Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Early design review for the Topics API (Issue #726)

Hi @lknik, you asked about our need to offer some privacy-improving replacement technologies.

For a long discussion of this, please take a look at the blog post here:  https://privacysandbox.com/news/working-together-to-build-a-more-private-internet.

From a POV more focused on web standards: as with any other non-backwards-compatible change to the web platform, we can only proceed with a deprecation and removal after considering the potential breakage.  See https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/#feature-deprecations for full details of the Blink process, but note for example that the [guidelines](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LdqUfUILyzM5WEcOgeAWGupQILKrZHidEXrUxevyi_Y/edit) ask "What is the cost of removing this feature?" and "What is the suggested alternative? There should be another way for developers to achieve the same functionality."  A change that would cause most web sites to lose half of their revenue, without any privacy-improving alternative, is not compatible with our removal process.

You mention "the competition/etc proceedings", and certainly the Commitments that Google made to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority are part of our overall considerations.  But our stance here always mirrored theirs: disrupting the advertising ecosystem without a reasonable privacy-improving replacement would harm too many parties — publishers, advertisers, technology providers, and people.


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