[cookiecaper]

The "independent implementations" aren't worth much if nobody uses them. Chrome already has a majority of the market share at ~60%, with Safari, its nearest competitor, trailing far behind at ~15%. Firefox is sitting at 9.3%. [0]

Combining IE/Edge, Safari, and Firefox still leaves Firefox at half of the market share of Google, and that's still a distinct disadvantage, but it's a much stronger fighting position than single-digit market share. Google and Facebook are not naive upstarts and it won't be easy to quash them, especially not when little old Mozilla is running on comparative fumes compared to a couple of the best-capitalized companies on the planet.

Google and Facebook's interests are aligned as both base their business model on profiling and reselling data derived from user behavior, so it's unlikely that Google will feel inclined to implement desired user protections against that business model.

It's very important that we have strong competition representing a diversity of interests, especially when the dominant player's business model is just "slick spyware". Without a competitor in the same league, consumers don't really have an option.

[0] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2017&month=11