Does Google Have Too Much Control Over The Privacy Sandbox?; Tubi Revs Will Soon Eclipse Fox's

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Absolute power

Google has been steamrolling ahead with its privacy sandbox proposals, where progress is incremental – perhaps too incremental. And according to Adweek sources, Google’s ideas are too conceptual as well. Non-Googlers playing in the sandbox “want more concrete examples of how the proposals will impact their day-to-day operations and, ultimately, revenue.” Publishers in particular are hanging in the wind, with Google retaining full control over what data goes to marketers and, according to the UK lobby group Marketers for an Open Web, control over how publishers register their readers. And while Google emphasizes its commitment to being open, the rest of the community is skeptical, noting that participants in the W3C’s Improving Web Advertising Business Group are intimidated by Google’s outsize influence.

Totally Tubi-lar

Fox Corp. didn’t get into streaming until March 2020, when it plunked down $440 million to buy Tubi, and the two soon debuted their marriage by participating in this year’s upfront negotiations together. And Tubi’s revenue is growing at such a nice clip – double since the acquisition – that Fox Corp. CFO Steve Tomsic anticipates Tubi’s revenue will eclipse the broadcast network’s revenue in two to three years. He said that once Fox’s sales and marketing organization got a hold of Tubi, the streaming service surpassed all early monetization expectations. And to further drive that growth, Fox is going to unleash more of its programming library into Tubi, and also make “selective programming acquisitions.” The goal, reports MediaPost, is upping Tubi’s “breadth of content.”

ODoH!

Apple is putting down another stake in its privacy-first claim. According to Business Insider, Apple worked with web security company Cloudflare to build a new DNS protocol (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS or ODoH) to keep internet service providers from checking out consumer browsing activity. The standard works by placing a proxy between the browser and the DNS server, which is run by the ISP. The proxy masks which browsers are making requests, which effectively keeps the ISP from peeping. But will we see ODoH in the wild? BI’s Jason Aten writes: “whether ODoH becomes the standard depends on whether it’s adopted by web browsers and organizations that will run proxies. It also depends on whether DNS resolving services support the standard.” Firefox, reportedly, is interested in exploring it, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.

But Wait, There’s More!