For better or worse this just points to a continued feeling of incompetence and a sense of being lost from Google
Not really. From Google’s announcement:
we recognize this transition requires significant work by many participants and will have an impact on publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising.
Translation: Google’s main income sources didn’t hop on the train fast enough, and Google is not going to commit financial suicide just to please its
usersproducts.It was never about privacy, they just wanted to monopolize the tracking market by making it so only the company that owns the browser you’re running can track you. They called it FLoC at one point, but I think they rebranded it a few times since.
It’s not sbout monopolies, it’s about survival of Google’s core business model.
All other browsers whose businesses are based on selling ads, face the same risk. They’re ALL between a rock and a hard place:
- On one side, the EU and other countries want to push privacy laws that protect their citizens from getting casually spied on by foreign entities
- On the other, Google’s core business model relies on spying on users and reselling the use of that data to the highest bidder… many of them being foreign entities to the targetted people
If both Google/browsers/Ad sellers, and Ad purchasers, don’t come up with something that is tracking, but cuacks like privacy, the whole Ad ecosystem is at risk.
FLoC is an attempt at compromise, by having an intermediary (the browser) who gathers full tracking data, but only sells a “reasonably anonymized” version.
Of course Ad purchasers see that as an inferior product, so they aren’t keen to jump onto it… but if they all don’t get something like that going on, then everyone’s going to get shut down, with Google standing to lose the most.
From the end user’s perspective, their failure would be slightly better, but otherwise worse than the current state of things:
- Less tracking on sites that didn’t rely on it in the first place
- More paywalls on sites that lose Ad revenue
- More sites asking people to enable full tracking in order to access their content
IMHO, stuff like FLoC would be a better solution.
How I see it is that FLoC would have meant that instead of a competitive surveillance market that should not exist, we would have had a monopolized surveillance market that should not exist. IDK which is worse TBH.
FLoC was the first, pre-enshittification iteration. It would have got worse. It will get worse.
While it is true that the ad business model is changing as you describe, Google’s strategy with respect to it is also absolutely about monopolizing the ad market.
Google is stuck because they can’t actually improve user experience without threatening their revenue model.
