Friday, the UK’s Antitrust Authority announced a new investigation into Google’s plan to end support for third-party cookies in Chrome. The probe, it explained, is designed to determine whether the change “ could cause ad spend to become even more focused on Google’s ecosystem, ” leaving competing companies who – for the most part – already gasp for air , may be suffocated.
On the one hand, the full set of proposals Google is putting forward sounds like a great deal, especially for the privacy-minded folks among us. Broadly speaking, the changes in what Google are ‘Privacy Sandbox“Would put a” budget “on the amount of data that sites on the Internet could get from the people who surf them, and would stop advertisers from following those surfers on an individual basis. Instead, users would be aggregated into”interest groupsBased on their in-browser activity, and advertisers can target it instead. While all of this data is generally processed by a chain of intermediaries, it is part of Google’s proposal mandates that the browser, in this case Chrome, is solely responsible.
In short, Google suggests protecting our personal information by … preventing someone that’s not google to access. As we have said before, this is much like a power trick, not privacy.
And we weren’t alone. The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) investigation is the result of months of pleading with Marketers for an Open Web, a large trading group representing digital media and adtech companies. The group arrived in November stated that Google’s proposal would result in the company controlling the resources that digital advertisers use to reach the public, and that the change will be ‘irreversible’.
Even if you don’t care about digital ads (which really who can blame you), that point should give you a pause. Some analysts have estimated Which Google’s parent company, Alphabet, brought in $ 149 billion dollars from digital ads in 2020—Means nearly 25 cents of every dollar spent online on advertising ends up in Google’s pockets; Only YouTube is projected to have deserved around $ 18.5 billion, which would represent nearly 30% of all online video ads released throughout the year.
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Unsurprisingly, Google has also become the subject of three separated antitrust suits all of which somehow claimed to be Google’s steel grip across the digital advertising market was the result of a long track record of anti-competitive behavior.
The CMA is the first authority to tackle Google’s proposed Sandbox head-on, and striking a balance between consumer privacy and Google’s grip won’t be easy. Everyone agrees that cookies are scary as hell, but the Justice, tens of Attorneys General, and the House Antitrust Subcommittee all agree that Google has become too big. At the moment, the CMA is in the process of “contacting Google” every objectively Byzantine technical roadmap developed by Google. The goal now is to find out how preservation of privacy aspects of the Sandbox, while weighing them against Google’s inflated position in the digital advertising market. If all goes well, the CMA will emerge with a “legal basis” for what comes next.
“To create a more private web while empowering the publishers and advertisers who support the free and open internet, the industry needs to make major changes to the way digital ads work,” Google said in a statement to Gizmodo . “The Privacy Sandbox has been an open initiative from the start and we welcome the involvement of the CMA in developing new proposals to support a healthy, ad-supported web without third-party cookies. “