I think the main reason Bloomberg is calling them ad cookies is because it is the impact on advertising that's causing this delay. Google promised regulators that they wouldn't get rid of cookies without a replacement for advertising, and those replacements aren't ready yet. On the other hand, this is really hard and I don't know if Google is actually going to be able to do this ever.

(I used to work on this)

This is an excellent example of theoretically good intentions (promoting competition) leading to terrible results (preventing the removal of something largely unwanted that's abused by advertisers).

Maybe an "ad-enablement cookie" or a "tracking-enablement cookie" would be better. But the technical term of art, "third party cookie," is french to most people. As long as they make a note of the technical term (it's in the first line!) I think they're well within the limits of journalistic license.

Obviously they still get the benefit of designing such a system, and can tailor it to the needs of their products.

As one of the few people who is affected by a legitimate use case of third party cookies that are not ads... this is bullshit, 99% of use cases are for ads, it's an ad cookie.

More concretely my particular case is to do with learning management systems which commonly use LTI to embed external content (outside of the US at least). That external content is hosted by some other system (can be another LMS) which usually store their session information in a cookie just because that's how it's always been done - The solution is to not use cookies, it's not needed, each resources can re-auth over the launch protocol (LTI) anyway, and for individual frames to be able to continue navigation/access - the session info can live anywhere else, in the URL for old fashioned navigation, or as part of the initial request body if subsequent requests are done over AJAX.

Do they? Like what?

Third-party cookies can be convenient, sure, but in almost all cases you don't need to use them and you can still get done what you need to get done. Except when you want to track users for ads.

(You can obviously track users without third-party cookies, too, by various fingerprinting methods, but at that point it's a lot clearer that what you're doing is nefarious and doesn't have the user's consent.)

for some reason MS Teams won't work without third party cookies... not sure why... I hope I never have to use it again