Great thread from @Myles_Younger that inspired me to start my own - what are Google's intentions and who are their internal stakeholders with respect to the deprecation of third party cookies? I have no special insight into the inner workings of Google, but here goes anyway.. 1/ https://twitter.com/Myles_Younger/status/1280640920749174787

The best way to walk through the "why are they doing this?" question, is to think through the stakeholder groups inside of Google. I believe there are at least four groups with somewhat overlapping and also contradictory needs/viewpoints. 2/

1) The Google "ad network" group - the ex-Doubleclick team. Even though this team is highly integrated with Google Ads in general, they obviously have their own needs. If open web advertising gets hit hard, this is obviously very bad for this team. 3/

Unfortunately for this group, their revenue, and more importantly, profit, is a rounding error for Google and they are probably the source of the greatest anti-trust risk and negative PR (well, maybe Youtube has worse PR risk, but is worth the hassle) 4/

But they face, mostly, the same challenges that any other open web advertising-funded group is going to face. Maybe some sort of Google universal login across the web can work out, but there's no possible way the Chrome team is sharing IDs with them. 5/

2) Google Search team - the money makers. They don't care about the money from open web advertising. But they do care about the quality of search results. If lots of publishers go out of business, or lots of e-commerce stores move to commerce walled gardens, Search loses. 6/

The Search team cares deeply about the quality of search results (driven by a vibrant open web), and I believe they are a key internal stakeholder pushing for "saving" advertising on the open web. 7/

3) Google corporate - they obviously care about overall revenue/profitability, so the desires of the search team are important. But more importantly, they care about anti-trust and regulatory pressures. 8/

They don't want to be broken up, want to minimize the damage if they are, and want to minimize new regulations that affect their businesses. They also feel that they are being crucified in the court of public opinion by their privacy-focused competitors (mostly Apple). 9/

This group has the greatest internal conflicting opinions.
Regulation is mainly focused (to-date) on user privacy - so they know they need to increase their focus in that area. But privacy has the side effect of highly consolidating power with larger companies 10/

And Google is at the top of the list of companies that benefit from greater privacy. So there is an extreme push/pull here where they know they need to focus on user privacy, but they also know that their desire to reduce regulatory and competitive pressure... 11/

Will drive consolidation in their favor and make them even more of a target for antitrust. Anyone external who is focused on trying to improve the Privacy Sandbox to help more open web creators is focused on this point. More privacy = more power to the largest companies. 12/

4) The Chrome team. The heaviest pressure they feel is from the other browsers which are pillorying Chrome for being anti-user. Having sat through a number of different W3C meetings and read through many pages of github/discourse... 13/

And I've seen how the other browsers take implicit potshots at Chrome, and since these teams spend inordinate amounts of time in those forums, it must feel like the weight of the world is against them. Plus, there are a ton of security implications they are trying to fix... 14/

in the way the web was initially architected that are highly connected to privacy. 15/

As a side point, and mostly obvious, but I believe the Safari and Firefox teams do truly believe they are in some sort of religious battle for the web. In reality, I think that Apple allows Safari to do what it does because it's a welcome attack against Google and the web... 16/

As a strong open web is good for Google, it's bad for Apple. Apple has all of its interest in the app ecosystem and App Store, where it allows tracking and can make all of the money it wants on app install search ads. 17/

And Firefox just hates advertising in general and wants it removed from the open web, and if that's a side effect of a focus on privacy, that's great. 18/

Back to Google. So their privacy focus is driven primarily by a desire for regulatory and competitive relief, and some need to support the open web. But conflicted by their fear of antitrust and the fact that all of this is a distraction from their core business anyway... 19/

And that's why much of the Privacy Sandbox is so convoluted. They want to "save" advertising on the open web, but trying to thread the needle between all of these pressures is insanely complex and likely to lead to other issues. 20/

Trying to save advertising on the open web is a worthy cause as it supports the livelihoods of millions (or more) people. But while I keep a positive attitude, it's very unclear if the Sandbox will save the web - but there are other options... 21/21