But far from breathing a sigh of relief about the reprieve — Google says it hopes to proceed with its cookie elimination in early 2025 — many in the industry are huffing with frustration. Google first announced the plan to end support for cookies in its Chrome browser in 2020, but the deadline has been pushed back three times, leaving thousands of companies still in limbo four years later.

That even a short delay has such a profound effect on an entire industry underscores how powerful Google’s influence has become, experts told Business Insider.

“If they weren’t so greedy with owning every piece of the adtech stack, this would be done,” said Ciaran O’Kane, chief strategy officer of adtech-focused publisher WireCorp and general partner of the adtech venture capital firm FirstPartyCapital.

Google has a 28% share of the online ad market, according to market research firm Emarketer (a sister company to BI). It owns the software buyers use to place ads on the web, the tech that publishers use to sell ads, and the intermediary tech that connects the two. It owns hugely popular platforms like YouTube, Android, and Gmail, giving it proprietary access to the logged-in details of hundreds of millions of users. And Chrome, where it plans to turn off cookies, is the world’s most popular web browser, used by around two-thirds of internet users.

This outsize influence hasn’t gone unnoticed by regulators. Antitrust officials, including the US Department of Justice and the European Commission, are looking into whether Google has monopolized the digital ad market. Even Google’s Privacy Sandbox process itself is being overseen by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to ensure that its replacement cookie technologies won’t give Google an unfair advantage.

CMA said in February that it had several concerns about whether Privacy Sandbox was anti-competitive; it’s expected to release an update to that report later this week. Industry trade group the IAB’s research and development consortium, the IAB Tech Lab, was even prepared to torch its largest member by releasing a report detailing its numerous concerns about the Privacy Sandbox’s potential to throttle Google’s competitors and stunt the industry’s growth.

Critics say Google’s cookie replacement technologies would make Google more powerful

Google said Tuesday that the cookie deprecation delay was designed to give the industry and the CMA more time to test its Privacy Sandbox technologies. A CMA spokesperson said it welcomed Google’s announcement in clarifying its timeline and allowing more time for the regulator to assess the results of industry tests. But no amount of testing will change some of the fundamental issues with Google’s proposals, which many experts think will give Google an unfair advantage over its competitors.

A key sticking point among detractors is that the Privacy Sandbox proposals denote that advertising auctions would take place on the Chrome browser itself, which would take on the role of a quasi-advertising exchange. With Google’s own technology making the decisions on these ad auctions, some competitors are concerned that Chrome would self-preference Google’s own ad tech to outbid its rivals.

“Self-preferencing” plays a starring role in the US and EU Google adtech investigations because it operates in both the buy- and sell-side of the advertising market, meaning it could potentially use information from one side to give it a competitive advantage on the other.

At this stage, experts said, it’s unclear who would govern these post-cookie Chrome auctions to ensure Google isn’t giving itself a competitive advantage and to ensure that proper protocols and contracts are in place should issues arise — or even whether Google would allow such governance.

The cookie mess spotlights tensions between Google’s Ads and Chrome teams, experts say

Stuck between a rock and a hard place — and several global privacy regulators — the long, drawn-out demise of the cookie also highlights fundamental tensions that exist between the Chrome team and the Ads team within Google, experts said.

“Chrome doesn’t want cookies, they want everything happening in the browser,” said Mathieu Roche, CEO of ID5, an adtech company that was founded to provide an alternative technology to cookies. “The ads team said, ‘No, that’s not how advertising works, we need a way to recognize customers.’ And that tension has played out over the last four years.”

Google’s ad products themselves use third-party cookies for targeting and attribution and would be impacted by such changes, but likely less so than other competitors, thanks to its large logged-in audience. The company also makes the majority of its revenue from search ads, which are based on keywords users input and don’t require cookies.

“Google is in knots over this, and the number of people who can talk publicly about this is limited,” said another industry expert who asked for anonymity so as not to affect their commercial relationship with Google.

Regulators could step in to resolve the cookie chaos

Some industry experts are hoping regulators will step in to untangle the mess. The delay could give more time for new regulations like Europe’s Digital Markets Act and the UK’s Digital Markets Unit “to really bite,” said James Rosewell, cofounder of the lobbying group Movement for an Open Web, which has long railed against Google’s proposed changes.

But regulators haven’t earned a reputation for acting quickly. Amid the four years of confusion, chaos, and harumphing, there has been one consistent theme: When it comes to the future of online advertising, Google calls the shots. That a single player can send an entire sector scrambling with a single blog post raises questions about the industry itself, said Pierre Devoize, deputy managing director of public affairs at the French internet advertising body Alliance Digitale.

“It doesn’t happen in other industries,” Devoize said. “Our market doesn’t work properly. It’s obvious.”