Re:W3C slaps down Google's proposal to treat multiple domain...
by om2 on Friday April 09, 2021 @03:57PM
(#26755307)
If the proposal was limited to opting into strict origin scope (instead of eTLD+1/registerable domain scope) for cookies and other privacy-related things, it would be an improvement.
But it also allows things like specifying that laptops.shopify.com, laptops.com, laptops.social.com, desktops.com and calculators.com are the same party and therefore tracking may happen across them. There's no obvious good way to put the user on notice of this, and the Explainer totally punts on addressing this problem, instead leaving it to each browser to figure out.
You have also the parallel problem of how do you transfer the trust you have on google.co.uk to youtube.co.jp only based on the domain info you have.
This all to say that using only domain names to resolve ownership is a hard problem, since ages browsers use a crowdsourced list [1] to get around this issue but recently it proved not to scale very well, specially after Apple's move to use this list as part of their "Limit Ad Tracking" solution.
[1] https://publicsuffix.org/