[kenko]

"For advertisers this is a non-starter, because it prevents you from knowing the size of your audience. All sites would immediately begin requiring some form of "login" in your scenario in order to enable tracking again."

If this is really a non-starter for advertisers, then mandating it will effectively ban advertising, non?

Remember: your business model is not sacrosanct! Disruption!

[emmett]

I'm not arguing against banning advertising. Actually, I think that would be a fine idea.

Just recognize that unless you do ban advertising, the result of this change will not be what's intended. The intended result is that websites, in general, stop tracking anonymous users. Instead, it will result in every user being explicitly tracked.

The most important issue here is that the political feasibility of reducing tracking of anonymous users is equivalent to the political feasibility of banning advertising.

(I'm slightly overselling here -- in reality, a good amount of advertising of the "sponsorship" form would still work. But the impact would be large enough that most websites would force login as I describe rather than stop tracking people.)

[nine_k]

It will also kill most "free content" websites that live off the ads revenue. Are you ready for paywalls everywhere, even if subscription is 25 � / mo?

[lambda]

Your symbol comes out as a Unicode replacement character for me. What was it supposed to be?

[nine_k]

It was the cent symbol, ¢; somehow it was broken in transmission.

[lambda]

That time it worked. Not sure why it broke the first time.