In a relatively obscure industry standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium, Big Tech players, including Apple, Google, Meta, and Mozilla, are making inroads to introduce a new ad attribution tool to the industry’s major web browsers
Simply dubbed “Attribution API,” the proposals evoke memories of the Google Chrome team’s abortive Privacy Sandbox proposals, i.e., its bid to phase out third-party cookies for online ad tracking, along with the accompanying concerns about competitiveness in the wider ad tech landscape.
However, for advocates, such proposals are being discussed in open forums, with the aim of replacing the ad industry’s current opaque tracking flows with a transparent, well‑scoped API that can be explained to users and audited by privacy experts.
These deliberations are taking place within separate entities of the web standards body, which was cofounded by Tim Berners-Lee and is widely known as the W3C, across its Private Advertising Technology, or “PAT,” community and working groups over a course of several years. Both W3C groups have dozens of members from across the industry, with their membership organizations composed to reflect a range of opinions.
However, critics argue that the working groups within the standards org, which developed technologies such as HTML and URLs, require more man-hours for input; a commercial reality that inherently biases approval processes toward large organizations, such as Big Tech.
