Google’s Cookie Fight Will Shape Future of Digital Advertising
Shifts in the way data is shared threaten Facebook and other rivals in the $330 billion industry
By Alex Webb
You may not have noticed, but the web is on the cusp of a revolution. Groups of engineers around the world are beavering away on the biggest upheaval to it in a decade. The shift has the potential to drastically reshape the power dynamics of the internet and the $330 billion digital advertising industry that supports it.
It’s all about cookies. If the web is an unfathomably complex machine driven by billions upon billions of cogs, then cookies are the lubricant that keeps the thing moving. That’s because the web is, for the most part, funded by ads. And the tiny little text files known as cookies determine which ads get shown to whom. For now. Come next year, that’s all going to change.
The overhaul might also give publishers, not least the media industry, a chance to mend their bungled approach to making money in the era of digital consumption. If they get their act together, that is.
Whenever an ad seems to stalk you, cookies are to blame, but their origin in the mid-1990s was innocent enough. Engineers at the then-popular web browser Netscape needed a way for…
