Google faces UK legal action for bypassing iPhone privacy settings to target ads

Article just says they used cookies for tracking. Does anyone have a better article, indicating why this work a workaround, and they it affected iPhones in particular?

It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate.

Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance cost and complexity is involved. It's everyone else that is going to suffer, including all start-ups attempting to offer an Internet-wide service (something that not so long ago could be mostly taken for granted). The effect will be to lock-in the position of the existing giants and protect them from new companies that might challenge their global dominance.

If I want to offer an Internet-wide service in the near future, I'll need to comply with dozens of different Internet-related legal/political frameworks to spread into dozens of nations. It'll be realistically impossible to accomplish for smaller entities, so start-ups will be stuck even more than they already are in struggling to reach beyond their local audiences. This will particularly harm start-ups in smaller countries in Latin America, Africa and Europe. Start-ups in the US and China will gain a further advantage (an advantage which they've already utilized to produce most of the Internet giants to this point), because they get to start out with massive home markets with heavily unified rules and then push to the rest of the world from their large base.

This process destroys the Internet as it has been known the last two decades and it appears nothing is likely to stop it from getting dramatically worse in the next 10-15 years.

I doubt it. The GDPR and other european privacy laws are a problem if you operate from overseas.

On the other hand, if you start in europe and are thusly aware of the privacy laws it becomes much easier to design as service that complies with them.

The Netzdurchsuchungsgesetz in Germany even goes as far as only making big social networks responsible for content and small startups get a free pass.

It seems there were/are a couple of workarounds for setting third party cookies in Safari.

One was to send a POST request in a hidden iframe using javascript. This was supposedly what Google used to bypass Safari's blocking of third party cookies[1].

Another is (was?) to redirect to the third party domain, and then back again[2]. This would supposedly work since the restriction on third party cookies doesn't apply to already visited domains.

1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9930671/safari-3rd-party...

2: http://www.mendoweb.be/blog/internet-explorer-safari-third-p...

> It'll be realistically impossible to accomplish for smaller entities, so start-ups will be stuck even more than they already are in struggling to reach beyond their local audiences.

Wasn't this always the case for businesses? If you are a physical company selling physical things then logistics, legal etc was always a huge barrier to expansion beyond your local market.

I think the misconception is that the "normal" state is that the internet is a single normalized market where anyone can grow from zero to global in a way that a physcal company can't. I don't think that's realistic. What happened was simply that regulators couldn't keep up, as is always the case in the beginning of something.

> This process destroys the Internet as it has been known the last two decades and it appears nothing is likely to stop it from getting dramatically worse in the next 10-15 years.

But wasn't the internet in the past decades just a wild west where things like privacy etc always took a back seat? Is this development really such a bad thing (for consumers, I mean)?