Inside the World Wide Web Consortium as members debate the future of online privacy, with browsers' engineers often at odds with companies that rely on tracking
James Rosewell could see his company's future was in jeopardy. — It was January 2020, and Google had just announced key details … Tweets: @issielapowsky , @hkanji , @jason_kint , @tiffanycli , @davidakaye , @carnage4life , @taubeneck , @issielapowsky , @wilbanks , @swodinsky , @robleathern , @johndcook , @hutko , @sonia__pham , @carnage4life , @stshank , @kcoxdc , and @issielapowsky Tweets: Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : NEW: A deep dive into the privacy war raging within the World Wide Web Consortium, where some of the most secretive companies in the world are wrangling over the future of your data — and their own power — in plain sight. #longread https://www.protocol.com/... Hussein Kanji / @hkanji : Apple, Google, Mozilla, Brave and Microsoft vs Facebook https://www.protocol.com/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : @issielapowsky @hshoch A definition was decided for “Tracking” by the way.... in fact, Apple was still at the table as was DCN. And we saw Apple's roll-out of ATT mostly keep to it which was appreciated. Weird how history got written differently. Tiffany C. Li / @tiffanycli : 20 years ago, everyone was talking about internet standards bodies like W3C. Today, most have forgotten how important these (mostly) non-governmental orgs are in deciding the future of internet governance. https://twitter.com/... David Kaye / @davidakaye : excellent deep dive into @w3c, among the most important technical standards/internet governance bodies most have never heard of, by @issielapowsky https://www.protocol.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : This is a good summary of the privacy battle in the W3C. On one side, browser vendors Microsoft, Google & Apple who want to ban all forms of user tracking. On the other side, is the entire ad tech industry which exists to show users ads based on tracking. https://www.protocol.com/... Erik Taubeneck / @taubeneck : Great write up on the progress to build a privacy centric internet. Lots of moving pieces and interests, but I'm bullish on finding privacy enhancing solutions that protect people's privacy and enable the business models that support the open web. https://twitter.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : This is the geekiest story I've ever written, but I found it so fascinating. The W3C is a microcosm of all of the global policy debates around privacy and competition we see playing out right now, but it's engineers, not politicians, doing the talking. https://www.protocol.com/... John Wilbanks / @wilbanks : The intersection of boring, counter-intuitive, and crucially important is the precise place where technology companies have so much leverage over civil society https://twitter.com/... Shoshana Wodinsky / @swodinsky : i'm so glad * somebody * finally wrote about how messy the w3c is lmao https://twitter.com/... Rob Leathern / @robleathern : Useful read for context on W3C -> https://www.protocol.com/... https://twitter.com/... John D. Cook / @johndcook : It's hard to tell whether privacy proposals would improve or degrade privacy. https://www.protocol.com/... Martin Husovec / @hutko : Fascinating read on standards, politics of SDO members, privacy vs competition, and code as law https://www.protocol.com/... mboi @contreraslegals @kamara_irene @oliakanevskaia @lynskeyo Sonia Pham / @sonia__pham : And this utterly fascinating article by @issielapowsky on W3C which sees the future of so many companies duked out by a group of engineers in an overlooked corner of the internet? https://www.protocol.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : The browser privacy battle is similar to Apple vs Epic in that it's trillion dollar companies smacking down billion dollar companies where each side claims noble intent while standing to make a lot of money if they win. Regulators beginning to realize this https://www.google.com/... Stephen Shankland / @stshank : A great deep dive into web privacy for people like me who follow standards groups wrangling. But browsers have veto power. If W3C standards fail like DNT did, browsers can stomp on tracking however they want. Indeed, that's what Brave, Safari, Edge, and Firefox are doing. https://twitter.com/... Kate Cox / @kcoxdc : I told @issielapowsky , when I first saw this story, that it felt like she was handing me a missing piece in the big jigsaw puzzle that is Big Tech, privacy, and competition. Now you can add that piece to your puzzle, too: https://www.protocol.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : As companies like Apple and Google have announced plans to kill off web tracking techniques, the W3C saw an influx of new members from the ad and data industry, who argue these changes are just power grabs by tech giants that are already too powerful https://www.protocol.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The World Wide Web Consortium has become the arena where the web's tracking economy gets settled or dismantled. The trigger was Apple refusing to implement sixteen new Web APIs it deemed fingerprinting risks and Google's January 2020 announcement phasing out third-party cookie techniques — moves by browser vendors that put ad- and data-dependent members like James Rosewell's firm in existential territory inside a standards body they now join to defend themselves.
The stakes extend beyond ads: Apple's parallel Safari hardening — deleting sites' local storage after seven days of inactivity — shows the same privacy rationale reaching past tracking into core platform features, and critics argue its WebKit control lets it unilaterally shape what the open web is allowed to do.
First-order effects
- Browser engineers from Brave, Safari, Edge, and Firefox are writing tracking-blocking defaults directly into implementations, so publishers and ad-tech firms face de facto standards set by code rather than consensus at the W3C table.
- Ad- and data-industry members are responding by joining the consortium to lobby for replacement technologies, turning a technical working group into a negotiation between firms whose revenue depends on tracking and those whose brands depend on blocking it.
Second-order effects
- Google's cookie phase-out forces the entire ad ecosystem onto whatever identity alternatives survive the W3C process — meaning the standards debate now effectively decides which intermediaries keep their access to user data.
- As Benedict Evans notes, privacy proposals of this kind tend to entrench the biggest platforms while squeezing smaller competitors, so the rules hammered out here redistribute market power as much as they protect users.
Third-order effects
- If browsers keep defining privacy unilaterally — with Apple's engine monopoly cited by critics as letting it strip capabilities the rest of the web depends on — standards bodies risk becoming rubber stamps for decisions already shipped, shifting governance from multilateral process to whoever controls default engines.
- The deeper pattern is a web where platform-level privacy enforcement substitutes for regulation, leaving advertisers, publishers, and regulators to litigate the trade-offs after the fact rather than through policy.
The trend: Web privacy governance is migrating from standards committees to browser vendors' unilateral shipping decisions, with ad-industry members fighting rearguard actions inside the W3C.