MEDPUSH

The news: Google’s plan to deprecate third-party cookies in early 2022 has been delayed by almost two years, in part to accommodate an evaluation by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

How we got here: Google has faced multiple challenges to its deprecation plans for some time. Over the past year, government regulators in both the EU and the US have been conducting various investigations into the potentially anti-competitive impact of cookie deprecation. In turn, privacy advocates and advertising industry trade bodies have expressed serious concerns about many of the Privacy Sandbox initiatives designed to replace third-party cookies. Technical delays to the Sandbox’s first locally executed decision over groups experiment (FLEDGE) and Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) project also made the prospect of a 2022 deprecation appear increasingly unfeasible. These challenges have led many (us included) to speculate that Google would have to delay its deprecation plans or incur serious reputational and regulatory risk.

However, it appears that ultimately it was the CMA’s investigation that forced Google to officially push back the entire process. In January 2021, the CMA launched an investigation into Google’s proposal to replace third-party cookies. When it announced the postponement, Google explicitly referred to “commitments” it had made to the CMA during this investigation as being a motivation for the delay. These commitments include the promise to not give preference to its own systems, and to give the CMA at least a 60-day notice before deprecating cookies. The commitments may also explain the CMA’s larger role in the new plans for cookie deprecation.

The new plan:

• Google will conclude its initial trial of FLoC—one of the more controversial Sandbox initiatives—on July 13, 2021, and will share details about future FLoC tests in the coming weeks.
• In late 2022, after additional development of different Privacy Sandbox initiatives, it will roll out its various cookieless ad methods and monitor industry adoption. This is expected to occur over a nine-month period, during which the CMA will conduct its own evaluation of the Sandbox initiatives.
• In mid-2023, after fully testing its different Sandbox initiatives and receiving approval from the CMA, Chrome will begin to phase out third-party cookies gradually over a three-month period. Google will do this by slowly shortening the maximum duration that a third-party cookie can remain active. Cookie life spans currently range from the length of an individual browser session to over a year in some cases.

What the delay could mean for the advertising industry:

• Many marketers will likely see this as permission to not make strategic changes for another two years. Some agencies will likely feel less motivated to push their clients to adopt alternative identifiers or attribution models. This will ultimately leave many of the advertising ecosystem’s underlying privacy problems unaddressed for the most part. For reference, the majority (51.9%) of US marketers and publishers said it will take more than a year for their company to shift from third-party cookies to another identity solution, according to LiveIntent polling in Q4 2020.
• It probably also likely dampen some of the momentum behind industrywide efforts to replace third-party cookies, such as The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0. The urgency to develop a new solution will likely be less prevalent than what we’ve seen over the past year, and receive less media coverage. Also, publishers banking on their first-party data as an alternative in a cookieless world will likely need to readjust their timelines.