On Friday, the UK antitrust authority has announced a new investigation into Google’s plan to end support for third-party cookies in Chrome. The survey, he explained, is intended to determine whether the change “could cause advertising spending to become even more focused on the Google ecosystem”, and could suffocate competing companies that are – for the most part – already panting for air.
On the one hand, the full set of proposals presented by Google sounds like a pretty good deal, especially for people who look at privacy. Broadly speaking, the changes in what Google calls “Privacy SandboxIt would put a “budget” on the amount of data that web sites could retrieve from people browsing it and prevent advertisers from tracking those surfers individually. Instead, users would be grouped into “cumulative”interest groups“Based on their browser activity, and advertisers could target them. While all of this data is generally handled by a chain of intermediaries, it is part of Google’s proposal seats that the browser – in this case, Chrome – would be solely responsible.
In short: Google proposes to protect our personal details by … preventing anyone Google does not have access. Like I said before, it looks a lot like a trick for power, not intimacy.
And we weren’t the only ones. The UK Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) inquiry is the result of several months of requests from Marketers for an Open Web, a major business group representing digital media and advertising technology companies. In November, the group established that Google’s proposal would lead to effective control of the means that any digital advertiser uses to reach the public – and that the change “will be irreversible”.
Even if you don’t realize digital advertising (which, indeed, who can blame you), this point should give you a break. Some analysts have estimate that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, extracted $ 149 billion from digital advertising in 2020– means that almost 25 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising has reached Google’s pockets; Youtube alone is designed to have won around $ 18.5 billion, which would be almost 30% of all online video ads year-round.
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Surprisingly, Google has also become the subject three separate antitrust fits all who claimed, in one way or another, that Google steel grip the digital advertising market has been the result of a long experience of anti-competitive behavior.
CMA is the first authority to deal directly with the Sandbox proposed by Google, and achieving a balance between consumer privacy and Google control will not be easy. Everyone agrees that cookies are creepy as hell, except Department of Justice, dozens Attorneys General and House Antitrust Subcommittee everyone agrees that Google has grown too much. The CMA is currently in the process of “interacting with Google” to understand Byzantine objective technical roadmap presented by Google. His goal now is to find out how to approach it maintaining confidentiality aspects of the Sandbox, while weighing the ones from Google swollen position on the digital advertising market. If all goes well, the CMA will come up with a “legal basis” for what should come next.
“Creating a more private web, while allowing publishers and advertisers to accept the free and open internet, requires the industry to make major changes in the way digital advertising works,” Google told Gizmodo in a statement. “The Privacy Sandbox was an open initiative from the beginning, and we welcome CMA’s involvement as we work to develop new proposals to support a healthy, ad-supported, cookie-free web of third parties. “