After years of proceedings, several decisions will finally be rendered at the start of the year and will shape the future of online advertising.
If 2024 has already been turbulent for the global advertising market, 2025 promises to be even more turbulent, particularly in France, from a regulatory point of view.
Publication of the EDPB’s opinion on “pay or consent” on the open web is imminent
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) will soon rule on the pay wall model applied by open web publishers. These walls, which require the Internet user to pay for the article or to subscribe if they do not wish to consent to the deposit of a tracker for personalized advertising purposes, are used by approximately 30% of the top 100 of publishers in France. The latter argue that the advertising model does not hold up economically without data and the offer of personalization. The EDPB, which has no coercive power but whose decisions have a great influence on the national data protection authorities, had already expressed itself unfavorably in spring 2024 on the “pay or consent” model applied by Meta, who has since had to revise his copy.
The publishing and online advertising sector is booming. “If by chance the regulatory and supervisory authorities decide to extend the ban on ‘pay or consent’ that they require from large platforms to the entire digital sector, the entire open web will be threatened. “, declares Laureline L’Honnen-Frossard, director of public and legal affairs at Union des Marques. “The Court of Justice of the EU validated the principle of pay or consent in 2023, as did several national data protection authorities, including the CNIL or the Austrian authority. We can question the functioning of and the legitimacy of the EDPB, which undermines the previous decisions of certain authorities when it is statutorily supposed to rely on them for the development of its own decisions”, adds Pierre Devoize, deputy director general of the EDPB. Digital Alliance.
Apple’s ATT: the Competition Authority’s decision is imminent
The market is counting on this first quarter to obtain the long-awaited verdict from the French Competition Authority (Adlc) on the subject of App Tracking Transparency (ATT). The anti-advertising tracking system resulted in Apple filing a complaint with the Authority for abuse of dominant position and anti-competitive maneuver. After 5 years of waiting, the associations brought together within this procedure (Alliance Digitale, SRI, Udecam and le Geste) should not wait any longer to obtain a decision, given that the last stage of the investigation took place on October 23 when both parties were heard before the Adlc college. A first complaint was filed in October 2020, a second in February 2022, and the adversarial phase opened in July 2023. Similar procedures are underway in Germany, Italy and Poland.
-“Apple’s ATT, Google’s Privacy Sandbox… we observe that all these procedures underway with the Competition Authorities in Europe raise the question of what these platforms do with user data and the limitations that they unilaterally want to bring to access of other operators (publishers, agencies, advertisers or technological operators) in the value chain: is the privacy of users better protected when this data is held and exploited massively by players such as Google and Apple rather than when they circulate to everyone market operators under conditions consistent with the European legal framework, validated and consented to by end users?” asks Fayzouze Masmi-Dazi, the lawyer specializing in competition law who supports the Digital Alliance, le Geste, SRI and Udecam.
Privacy Sandbox and third-party cookies, a decisive first quarter
The market is still awaiting conclusions from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on whether or not the Privacy Sandbox complies with competition principles. In its latest press release, dated December 20, the CMA declared that it was continuing its discussions with Google on the modifications to be made: “The CMA plans to provide an update on these discussions, and more generally on the Privacy Sandbox, during the course of this year. next year,” the authority then indicated without giving further details. The market, however, is counting on a return in the first quarter and has noticed a rather favorable “change of tone” from the British authority during its last progress report, published in November, particularly with regard to the system of governance of the ‘tool.
Not so simple, however, for Google to obtain this green light, especially since last spring the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) joined the initiative to ensure compliance with the British law on data protection (national translation of the GDPR). The crux of the problem remains the dominant position of GAM, Google’s ad server and SSP on auctions within the framework of PAAPI, GAM which moreover is by far the SSP best connected to the Privacy Sandbox.
Note that details from Chrome regarding its future “new” experience of consent or rejection of third-party cookies are still awaited. Some observers are working on an announcement in January.
