Indeed. Just because it is widespread doesn't make it okay. We should not allow greedy companies to set the Overton Window of acceptability.

Advertising is “ground zero” for the cookie explosion because nobody trusts anybody in the advertising biz.

For instance the website selling ads has every reason to inflate view and click count numbers, the ad buyer has reasons to diminish those numbers. In fact if you measure an honest pipeline it is going to look that way because some people drop out at each stage.

One reason you have 87 trackers on a typical web site is that many sites and advertisers figure if they have a large number of trackers they can’t all be wrong.

Site X could show ads to users just fine without third-party cookies but then advertisers would not be so sure about the stats.

Sure, but is that situation worse than other traditional forms of advertising? Are we just saying that the advertising industry is so greedy that they want so much more of the pie than they used to have, that we should enable them?

> Site X could show ads to users just fine without third-party cookies but then advertisers would not be so sure about the stats.

Feels like 99% of people would prefer this. Maybe advertising becomes less effective, but it may actually become more effective if it leads to more ads being visible since they are no longer ad-blocked.