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Google Chrome Wrap-Up
With everyone in Miami for Possible this week I’m just going to do a round up of the best coverage of the Chrome cookie reversal.
Trey from Ad Tech Explained summed up it up perfectly, calling the last five years “the biggest waste of time in ad tech history.” In his article, he focuses on the countless hours and millions of dollars wasted on Google’s sandbox APIs:
While I limited my exposure to mostly thinking and writing about the Privacy Sandbox, I weep for the poor, unfortunate souls and companies that dedicated actual capital, resources, and their product roadmaps toward the doomed endeavor. It makes my head spin thinking about the millions of dollars and countless hours wasted on the Privacy Sandbox.
This wasn’t the first rug pull. Last July when Google announced the first step in their abandonment of third-party cookie deprecation, AdExchanger wrote a piece which could be reprinted almost without any edits today. The title: “Vendors Like RTB House And Raptive Bought Into The Privacy Sandbox. Do They Feel Burned?” Choice quote:
While the ad tech vendors AdExchanger spoke to were generally positive about Google’s reversal, they admit the Privacy Sandbox does have serious problems.
Back last Fall, Reuters reported that the Sandbox was potentially leaving smaller firms behind, and that this project could increase anti-trust scrutiny, writing:
…the investigations and potential technology development delays are hurting smaller ad-tech firms, as the burgeoning costs due to adoption delays for Privacy Sandbox will put them at a disadvantage against well-heeled rivals.
Wither alternative IDs?
One of the hot takes going around is that the reversal on 3P cookies means the death of alternative IDs. I’m not sure this tracks, given how much of UID2 and RampId effort has centered around CTV. Friend-of-the-pod Matthieu Roche weighed in on LinkedIn:
In 2025, consumers spend less than 25% of their time interacting with digital content & services through a web browser. And only 60% of those web browsers support 3P cookies. So overall, cookies are a useful mechanism to recognize and engage with people for only about 15% of the time they spend online -the rest is spent in “cookie-less” environments, including podcasts, CTV channels, mobile applications, gaming platforms, etc.
Bringing the story arcs together
Like the viewers of Severance, industry observers like myself have been trying to figure out how the separate threads of the two different antitrust cases and the CMA oversight of the Sandbox might turn into a coherent narrative. But unlike Severance, the writers on this one seem to be bringing it together, and it all comes back to Chrome.
Some of the best coverage of the search antitrust case is coming from Megan Gray who has been tweeting about the DOJ’s arguments to spin-out Chrome. Here’s one interesting tweet:
Chrome divest expert going thru prior examples on when proprietary OS-based projects have been spun off: Kubernetes, Firefox (formerly Netscape), Blender. Judge is asking great questions.
— Megan Gray (@megangrA)
4:11 PM • Apr 25, 2025
BOK chimes in on LinkedIn:
Will they own Chrome in a year? Probably not. And the new owner, whether that's a foundation like Mozilla or a strategic like OpenAI, is not going to have a legacy ad tech business that relies on cookies, and thus will have no reason to keep them. In fact, I would argue that anybody who is doing commerce would rather not have cookies since they steal attribution.
The tie between the Sandbox reversal and the other cases is a big convoluted, so I’ll try to unpack the galaxy brain nature of it:
Google was under pressure from the CMA to propose their “notice screen” proposal. Whatever they proposed was going to a) make people angry; and b) make them look too powerful;
The search antitrust case is right in the middle of arguing that Chrome is too powerful. Any announcement (above) would work against them;
They already lost the ad tech trial, and have internally accepted this division will spin out. They want to use the ad tech spin-out as leverage in the eventual
search remedies;
Therefore, why keep worrying about Sandbox when the customers it effects the most ("open web” publishers) won’t be their customers shortly, and all the project does is reinforce the perception that Google is too powerful.
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