Google May or May Not Have Screwed the Entire Internet

Either way, they may be the only ones who can fix it

Earlier this week, Google announced that it was moving past its initially proposed post-cookie solution, Floc, in exchange for a new more privacy-safe, incredibly generic sounding initiative called Topics.

For the most part, the company won praise for listening to the market’s overall concerns with Floc and trying to collaborate on something better

Hooray?

What struck me about this news was that a week or so earlier, a Wall Street Journal report laid out an extremely-damning-if-true report on the allegations being put forth against Google by the Texas attorney general.

There was a lot of bad stuff in there, but overall the net takeaway was that Google - thanks to its unique role as the dominant internet advertising infrastructure provider - knowingly rigged marketplaces and auctions, potentially screwing over other ad tech companies, publishers and brands.

Let me be clear in saying, this is an ongoing lawsuit, of which we are only seeing one likely highly biased side. And Google is defending itself quite vocally. So do I know if all this is true or being accurately depicted.

But if it is true - holy shit.

Which leads me to the Floc/Topics news. What made it so striking is the idea that we’re about to let a company that is being accused of the most anti-trusty behavior you’ll ever see, play a tremendously outsized role in shaping the future of how digital advertising functions for thousands of companies. And that this new initiative, however democratically shaped it was, would essentially be run by, and only fully understood by Google.

Jeez. It feels like regulators miss even when they strike.

Anyway, to get some thoughts on this, I called Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer at CafeMedia, a company that works with hundreds of small and mid-sized web publishers. Bannister has been following both the Floc evolution and the lawsuit extensively.

Regarding Google’s role in the future of this industry light of what it’s accused of, “there is a lot of irony there,” said Bannister. “It’s terrible, but I can’t help think that collectively, we’ve allowed this to happen.”

Bannister’s point is that whatever Google did or didn’t do, for far too long the ad tech world had too many bad actors playing fast and loose with privacy and data. Which eventually caught regulators’ attention, leading a need to change the rules on targeting.

Which is why Google, Facebook and Apple - the real legislators of the web, are changing them.

As for Google’s new Topics plan, Bannister is actually cautiously optimistic. He called it better than Floc in terms of privacy, albeit potentially a lot less effective for advertisers. With Floc, though brands wouldn’t be able to target individuals with third party cookies anymore, they’d have over 32,000 different cohorts to chose from.

With Topics, that number is down to 350, including blues jazz enthusiasts. If you were worried that web ad targeting is going backwards by a few decades, this won’t make you feel better.

Hey, at least Google is trying, Bannister noted. The company could have just shut down cookies in Chrome and moved on, as Apple did with Safari.

Ok, so credit the search giant with aspiring to keep digital advertising on the open web alive (they do have a vested interest). But can anybody trust them, given the behavior laid out in the lawsuit?

Well, that’s complicated. Bannister has been pouring through the documents made public, and he’s noticed numerous errors or mischaracterizations of how programmatic ad technology work, and what Google could or couldn’t have doing. There are parts that are simply contradictory - in some cases Google is said to have taken an action that taking hurts both brands and publishers at the same time - which doesn’t necessarily make sense. That sort of thing.

Are the errors Bannister is catching based on a lack of technical understanding of programmatic ads, or lawyers trying to make the allegations sound worse? He says it’s had to tell, but either way, “It’s enough to give me doubts about even the juicy stuff.”

Obviously, the case has a ways to go, and may change significantly when it’s all said and done. Will that ultimately hamper Google’s role in the next phase of digital advertising? The thing is, “I don’t think there is anybody else better to handle this,” said Bannister.

When you own the biggest browser, ad server, exchange and so on, you’re virtually irreplaceable. So if Google doesn’t ‘fix’ the post cookie problem they are creating, who can?

In the meantime, I found myself wondering - if the crux of what Google is accused of by Texas does end up being true and provable - why’d they do it?

I know that sounds naive. But when you look at Google’s performance, the money made off-Google properties continues to diminish in importance. As former Googler and Action CEO Patrick Keane told me during a podcast recording earlier this week, the non search revenue is a “rounding error” for Google.

So why bother? I bet Facebook is happy they eventually backed off a big ad tech play.

As Bannister put it, “Google has to grow,” he said. “Every quarter they are under enormous pressure.”

Here’s hoping the pressure didn’t make them crack.