Google aims to turn the Internet into a “walled garden”

Google’s privacy sandbox plan is more to enrich the company than to improve the privacy of Internet users. Now, the attorney generals of 27 US states have asserted this in more detail, claiming that Google has a huge conspiracy to shut down the Internet and concentrate all advertisements under their umbrella.

Moreover, Project NERA is Google’s original plan to create a closed ecosystem from the open Internet. Google’s documents show that Google’s motivation is to “successfully imitate a walled garden across the open network that we can protect our profits.”

According to Google’s internal documents, the strategy will enable Google to extract higher intermediary fees. A Google employee aptly described Google’s ambitions for the NERA project, that is, “to obtain the benefits of a tightly’operated’ property without owning the property, nor facing the challenge of building new consumer products.”

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This is similar to how Apple makes a lot of profits from developers on the iPhone without creating apps, while Microsoft cannot do this on the open platform of Windows. Google’s main strategy for doing so is to use its popular Chrome browser to track users and force them to remain logged in on the browser.

Furthermore, Google’s approach is that when users log in to any Google product (such as Gmail or YouTube), they log them into the browser, and when they log out of the browser, they only log out of the service. This “dark” mode keeps the user in the browser and allows Google to track the user’s situation in Google properties and non-Google properties.

Google can then collect detailed user data without the use of cookies and sell advertisements based on these data. The U.S. Attorney General pointed out that as the global supervision of Google and other large technology companies has increased, Google has transitioned from the NERA project to a “privacy sandbox”.

This is a seemingly open standard that still relies to a large extent on. This will also speed up the dominance of Google’s advertising network by blocking third-party cookies used by other advertising companies.

They pointed out that “Google operates as a buyer and seller, runs an exchange, and participates in the market as a buyer and seller,” and continued, “The upcoming changes at Google will force market participants to rely more on Google as a conflicting intermediary. The arbiter of advertising transactions.”

They accused Google of “trying to use privacy as an excuse to conceal its true intentions”, Of course, these allegations have not been confirmed in court, but on the surface, it seems very clear that an advertising company should not decide how we are tracked.