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Технологии

Start-ups fight Google over whether the cookie crumbles

Google EMEA offices, in the western part of the Grand Canal Docks, in Dublin

Credit: Artur Widak /NurPhoto

Rosewell and his allies have in their sights a series of initiatives Google wants to push through to increase user privacy, under the umbrella “Project Sandbox”.

Given Google’s business has been built on collecting as much information as possible about as many people as possible, this might come as a surprise to regulators unfamiliar with the notoriously complex technicalities of digital advertising.

Yet by destroying “third-party cookies”, the small files that allow advertisers to track people across the web, and superseding them with a new concept of groups or “cohorts”, Rosewell thinks Project Sandbox will allow Google to clean up.

Timeline | Antitrust lawsuits against Google

“Suppose you will want to target females aged between 20 and 30 in a particular area, without sufficient users there might not be enough to match that criteria, so you will have to go to Google,” he says.

Intriguingly for regulators, Google’s in-house research agrees. Disabling third-party cookies delivered a steep boost in revenue, Google researchers found. The majority of publishers lost 50pc or more of their digital advertising income, and some more than three-quarters.

Rosewell knows measures to protect privacy will be attractive, superficially at least. “We’re not saying we want unlimited tracking,” he says. “We object to Google saying only they can do any tracking or measurement at all. It’s about a level playing field.”

Google says many Project Sandbox proposals are still in their infancy. Outlawing the third-party cookie will increase individual privacy, the company told us, but it acknowledged resistance from the digital advertising industry. “Cohorts aren’t fundamentally different, but they are a non-intuitive concept,” Chetna Bindra, Google’s product manager for privacy initiatives, explained.

Google's $131m campus in Boulder, Colorado

Credit: Daniel Brenner /Bloomberg

The search giant published a statement on its website about Project Sandbox that said the concept “aims to provide space for experimentation and input from technologists, businesses, publishers, regulators and more. Among the proposals being tested are privacy-safe ways to do things like predict and protect against fraud, properly measure if an ad campaign has ‘worked’ and find the right audience for an ad”.

The alliance also objects to Google moving login controls and other features into the browser, cutting website owners off from user data. The browser market happens to be dominated by Google’s Chrome.

And somewhat embarrassingly for Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the feted creator of the world wide web and a strong advocate of the web as an “open platform”, Google’s measures have been funnelled through his very own W3C standards body.

Such bodies have increasingly become dominated by Google, with over 106 Googlers registered with Berners-Lee’s W3C, three times as many as the next largest, Microsoft. Most have just one seat at the table.

Google’s Bindra disputed the claim – the company has “around 10” employees active and engaged at the W3C at any one time, she told us.

Google search | How it decides what you see

For veteran competition lawyer Tim Cowen, chair of antitrust practice at Preiskel and Co, who is helping the alliance, the accusations against Google are familiar: “Many Sandbox proposals are either foreclosing third parties in their ability to compete, or raising rivals’ costs.” He sees similarity with the Microsoft browser case of the late Nineties. “It’s integrating the browser with Google’s own ecosystem of online apps and services,” he told us.

“They’re not refusing to reply to something new, but interfering with the existing supply of data.”

Where Cowen thinks the UK can act is by taking decisive action.

“We’re beginning to see a lot of muscularity in the Government’s approach to both harms and competition,” says Lord Tim Clement-Jones, co-chair of Parliament’s Digital Policy Alliance (EURIM).

The CMA has been given the job of establishing a new digital regulator recommended by the Furman Review, and told us it’s waiting for parliamentary time to establish the enabling legislation, so by next March. But the CMA added that it already has the powers to act, and will if it thinks the complaint merits action.

That can’t come soon enough for Rosewell: “If things aren’t changed, it would be like the Government sending an ambulance to a funeral.”

 

Andrew Orlowski is the director of the research network Think of X

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