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First Party Sets is a proposal I liked a lot the first time I saw it, but as it has gotten discussed and worked over and poked holes in I like it less and less.
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A lot of good people doing a lot of good work analyzing it and giving feedback and the end result looks, to me, like serious doubt for the fairness or reasonableness of the proposal...
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I think there's a lot of good work, none wasted, on this. But it's hard to look at {Option 1: an enforcement entity maintains a new layer of the web, and checks compliance regularly} or {Option 2: everybody moves their stuff to paths/subdomains} & go for 1.
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I think the cookie delay has made it even harder to parse the argument for First Party Sets. It made even more sense as a sort of temp measure while the web moved itself to a more private mode. But now there's time enough to not bother with a bridge.
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I worry about Chrome's support for this proposal and likely adoption. It could mean capturing large swaths of functionality for every day web users entirely in Chrome with other browsers forced to support, or users forced to choose. A potential fracture point, if ever there was.
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If browsers end up splitting on First Party Sets it will mean that there will be no push to update your domain management until such a point where you're locked into Chrome. It's exactly the sort of case that makes for anti-trust nightmares.
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This is a tough thing to work thru. There are a lot of reasons to *want* something like First Party Sets. The concept has weight. But the more we try & turn it from an idea into an actionable plan the harder it gets to see how it could work and not be either unfair or unsafe.
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It's equally rough to think about Chrome adopting this and leaving it in place as other browsers turn off the sort of cross-domain functionality First Party Sets would allow to continue. It's easy to see the sort of version lock-in from IE8 happening all over again with Chrome.
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I would hope this would be the *exact* thing the CMA looking over their shoulder would cause Chrome to hesitate on, but who knows. I also remain open to a version of First Party Sets that makes more sense and answers the very reasonable open questions. But I haven't seen it yet.