Chrome Delays the End of Third-Party Cookies to 2023

What Changed

When Google announced the plan in January 2020, it gave itself two years to make third-party cookies obsolete in Chrome. On June 24, 2021, it said that wasn't enough: "more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right," wrote Vinay Goel, the product director for the Privacy Sandbox in Chrome.¹

The new schedule had two stages. In the first, starting in late 2022 once the replacement technologies had been tested and launched in Chrome, publishers and advertisers would have about nine months to move their services over, while Google monitored how widely the new tools were adopted. In the second, starting in mid-2023, Chrome would phase out third-party cookies over three months, finishing in late 2023.¹

The replacements were still early. Google said Chrome and others had put forward more than 30 proposals, four of which were in origin trials, the stage where websites can try a feature with real users. The best known, FLoC, had drawn heavy criticism, and Google said it would end that trial within weeks and take the feedback on board.¹ FLoC was later replaced by the Topics API.

The timeline also came with a condition: it was subject to Google's engagement with the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which had opened an investigation into the plan in January 2021.^1,2 Two weeks earlier, the CMA had published the commitments Google offered to settle that investigation, including a standstill of at least 60 days before cookies were removed, during which the regulator could reopen its case.³ The CMA accepted the commitments in February 2022.

What the Industry Was Building

While Google worked on the Privacy Sandbox, much of the rest of the ad industry built alternative identifiers to replace the cookie ID. The best known was Unified ID 2.0, created by The Trade Desk, a buying platform that competes with Google. It is based on a person's email address, hashed and encrypted, so it can recognize the same signed-in person across sites, apps and devices. UID 2.0 began a beta in the United States in March 2021, and in May 2021 The Trade Desk handed its code to an industry working group run by the IAB Tech Lab, with the open-source ad auction group Prebid signed up to help run it.⁴

IDs like this have a built-in limit: they only work for people who share an email address, usually by signing in. That gave publishers a reason to ask readers to register, and advertisers a reason to collect customer emails. It also left Google's own ad products out: three months before the delay, Google had said they wouldn't use alternative identifiers like these.

Why It Mattered

For advertisers and publishers, the delay bought almost two more years of cookie-based targeting, retargeting and measurement in the world's most-used browser. It didn't change the direction: Google still said the cookies would go, and Safari and Firefox already blocked them.

It also changed who decided when. From this point on, Chrome's timeline depended not only on Google's engineering, but on a regulator's view of whether the replacements were fair to Google's competitors. That made every date less certain, and the late-2023 date didn't hold either: Google delayed again in July 2022.