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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

Might as well read "Google delays making less money". Not surprising at all.

Not exactly. Google wants to replace cookies with something else. But Mozilla and Apple, unsurprisingly, haven't liked their proposals so far.

I don't think lack of participation from other browsers has been a big component. Firefox actually gave some excellent feedback on the FLoC API. [1] Instead that it's just been really hard to get these new privacy preserving APIs working well. Turtledove/Fledge, for remarketing, in particular, is extremely complicated and not done. Making something fully privacy preserving that recovers no revenue isn't especially difficult, and making something that recovers revenue but has fatal privacy issues is not that bad, but solving both of these at once, while building a system that has good performance on real devices, is somewhere between really hard and not possible.

(I used to work on this, on the Google Ads side)

[1] https://mozilla.github.io/ppa-docs/floc_report.pdf

Did you consider letting people add topics they're interested in to things like the topics proposal? Context-based ads, some random ads, and just serving me ads on topics I opt-in to would be enough for me to turn off any ad-blockers, save for fingerprinting, but I believe some standards-based progress is being made there as well.

If targeting precision plummets, then cpa will probably increase globally because the only effective strategy will be broader targets, or targets with signed in properties. That means higher relative value for signed-in search, mobile ads, and generally any owned properties. The smaller brokers are the ones who will be damaged the most. If Google did this tomorrow, you could probably make a case that it's anti-competitive.

Seems simplistic to draw that conclusion. Especially if you assume they are as hyper focused on profit above all else. If you think that way then there must be some selfish motive to them phasing out ad cookies and so the delay may be about profit but could also indicate something else.

Google would probably face legal issues if they did this too fast, other ad networks depends a lot more on these tracking cookies than Google does so they would sue Google for using their browser dominance to hurt their advertising competitors.

> Seems simplistic to draw that conclusion.

Simplistic? Maybe, but it is also realistic.

> Especially if you assume they are as hyper focused on profit above all else.

Google is not "they", as in a group of people. Google has been a public company for 18 years, since 2004. The main purpose of a public company has always been to maximize shareholder value by generating as much profit as possible. Google is no different in that regard.

Aren't companies forced to try and make themselves as valuable as possible? My gut says they wanted to get a publicity boost so they decided to cut cookies but then had to backtrack as they realized they'd loose a lot more money than expected. I think the delay is to buy more time to think of some way of minimizing damage (profits).

> I think the delay is to buy more time to think of some way of minimizing damage

That's not a cynical take, that's what they're saying publicly. "That's why we started the Privacy Sandbox initiative to collaborate with the ecosystem on developing privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies and other forms of cross-site tracking. ... The most consistent feedback we’ve received is the need for more time to evaluate and test the new Privacy Sandbox technologies before deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome. This feedback aligns with our commitment to the CMA to ensure that the Privacy Sandbox provides effective, privacy-preserving technologies and the industry has sufficient time to adopt these new solutions. This deliberate approach to transitioning from third-party cookies ensures that the web can continue to thrive, without relying on cross-site tracking identifiers or covert techniques like fingerprinting." -- https://blog.google/products/chrome/update-testing-privacy-s...

Fiduciary duty to shareholders often is misinterpreted that way, but no, companies are not forced to maximize shareholder value above all else.

They benefitted from all of the good PR they got for pretending to phase out ad cookies in the past. Now they can kick the can down the road and do it again.

They could have chosen not to do it at all unless we believe people were switching to alternatives that pushed them to. That argument is poorly supported, so I'm not as cynical about their intentions here.

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