What's really broken is that we end up giving control over the revenue streams of millions of websites to a couple of US based companies.
The goal of these companies is to have end-to-end control as this gives them control and security of their revenue.
This might not be a stated goal publicly but the deeper they can take things and the more things that they can put a moat around, the more they can rely upon and grow their revenue and profits in future. I can see how each step feels like a natural increment over the prior.
I loathe the privacy impact of the way cookies have been used, but these changes merely push the same issues inside a behemoth who can capitalise upon that data in a more opaque way. This feels like a transfer of control and a land-grab on a colossal scale.
They only seem to talk about chip manufacturing, which only recently started in the first place.
There IS still the option of not using Chrome.
ff is not even second
My understanding is there are a minority of legitimate use cases that require them. If Chrome stops supporting them, those flows will get rewritten, and anyone not using Chrome benefits? Add to that an aggressive anti-trust action splitting Chrome from the bit of Google that sells ads (I can dream?), and this all works out fantastically well. Probably too much misplaced optimism.
I suspect what actually happens is that ad-tech companies end up using clever tricks at the CDN or server level to work around this.
Google paying anyway to keep it alive through a search engine deal like Firefox? that doesn't remove the link between the two financially.