In the blog military post announcing the delay, Google says that decision to phase out cookies over a “ three calendar month period ” in mid-2023 is “ subject to our engagement with the United Kingdom ’ s Competition and Markets Authority ( CMA ). ” In other words, it is pinning region of the delay on its want to work more closely with regulators to come up with new technologies to replace third-party cookies for use in advertising .
few will shed tears for Google, but it has found itself in a very unmanageable put as the sole company that dominates multiple industries : search, ads, and browsers. The more Google cuts off third-party trailing, the more it harms other advertise companies and potentially increases its own dominance in the ad outer space. The less Google cuts off tracking, the more likely it is to come under fire for not protecting exploiter privacy. And no matter what it does, it will come under heavy fire from regulators, privacy advocates, advertisers, publishers, and anybody else with any kind of interest in the web .
Finding a means to balance those conflicting incentives has proven difficult to say the least. One cause is that, as a steward of the open web, Google is attempting to develop its new privacy technologies out in the open via the usual process of creating vane standards. It has bundled several efforts under the rubric of a “ Privacy Sandbox, ” a catch-all term for a bunch of different new proposals for Chrome and the vane.
The most contentious of those proposals has been the “ Federated Learning of Cohorts ” engineering, or FLoC. It is a very complicated attack to create groups of demographically alike users in a semi-anonymous decentralize system that advertisers could use to target ads. however, not a single early browser seller has signaled that it is on board with using FLoC, and several have explicitly said they would block it. The best reply Google has actually gotten is this analysis from Mozilla that identifies some problems in a way that doesn ’ metric ton completely slam the doorway on future Firefox borrowing.
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Google is pointing to a “ rigorous, multi-phased public development process, including across-the-board discussion and testing periods ” for FLoC and early proposals, a fairly obvious signal that it will end up changing or replacing FLoC. “ We plan to conclude this origin test in the total weeks and incorporate input signal, before advancing to far ecosystem testing, ” Google says.
The company is promising a “ more detail schedule ” will be posted on its Privacy Sandbox web site. But in the meanwhile, here ’ s its current schedule — complete with a note that this revised timeline will need to be approved by regulators :
After this public development process, and subject to our battle with the CMA, our plan for Chrome is to phase out back for third gear party cookies in two stages :
stagecoach 1 ( Starting late-2022 ) : once testing is accomplished and APIs are launched in Chrome, we will announce the start of stage 1. During stage 1, publishers and the ad industry will have clock time to migrate their services. We expect this stage to last for nine months, and we will monitor adoption and feedback carefully earlier moving to stage 2.
stage 2 ( Starting mid-2023 ) : Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three calendar month period finishing in late 2023 .
