W3C Meets Ad Tech Drama
The W3C is negotiating a tricky influx of members and attention as it becomes an increasingly important stakeholder in online advertising. That’s because browser operators like Chrome, Apple’s Safari WebKit group, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla are the W3C natives, and are asserting more control over digital advertising by disabling cookies and web tracking with default ad-blocking tools. Of late, ad tech companies, web publishers and data vendors have flooded the W3C (the Improving Web Advertising Business Group, in particular) to lobby browser developers. There’s simmering tension in these working groups. Ad tech and publisher advocates are frustrated because they don’t have real power to affect change, and can only voice their opinions. All these new dues-paying W3C members also change its composition, just like when the IAB changed from a publisher-first trade body to one that represented all online advertising constituents. So browser developers and
It’ll all be different now that the U.K.’s antitrust authority has come to the rescue.
At least, that’s what James Rosewell, CEO and co-founder of 51Degrees, a small ad tech fish in a Google-dominated pond, hopes will happen now that the country’s competition oversight agency is expected to play a role in the process Google has guided in developing cookieless tracking and targeting tech.
The Worldwide Web Consortium an international web standards body also known as the W3C is hosting the Privacy Sandbox initiative to develop methods for tracking, ad targeting and measurement to replace third-party cookie-based approaches. But Google is driving the initiative, which it developed in connection to its now-delayedplans to disable third-party cookies in its much-used Chrome browser. And ad tech providers like Rosewell feel like Google’s involvement has unfairly tipped the Privacy Sandbox process in the digital ad giant’s control.
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