Friday, the British Antitrust Authority announced a new investigation into Google’s plan to end support for third-party cookies in Chrome. The investigation, it explained, was intended to determine whether the change ‘could cause advertising spending to focus even more on Google’s ecosystem’, which could potentially stifle competing companies that are mostly gasping for air.
On the one hand, the complete set of suggestions that Google puts forward sounds pretty good, especially for the privacy among us. Broadly speaking, the changes in what Google calls its “Privacy Sandbox‘Would set a’ budget ‘on the amount of data websites can get on the internet from the people who visit them, and would prevent advertisers from tracking the surfers on an individual basis. Instead, users will be merged into composite “interest groupsBased on their activity in the browser, and advertisers may rather target it. Although all of this data is usually handled by a chain of intermediaries, it’s part of Google’s proposal mandate that the browser – in this case Chrome – is solely responsible.
In short: Google suggests protecting our privacy by … preventing anyone it’s not Google that gets access. As we said previously, it looks a lot like a gimmick for power, not privacy.
And we were not the only ones. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)’s inquiry is the result of several months of begging Marketers for an Open Web, a key trading group representing digital media and adtech businesses. Back in November, the group set that Google’s proposal would result in the company effectively controlling the means any digital advertiser uses to reach the public – and that the change would be ‘irreversible’.
Even if you do not give a shit about digital advertising (which who can blame you), then you have to give it a while. Some analysts have estimated that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, raised $ 149 billion from digital advertising in 2020– which means that almost 25 cents of every dollar spent online ended up in Google’s pocket; Youtube only is projected to have deserve it around $ 18.5 billion, which would represent almost 30% of all year-round online video advertising spend.
G / O Media can get a commission
It is not surprising that Google is also the subject of three separate antitrust is suitable for anyone who claims to be Google’s in any way firm grip about the digital advertising market was the result of a long history of competitive behavior.
The CMA is the first authority to put Google’s proposed Sandbox to the test, and finding a balance between consumer privacy and Google’s grip will not be easy. Everyone agrees that cookies are whimsical as hell, but the Department of Justice, dozens of Attorneys-General, and the House Committee on Antitrust everyone agrees that Google has become too big. The CMA is currently “connecting with Google” to objective Byzantine technical roadmap laid out by Google. Its purpose now is to find out how the privacy protection aspects of the Sandbox, while weighing against Google’s inflated position in the digital advertising market. If all goes well, the CMA will have a ‘legal basis’ for what is to come next.
“The creation of a more private web, while also enabling publishers and advertisers who support the free and open Internet, requires the industry to make major changes in the way digital advertising works,” Google said in a statement. Gizmodo said. ‘The privacy sandbox has been an open initiative since its inception and we welcome the involvement of the CMA as we work to develop new proposals to support a healthy, ad-supported web site without third-party cookies. ”