Google formally announced its intention to deprecate third party cookies in January 2020 and finalized its U-turn on 22 April 2025. During the intervening 63 months, we had two US elections, a global pandemic, the war in Ukraine, two stock market crashes, massive inflation and a global trade war.

We also saw the rise of virtual and augmented reality, cryptocurrency, self-driving vehicles and - last but by no means least - generative AI. Yet the humble third party cookie and the circus of technologies that were built around it, survived repeated waves of social, economic and technological disruption relatively unscathed.   

Not even the most ardent advocates would attribute this resilience to the inherent strength of the technology. Cookies are a hack, but they’re the only hack that works across a hugely disjointed, fragmented market. Their resilience is therefore the result of a systemic market failure to produce meaningful innovation. The fact that the most widespread cookie alternatives are hashed email addresses and ID graphs based on IP addresses gives a measure of this technological abdication.   

Many attribute this to Google’s supernatural powers and the foresight of fifteenth century prophets; but, in reality, its botched attempt to get rid of third party cookies was the product of greed and incompetence. The resulting, massive waste of time and energy sucked the air out of the room for programmatic advertising.   

It created uncertainty and chaos, diverted resources to side-projects and shoddy technical alternatives, and exposed the industry’s fragmented and messy nature in a damning way. And while we were all busy building the next pointless ‘identity graph’, the world moved on. The walled gardens acquired even more market share, new cookieless channels emerged (hello, CTV!) and LLMs literally stole the open web.   

The open web is under attack from all directions and cookies are part of the problem. They keep the industry addicted to ID syncing, which misses 60% of open web impressions effectively halving the size of the market. Cookie-based measurement (whether post-view or post-click) incentivizes fraud, losing advertisers over $80 billion a year in fraud. Cookies also leak publisher data to MFAs and brand-unsafe sites, tainting the reputation of the open web while undermining journalism.   

That’s why the survival of the cookie should not be celebrated even if it helps some companies hit next quarter’s revenue targets. In the medium term, it is a key driver of the industry’s long-term decline.    

So perhaps Google’s biggest win is that it lost its battle to deprecate the cookie, shackling its competitors to a failed technology. While the disruption that would have come from cookie deprecation could have forced the industry to embrace innovation, this drawn out process has made it suddenly look old and tired.  

Of course, the industry has enough capital and technological muscle to reverse course. What it doesn’t have is a lot of time: if we are to remain relevant in the next twenty years, we’d better stop using technology from the past twenty.