Mozilla has made another big move on its Do Not Track policy, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is not happy about it.
In February, Mozilla announced its Firefox web browser would begin blocking third-party tracking cookies by default, effectively preventing advertisers and data providers from collecting data on users who visit a site or view an ad. The company later stalled the decision in order to develop a solution to identify “edge cases” where its browser accidentally confuses first-party cookies (those used by the publisher directly, which Mozilla does not wish to block) for third-party cookies from advertisers and the like.
Then last week, Mozilla announced that it will be integrating Firefox with the Cookie Clearinghouse, a service developed by Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society to identify whether edge cases belong to publishers or third parties. Firefox will check all cookies against Clearinghouse’s blacklist before blocking them.
In response, IAB president Randall Rothenberg posted a stinging condemnation.
Mozilla’s “Cookie Clearinghouse” is neither new nor a proposal, inasmuch as the no. 2 browser-maker seems hell-bent on implementing on a tight deadline cookie-blocking by fiat. It is not a clearinghouse for cookies – it is a kangaroo cookie court, an arbitrary group determining who can do business with whom. It is not “independent,” as Mozilla claims, but is stocked with self-interested academic elites with whom Mozilla has long histories.
He stressed the problems Mozilla’s implementation of Do Not Track would cause for small publishers:
By making it punishingly difficult for advertisers to reach highly engaged audience segments through small publishers dependent on this third-party-cookie supply chain, Mozilla’s new system will prompt marketers to concentrate their ad buys among a tiny handful of giant Internet companies that dominate the deployment of first-party cookies. This fear has led almost one thousand “long tail” Internet companies to sign a petition asking Mozilla to reconsider its determination to block third-party cookies by decree.
AdWeek surveyed a handful of small publishers, and it seems like they’re not too concerned.
David Denton @ Evolve Media
“What most publishers and most networks will do, they’re going to study this, they’re going to calm down and ultimately adjust to whatever this new reality is,” he said.
Doug Weaver @ Upstream Group
“The people who really win the biggest are going to be Facebook, Yahoo and Google,” he said. “Because they have more first-party data than anybody.”
Julie Hansen @ Business Insider
“The way we sell is so little based on third party and so much based on our own data, our own information about the user—none of those data sets are affected by this move.”
Rothenberg has also been at the forefront of opposition to Do Not Track initiatives at Microsoft and Apple, but he told AdExchanger last week that Mozilla’s moves are more troubling.
Mozilla’s proposal goes several steps further than Microsoft’s. Microsoft required publishers to follow its signals; because few have followed, it’s had very little impact. Mozilla blocks third party cookies by default. That is actually curtailing by “technical imposition” the ability of certain forms of content to get through… There are differences between the two, but there are similarities in that both Microsoft and Mozilla are proposing to take their high oligopoly positions, their dominant positions in the digital media supply chain, and impose their policies on everyone else. That is a fundamentally illegitimate position as I explained before.
No response yet from the folks at Mozilla or the Center for Internet and Society.
