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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Why don't they just unilaterally disable third-party cookies by default without providing any replacement? The only slightly valuable functionality that would be lost would be authentication in comment widgets like Disqus.

Ah, right, the makers of the world's most popular web browser are also the world's most profitable online advertising company, that's why.

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>Why don't they just unilaterally disable third-party cookies by default without providing any replacement?

It's explained in the article, and below in this thread. They legally cannot due to intervention from the CMA.

I do love when rhetorical questions actually have a simple answer. I'll admit I had a similar thought as GP (though I wouldn't have posted that thought as a comment without at least taking a look to verify my assumptions). I'm glad to see that it isn't a simple conflict-of-interest with their business that is holding it up.

A great pro-tip I try to follow (but sometimes fail since this is human nature): don't make assumptions, and don't be over-confident if you don't know. It can be especially embarrassing if TFA is quite short and well covered

I think the CMA does think it's a conflict of interest which is why they are stepping in. It seems like they think it's in Google's favor to remove third party cookies without a replacement.

Thanks that is interesting. To be clear though I meant a conflict-of-interest inside of Google. E.g. the ad division influencing the browser division to slow the roll to avoid damaging revenues/sales.

But I hadn't even considered that this might benefit Google, but that certainly makes sense! I'm grateful for good old British skepticism :-) Looking forward to their findings.

More importantly, it is also in customers favor to remove third party cookies.

That's not what the article says. The CMA is intervening based on their plan of replacing cookies with Topics (née FLoC). If they just wanted to drop 3p cookies without a replacement, they could.

>If they just wanted to drop 3p cookies without a replacement, they could.

That's debatable, but I doubt that's the case. The CMA isn't a privacy organization; they deal with monopolies. They're intervening at the behest of other advertisers who are concerned that they'll lose the ability to adequately track users under the Privacy Sandbox proposal. The CMA's chief concern is that everybody is on equal footing.

The alternatives proposed for more private ad targeting have gone through multiple evolutions, including FLoC and Topics, but these were created largely in response to the CMA's objections.

Hahaha...Oh, you're serious. Let me laugh harder...

The CMA has specifically mentioned that just blocking 3rd party cookies would provide Google an unfair competitive advantage because their large web presence allows them to develop better user advertising profiles based on just first party information. Advertisers without a large first party user base (because they only do advertising) would not be able to develop user profiles.

The whole privacy sandbox effort it's supposed to level the playing field between large content providers that are also advertisers (Google, Facebook, etc) and providers that only do advertising (Criteo, RTBHouse, etc). Google couldn't drop 3rd party cookies support without Privacy Sandbox.

I couldn't find a citation via google but perplexity helped me find [0] which does state your point clearly. So why are they allowed to have disabling them as an option at all? Since by that argument, customers that disable for privacy, further entrench google.

[0] https://www.adexchanger.com/marketers/the-uks-cma-wants-ad-t...

The CMA is a UK-only body. Why would this hold up a commitment to remove 3P cookies globally?

Sounds like a very flimsy excuse, Safari has blocked 3PC by default for years, so the restriction would apply to iOS Chrome as well. Didn't need the UK to sign off on it.

https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#intelligent-tracking...

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