Friday, UK antitrust authority announced a new investigation into Google’s plan to end third-party cookie support in Chrome. The probe, he explained, seeks to determine whether the change “could cause advertising spending to be further concentrated in Google’s ecosystem,” which could stifle competing companies that, for the most part, are already suffocating air.
On the one hand, the full set of proposals presented by Google sounds like a good deal, especially for the privacy that exists between us. Broadly speaking, the changes in what Google calls “Privacy sandbox“It would put a ‘budget’ on the amount of data that websites could pull from people browsing it and prevent advertisers from tracking individual browsers. Instead, users would be grouped into”interest groups“Based on their activity in the browser, and advertisers could target them instead. While all of this data is usually managed by a chain of intermediaries, it’s part of Google’s proposal. mandates that the browser (in this case, Chrome) would be solely responsible.
In short: Google proposes to protect our personal data by preventing … anyone Google does not have access. As we said before, this is very similar to a plot of power, not privacy.
And we weren’t the only ones. The UK Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) investigation is the result of several months of penalties from marketers’ petition for an Open Web, a major commercial group representing digital media and technology companies. additional. In November, the group he stated that Google’s proposal would lead the company to effectively control the means that any digital advertiser uses to reach the public, and that the change “will be irreversible.”
Even if you don’t give a damn about digital ads (which really who can blame you), this point should pause you. Some analysts do dear that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, made $ 149 billion from digital ads by 2020Which means about 25 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising ended up in Google’s pockets; Only Youtube is projected have won around $ 18.5 billion, which would represent almost 30% of all online video advertising throughout the year.
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Not surprisingly, Google has also become the topic three separate antitrust fits everyone who assumed, in one way or another, that Google steel grip in the digital ad market was the result of a long history of anti-competitive behavior.
The CMA is the first authority to address Google’s proposed Sandbox proposal and it won’t be easy to strike a balance between consumer privacy and Google adherence. Everyone agrees that cookies are creepy as hell, but the Department of Justice, dozens of the Attorneys General, and the Antitrust subcommittee of the house they all agree that Google has grown too much. At this time, the CMA is in the process of “interacting with Google” to understand this objectively Byzantine technical roadmap submitted by Google. Your goal right now is to figure out how to approach the file preservation of privacy aspects of the sandbox, while weighing those of Google inflated position in the digital ad market. If all goes well, the CMA will come up with a “legal basis” for what should come next.
“Creating a more private website, while allowing publishers and advertisers to support free and open Internet, requires the industry to make significant changes to the way digital advertising works,” Google told Gizmodo in a statement. . “The Privacy Sandbox has been an open initiative from the beginning and we welcome the involvement of the CMA as we work to develop new proposals to support a healthy website that supports ads without third-party cookies. “