alt Hacker NewsThe deprecation of third-party cookies, that all browsers were at one point on track to implement, was pretty much the most realistic first step to that. Which is why Google killed it last year by leveraging their control over Chrome.
While not technically a crime, it was a disgusting, unethical market manipulation move that never really got the public outrage it deserved.
Google execs’ initial support for it was also telling: leadership at Google must literally thought they would find another way to stay as profitable as they are without third-party cookies. Put another way: Google leadership didn’t understand cookies as well as someone who’s taken a single undergrad web dev class. (Or they were lying all along, and always planned to “renege” on third-party cookie deprecation.)
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This is very misleading. Google was prevented from disabling third-party cookies due to intervention by the CMA, who felt it would provide an unfair advantage over other advertisers. Google argued their case for years, proposed competing standards to act as a replacement (see Topics API), and eventually gave up on the endeavour altogether and simply made it a user toggle.
Insidiously calling it "Privacy sandbox", and now setting everything opt-in every time I login to Chrome is really not Googly.
Most commenters on Hacker News hated Google’s plan and hoped it would fail. Were they wrong?
It seems like damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t.
I don't think that's quite what happened. Google got in anti-trust trouble because they have an unfair advantage in user-tracking, given logged in Chrome accounts. Removing third-party cookies hurts other privacy-invading companies without substantially affecting Google. It was still somewhat on track to be removed from Chrome until they lost their antitrust battle, and Chrome was required to be spun off. With Chrome's new future, and Google's new legal constraints, there's less incentive to try and make Privacy Sandbox work. At least, that was my understanding; I didn't follow it all that closely.