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I got a different interpretation from that paragraph than what you suggest.

The interview doesn't state that 3rd party cookies are good. Rather, they argue that they are required to have a "healthy" targeted ads market:

> So the question then is, what do consumers want? Do they want no targeted advertising? Well, then you can’t have an ad tech industry. Do they want targeted advertising that benefits the business that’s sending it, like the dog walker or the New York Times? That would require competition in the ad tech market.

Of course, that conclusion rests on the assumption that "we" want a targeted ad market, an assumption that many here will dispute. But that's not the point of the lawsuit - their point is rather "Since this market exists, then the people must want it. And since people want it, we need to ensure that there's enough competition". "This class of business shouldn't exist" is not within the scope of this particular case.

> I find it interesting that the HN crowd loved that Apple was blocking 3rd party cookies in Safari but now that Chrome is about to do the same suddenly it's evil.

Apple isn't an advertising company. Google is. The label of 'evil' doesn't need to be part of a conversation about anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior.

https://searchads.apple.com/ Apple is an advertising company.

Google sells android phones and gsuite, as well.

> Apple is an advertising company.

Primarily, it's a hardware company. Lots of companies have advertising services, this does not make them "advertising companies". If your advertising products disappear and the company would function more or less the same, that's not the primary product in your company's portfolio. Google would be crippled, as advertising is the primary product (fed by data from all the other services it offers, often at a loss). Similarly, most of apple software would be useless if they lost control of their hardware production/control.

Depends on your definition of advertising-company. If you sell eyeballs through ads that means you are an advertising company.

This is an article about monopolies - which are all about scale and market dominance.

Yet you've excluded both from your analysis. It doesn't seem to be a good faith argument.

Faith doesn't matter in an argument.

This is a purely logical discussion. If you sell ads, it means you are an ads company. The degree to which you sell ads doesn't factor in to that.

I can argue that apple monopolized ads on iOS devices by disabling cookies on safari and removing the targeting capabilities on ad-identifiers. Now the only way to have targeted ads is through the app store. Hope this satisfies your arbitrary 'it should be a monopoly before i discuss it' argument.

Good faith (Latin: bona fides), in human interactions, is a sincere intention to be fair, open, and honest, regardless of the outcome of the interaction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith

OP wasn't discussing "faith".

> If you sell ads, it means you are an ads company.

Nope. An <x> company is a company that primarily deals in x. Ford is a car company. Their cars contain computers. Doesn't make Ford a computer company. The cars also have tires. Doesn't make car a tire company. Some cars have leather seats. Doesn't make Ford a leather company, furniture company or upholstery company.

> The degree to which you sell ads doesn't factor in to that

Sure does. Particularly in the case of anti-trust, which is the topic here.

It would seem to be blocking 3rd party cookies is good and it's a net negative for Google because their analytics stop working. The article suggests google has more data than their competitors so it's a net positive to them. That might be true for small competitors. It's not true for big ones like Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft or possibly even Apple who have or potentially have a similar amount of info on you via the services they offer

as far as i remember chrome actually sends an additional and probably unique xclient-data property when it connects to google owned addresses. This is a feature its competitors do not have access to.

I just looked through the headers of a request to google.com, expecting this to be wrong, but it does look like this is there! Right at the bottom, x-client-data. The value ends with == which makes me think it's some kind of hash. Crazy. It does not exist when I use ungoogled chromium, firefox, or even edge.

I looked it up just now and found:

https://9to5google.com/2020/02/06/google-chrome-x-client-dat...

Why only block third party cookies? Block all cookies by default. If the user needs a cookie she can enable them. For example, on a per-site basis. Default setting is cookies on for all sites.

Because that would be a terrible experience for consumers. Do you really want to have to explicitly allow cookies for every site you log in to? Or whenever you want to use a shopping-cart? Do you want every site you ever go to to have a huge popup instructing you on how to enable cookies for the site? Not to mention how difficult this will make life for developers who use cookies for legitimate purposes.

> Do you really want to have to explicitly allow cookies for every site you log in to?

Yes!

Absolutely.

Click login/cart, popup "do you want to enable login/cart for $this_site?" yes/no

But only when you explicitly make the request to use a cart or press the login button. Silently block everything else.

There's about 5 sites I would ever use with cookies. And I use chrome for them. I use firefox with all that crap disabled for everything else.

Give it a try!

> Click login/cart, popup "do you want to enable login/cart for $this_site?" yes/no

I don't see how you could implement that without sites abusing any click event to try and get you to enable cookies.

> There's about 5 sites I would ever use with cookies

Good for you. Most people need more than that.

What as many as 10? 15? Or even 50!

Now count your cookies. Orders of magnitude different. Thanks Google! Nobody agreed to that. Literally nobody.

When you cut to the chase like this it often triggers a canned defensive response such as,

1. "You agreed to it by using the software/website"

2. the design decision was made in the interests of improving "user experience" (meanwhile the users are a cultivated "product", not customers), or

3. the software/website has been "chosen" by large numbers of users which shows they all approve of the design (meanwhile, those users have no other meaningful choice)

I used to use konqueror years and years ago set to ask me about cookies from all sites. It got so tedious. These days I'm much happier with firefox/privacy badger selectively blocking stuff behind the scenes for me.

Though I do wish it weren't necessary.

I do this a regular basis. Not quite daily--Firefox had extensions that manage it for me--but every time I use a text-mode browser (lynx, links, etc) it prompts me when a website wants to store a cookie. The answer is almost always no.

> Not to mention how difficult this will make life for developers who use cookies for legitimate purposes.

I'm not worried about this. Developers using them for legitimate purposes I agree with can keep using them. If I don't want your cookie, I don't care how hard it makes it for you. I don't want you storing a consent cookie when I say no (ask when you need to get data, not when the page loads). I don't want you storing a cookie saying when I last visited your page anymore than I want Walmart to know when I walk past their doors (reading a single page on your site does not make me a user. Including me in a general count of unregistered views is fine--assigning me a unique ID is not).

If I log into a website or use a shopping cart, I am explicitly asking the website to store information for me. This is like walking up to the register (to ask a question, to pay, etc. They need to recognize me as a unique individual). Loading the homepage, loading a product listing? Absolutely not; this is like looking at a vending machine on my way by; you don't need to know anything other than (possibly) the fact that someone walked by (measure foot traffic) and did/did not buy anything (subtract number of purchases from number of visitors).

Google's motto was and is (they remove it and put it back various time) "Do No Evil."

They were the tech darling who innovated and created great tech products/services and all behind this mantra.

We have since seen here on Hacker News the evil they do... i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 being one example of many.

They get so much flack because they chose to have and promote that mantra then failed miserably in front of all here, many whom they inspired to get into tech and strive to work for them. Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to work there!