I'm not advocating to remove 3rd-party cookies because I want Google to be the only entity that can target me; I would be perfectly happy if Google removed 3rd-party cookies and committed to tracking me less to reduce its dominance in the market.
In fact, I would argue that it would be better if Google went down that route. I don't trust Google any more than I trust any other 3rd-party advertiser; it's just as problematic for Google to be collecting this kind of invasive data. The assumption that Google's business model or data collection can't possibly change, and therefore we can't make any privacy improvements for anyone else... I just really strongly disagree with that idea.
This is also true in the US. There are some probes happening in the US that cite cookie removal as a possible anti-competitive indicator. Notably, there are other policies and actions that these probes cite that Google has not scrambled to avoid in the same way as it has for cookies. But whatever -- even in the US, regulators are not saying that advertisers need this information, they are saying it's unacceptable for Google to have this large of a disparity with other competitors.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
They are not.
The world has survived for millenia without tracking ads.
For a very, very long time.
> Cause I see a lot of it dieing every day, being replaced with walls.
That's because companies feel value in silos and extracting every cent they can out of users.
Since its birth, clearly. No matter how you try and spin this, advertising is not a requite for a free and open Web. If ads were to disappear tomorrow, web sites which society has deemed important will survive, the others (if income was necessary in the first place) will indeed perish. And we will be just fine.
https://digiday.com/media/googles-confirmed-clicks-initiativ...
With ads, content quality goes down. You don't need to convince people that your content is worth reading, you just need to convince Google. Slap a few expired domains on your text-spinner generated content and off you go.
Not all content is created equal, and Made-For-Adsense content would not have been made otherwise and would not take away attention from quality content.
I believe you're rationalizing your paycheck.
The monetized web has in a lot of measures exceeded the frontiers of what the ragtag petite bourgeoisie of the early internet could ever be but, in the process, the great majority of us (both users and the very long tail of non-top content creators) have invariably become peasants.
I'm not saying there was any other way to have what we have now, but what we have now kinda ain't sooo good when one isn't the middleman in a process architected for the middleman's benefit.
Weird position to take when most high-quality content is already shifting to a paywall model (or didn't base their business model on advertising in the first place). And ad-supported content is in a race to the bottom meaning any content useful beyond light entertainment is drying up.