[choppaface]

As a business owner who wants to post online ads, I want the providers to be as competitive as possible on price and quality. As a user, if I'm going to have ads targeted to me, I'm hoping they don't blink, slow down my computer, or are the utter trash you see on today's poor news sites. As as user, I want competition to cause ad targeters to filter out ad spam-- it hurts the properties where they place things.

Any new ad provider (one that does not have 20 years of user data like Google, or 15 years like Facebook) will not be able to fingerprint as well with FLoC as they could with cookies. Existing FANG competitors like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast etc have lots of historical data offer and even some FLoC-like products but if Google's FLoC replaces cookies then it's harder to derive value from, say, Verizon's FLoC-- simply because a cookie is a more effective fingerprint than a Google FLoC.

So FLoC is anti-competitive and just further supplants Google's monopoly. Does that really impact consumer privacy? Well, if the ad market is less competitive, the level of privacy that the market can support will be less consistent. There will be people like Apple who make so much money off hardware that for ads they're fine with the unobtrusive choice of selling Google default search engine rights (versus, say, the loads of crapware that can be found in some Android distributions). But there will be lots of smaller ad players who will get more desperate for ad spam and more shady ways to target you with what little data they can get. For smaller properties, perhaps Google FLoC is so useless for targeting and lift that everybody switches to requiring a sign-up with a phone number SMS confirmation.

_Can_ FLoC be incentive compatible? What are the actual likely economic consequences? Google knows this (or they think they know), hence FLoC got launch approval. But Google won't share those details with you. They want you to think FLoC is just great for privacy. This is how Sundar addresses his position that "we need to work hard on user trust."