Sources: DOJ investigators are asking ad executives whether Google's plan to ban third-party cookies will hobble its smaller rivals
(Reuters) - Google's plan to block a popular web tracking tool called “cookies” is a source of concern for U.S. Justice Department investigators …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's pro-privacy move to block third-party cookies in Chrome was never just an engineering decision — per earlier reporting it boosted the US antitrust probe, as publishers argued the ban would tilt the ad market in Google's favor while its own ad business kept first-party data. The DOJ had already spent 2020 canvassing more than a dozen publishers, agencies, and ad tech rivals about Google's ad tools.
This Reuters report shows that inquiry narrowing to the cookie question itself, with investigators asking ad executives whether the ban would hobble smaller rivals — and it lands alongside the UK competition watchdog's own investigation into the same Chrome proposals, making this a two-jurisdiction test case for whether a browser owner can reshape the ad market under a privacy banner.
First-order effects
- Smaller ad tech firms and publishers are now being interviewed by DOJ investigators about competitive harm, meaning their testimony could shape the scope of the US antitrust case against Google's ad stack.
Second-order effects
- Google faces coordinated regulatory scrutiny rather than isolated probes, since the UK watchdog is examining the same cookie proposals — forcing the company to defend one design change across multiple competition regimes at once.
Third-order effects
- If regulators conclude that browser-level identity controls entrench the incumbent, privacy-driven product changes by dominant platforms will increasingly be pre-cleared with competition authorities before launch — a pattern visible years later when marketers still said Google hadn't prepared the market as cookies were restricted for the first 1% of Chrome users.
The trend: Competition authorities are treating default-setting power over web infrastructure — not just pricing or deals — as the new frontier of platform antitrust.