It's important to remember that every other browser dropped third-party cookie support years before Chrome did. Google dragged their feet on it until they could come up with a solution that would give Google the same level of tracking, because Google is an advertising company. So the competition authorities are telling Google - and
only Google - that they can't drop third-party cookies anymore.
I've never actually heard anyone claim Privacy Sandbox[0] APIs would give third-party ad networks the same level of tracking as Google. But I imagine even if they did, the APIs would probably be a poor fit for competing ad networks, in the same way that, say, the iOS File Provider APIs are a terrible fit for Dropbox[1].
There are three different ways you can introduce a new standard or interface:
- You can go to or form a standards body with all the relevant market players and agree on a technical specification for that interface. This is preferred, and it's how the Web is usually done.
- You can take a competitor's interface people are already using and adopt that. This is how you get de-facto standards, and while they might have loads of technical problems[2], none of them give you an unfair market advantage.
- You can make your own interface and force competitors to adopt that. You get all the technical problems of a de-facto standard, but those are all problems your competition has to deal with, not you.
The difference is a matter of market advantage. Out of all the major browser vendors, only Google has dominance in online marketing. Microsoft and Apple would like to have a piece of that pie, but they all dropped third-party cookies without tying it to their own competing standards that they wanted to force other people to use.
[0] Hell of an Orwellian name
[1] For example, if you use Dropbox as your file storage, you can't pick folders. At all. On an operating system built by the company whose engineers are obsessed with bundles (directories that look and act like files instead of folders).
[2] laughs in SWF