On Tuesday at its annual developer conference, I/O 2019, Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled changes to its Chrome browner that will give the search company an even more dominant position in the digital advertising space.
Touted as a privacy feature, the next version of the Google Chrome browser will enable users to block third party cookies. Third party cookies are nothing more than small anonymized data files that allow digital publishers to serve advertisements to website visitors.
Third party cookies are an essential part of the digital media value chain. They enable highly relevant advertising to consumers, which in turn provides the necessary revenue for digital publishers to offer free content on the internet.
News publishers that utilize third cookies compete with Google for advertising revenues. By enabling its Chrome browser to block third party cookies, Google forces websites to sell their advertising inventory through its own AdWords platform, giving it an even larger share of the marketplace Google already dominates.
While Google is trying to sell this change to consumers and policy makers as a commitment to privacy, the Wall Street Journal notes ‘The coming changes aren’t expected to curtail significantly Google’s ability to collect data.’ Making it clear the modifications only serve one real purpose: putting competitors out of business.
Investigating the anticompetitive behavior of big tech companies has become a bipartisan issue in Congress. Newly elected Missouri Senator Josh Hawley investigated Google for its antitrust behavior when he served as the state’s attorney general. In the Senate he has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of big tech.
On the other side of the aisle, Massachusetts Senator and 2020 Presidential Candidate Elizabeth Warren wrote on a Medium blog post, ‘Today’s big tech companies have too much power…They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.’
Bipartisan concern over the anticompetitive practices of tech giants like Google and Facebook, coupled with the Big Brother implications of their data collection practices and the clear and convincing bias big tech has shown towards conservatives could prove to be the perfect storm to finally reining in Silicon Valley.
To add your voice in support of breaking up big tech, you can contact your senator by using this online form.
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