Comment by imajoredinecon
3 years ago
No, they literally can't. The UK Competition and Markets Authority made Google promise they won't remove 3rd-party cookies from Chrome before adding alternatives.
3 years ago
No, they literally can't. The UK Competition and Markets Authority made Google promise they won't remove 3rd-party cookies from Chrome before adding alternatives.
Sure they can. They just have to do it in a way that doesn't create a disadvantage for other advertising providers.
Google isn't allowed to stop others tracking you without also removing their own ability to track you because that's anti-competitive.
You are assuming reasonableness on behalf of the regulators in question. In an ideal world, they hopefully said "you cannot give information to your own advertising/analytics division that you don't give to others". However, they could just as easily have said "you must provide either third-party cookies or a replacement for them", without offering the much more reasonable alternative of turning both off and not giving Google advertising/analytics any information either.
So, what did the regulators actually say, and does it in fact allow Google to turn off third-party cookies without any replacement? If it does, then this is Google's fault for adding this feature in Chrome. If it doesn't, then this is the fault of bad regulation.
Google has a habit of limiting changes it does not like to specific countries.
So if they are rolling out a UK mandated feature globally there is no question that Google is all for it.