“Microsoft and Madison Avenue are in a battle unlike anything we’ve seen for years,” Julia Boorstin reports for CNBC. “They’re fighting over the future of Internet advertising, and the $70 billion annual global ad business is at stake.”
“It all comes down to one little default setting-Do Not Track – in a new browser, Internet Explorer 10,” Boorstin reports. “Microsoft is defaulting to a ‘Do Not Track’ setting to give web surfers more privacy, looking to regain market share from Google’s Chrome. But this has advertising agencies up in arms – this will make it impossible for them to target ads to millions of users.”
Boorstin reports, “This issue is coming to a head today as industry-standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) meets at Microsoft. The industry group is evaluating whether to give its stamp of approval to the browser, and most importantly, what the standards for ‘do not track’ will be for websites. Advertisers are lobbying the W3C to exempt them from complying with “do not track” messages if it’s the default setting. Two of the largest ad agencies, WPP (WPPGY) and Publicis Groupe (PUBGY) , which work with Microsoft on their ad campaigns, have reached out to the company on the issue… Companies that have permission to track their users [could benefit], because those users have logged in, like to Gmail. That also includes Yahoo (think Yahoo mail), Amazon and even Apple.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “JayinDC” for the heads up.]