We witnessed a "gloves off" interview from Randal Rothenberg, IAB CEO, over on Adexchanger this week. He took aim at the Mozilla organisation, arguing that the open source browser was a fractional mess and couldn't be reasoned with over the the blocking of third-party cookies. He even described privacy advocate, Jonathan Mayer, as a communist. Tough talking indeed. The fact remains that no amount of huff from the IAB CEO will change the mind of Mozilla.

Why Mozilla Couldn't Care Less

Mozilla doesn't care about about display. It has no skin in the game. Mozilla makes all of its revenue from a search deal with Google. Search accounts for all of Mozilla's revenue. For those who contribute to the project, the concept of third party-tracking and retargeting is merely an irritation — and their focus remains on what they see as protecting user privacy. It is highly amusing to see the industry's key lobby group trying to coerce a bunch of open source coders into accepting the whims of ad tech vendors, digital agencies and advertisers. It's even more surprising that they managed to have so many meetings without realising sooner that a compromise would never be reached by two divergent groups of interests.

If Mr Rothenberg really wanted to bloody the nose of Mozilla, he could have a word with Google about its "unique" relationship with Mozilla — and apply pressure that way. The other thing the IAB could do is round up the biggest publishers and come up with some contingency plan around this. Perhaps the top 100 publishers could charge a toll for Mozilla users. If you can't set third-party cookies using the browsers, make them pay for content. Simple economics. Someone needs to pay the bills. ExchangeWire already knows of several big publishers in Europe that are going to start blocking Mozilla users — and redirct them to download pages for "cookie-friendly" browsers. Difficult to pull off no doubt given that big sites and portals would never cut off 25% of their web traffic.

In fairness, any publisher with a bank of first-party data couldn't help but see massive opportunity in the coming chaos. If we move to a first-party world, some of the big publishers might actually do lot better financially. With a quarter of the internet now opted-in by default, to block third-party cookies being set on their devices, the publishers with first-party data will ultimately become stronger. Agencies will have to pay more for data-enriched ad inventory, and publishers will be able drive better rates for any cookies being set on their domain. In a way, this situation has swung the initiative back to those publishers with large first-party data sets; but not everyone has that access.

The First-Party Desert For European Digital Media

The reality of a first-party world for Europe is not a rosy one. When you really start thinking about who will dominate the new first-party landscape, you can't look past the US digital behemoths — Google, Facebook LinkedIn, Twitter, Amazon and Yahoo!.

Amazon will be the new emperor of this first-party world. It has more first-party transactional data than anyone else on the web. If other browsers go down this route (and they likely will be forced to by political pressure), Amazon is in a great spot to offer its first-party targeting. It's already doing a billion in revenue, without even breaking a sweat. The galling thing for other vendors is that Amazon doesn't even see advertising as core revenue, but rather a means to discount items across its site. Don't be surprised to see Amazon go on a spending spree as it looks to beef-up for the new opportunity.

The tragedy of this situation is that local European ad tech players are dependent on the third-party cookie. You would be hard pressed to think of any digital players in Europe — outside the big players in Russian and e-commerce giants like Zalando — who have the scale of first-party data to make a play in the new world.

We don't even have any companies with a browser solution (Opera does not count), an email service or a scaled digital utility business like Facebook. It's doubtful that people like EU digital advocate, Neliee Kroes, ever imagined a situation like this: that the new privacy-first environment would result in total digital domination by a handful of companies in the European market.

Do We Need a solution Other Than the Third-Party Cookie?

The industry is clamouring for solutions to the problem. They are loathe to have their destinies dictated to by the big US digital giants. The agencies are particularly eager to find a solution. Is it fingerprinting? There hasn't been much written about this new form of "tracking" — and for good reason: it would send privacy advocates into convulsions. For users, it is even more insidious than anonymous third-party tracking. In light of the PRISM scandal, it is difficult to believe that such a solution would be acceptable to the general internet population or legislators.

A radical rethink is necessary on the whole idea of user privacy and how data is used in digital advertising.

This situation did not happen by coincidence (there is no such thing). You could read between the lines as to what could be alluded here, but let's see this as an opportunity to develop an independent solution that benefits all. What that looks like is still up for debate.

And debate it in full we shall at ATS London, where we will be hosting a full panel session on "Life Beyond The Cookie: The Browser Privacy Lockdown". We will be announcing full details on that panel in the coming weeks. If you'd like to be part of ATS London, we are still offering early bird tickets until the end of July.