2022 (Strike that, 2023) - the year the cookie crumbled

This is a revision of an old blogpost from 2021 that saw the light of day… until now.

Finally after years of speculation, false starts, and endless debates it is finally upon us. The death of the cookie. Or least its third party implementation. For years we have seen a greater and greater emphasis on privacy from legislators and a more privacy friendly approach from IT gigants as Apple and Mozilla. This all culminated when Google joined the band wagon and announced that it would be ending individual-based, cross-site tracking on Chrome. This was the last nail in the coffin for the third party cookie era now that the largest web browser, with more than 60% market share, would leave them high and dry.

Cookies have had a long and good run. Beginning as benign crumbles of information to be shared with a website to improve the user’s experience. They were quickly corrupted to be used first as data collectors of web statistics for the website owner and then for its more nefarious use, tracking and advertisement.

This first switch, from good to bad, came quickly but the use was often quite benign and never something that would register for most users. Someone collected data about which sites you were visiting and advertisements were sometimes more direct. But this is a small price to pay for the free internet we have enjoyed since its inception.

But as time moved on they became more and more invasive and frankly irritating. Endlessly tracked over the vast internet with directly linked adverts of products you have seen or purchased mere seconds before. It was too obvious to be denied and we all caught on that something was afoot. And in this process the humble and healthy cookie’s reputation was dragged through the dirt, forced to bear the shame that its third party sibling has brought over the family.

With all this attention it was only a matter of time before legislation and policy would follow. Today the cookie is despised, shamed and largely misunderstood by the public. It’s something you get warned about when you enter a website for the first time and that the press tends to report as a negative. So with all that the death of the cookie was inevitable.

So what does the future hold for us now and what implications might follow? Well first of all there are the replacements that currently are held in a bit of a holding pattern. Google has its solution, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), and several other companies have or have had their own takes on what essentially is the same solution.

FLoCs is a technique where you group users together with like minded and similar individuals into a gray mass of anonymity. The user itself is not distinguishable (or so they say) and the conclusions that can be derived from the user are shared with a large possibly enormous group. A giant collective avatar if you will.

Companies as Google often uphold this as a shiny new tech to save the users from the evils of the internet. A bastion of privacy and a champion for the users rights. But this is a view that is not shared by privacy groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and companies like Mozilla, DuckDuckGo and Amazon.

— REVISION — Here I kept on, in the original post from 2021, about the critics about FLoC and how there was a fear that it would do more harm than good. That Google in fact were planning to spy even more on us and that some companies were already planning to ban it

Well since then companies, solutions and browsers right and left have started blocking the technique. The rollout was stopped and postponed to mid-2023 and with the date changes the storm died down. But FLoC survived and have been biding it’s time only to come back when we least expect it. — REVISION —

So with FLoC up in the air (Revision, Dead in the water) what else would a cookie free world entail. Well my guess is that we see a greater use of cookies. But this time in its first party variety. By leveraging the data the website owner already possesses or can easily collect. Greater use of first party cookies will lead to less direct marketing that follows you around but leverages the opportunity for the website’s owner to still present direct and hopefully helpful product suggestions.

A new opportunity arises where the individual websites can integrate advertising solutions directly on their end rather than serve it from a third party. For smaller outfits this will hardly be beneficial but for larger content creators and even some businesses this might be an improvement. You can sell or auction out your advertisement realestate yourself and have full control over it. But at the cost of managing it yourself. It’s a double-edged sword.

We will also see a number of different reventu models show up in the future to compete with adverts. What these models might be is still hard to predict. In December 2021 I speculated that we would see more creative use of funding platforms and the aggregation of content into bundles but that has not come to fruition, yet.

How to compete with free will be the question for withs the whole internet wants an answer for. If revenue, from adverts, is cut off what does this imply for the classical internet with no upfront cost. Someone has to pay but how, how much and with what? Questions questions. Lets see what the future holds.