Wall Street Journal:

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.

The Alphabet Inc. company said Wednesday that it plans next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet.

The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.

So much to unpack here. Start with the obvious: This is a good thing.

Google accounted for 52% of last year’s global digital ad spending of $292 billion, according to Jounce Media, a digital ad consultancy.

That 52% is a massive number. Imagine the impact on journalism if you could remove Google and Facebook from the advertising equation. Advertising dollars wouldn’t go away, they would flow to many more places. And journalism would flourish.

“If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web,” David Temkin, the Google product manager leading the change, said in a blog post Wednesday.

Um. Not sure Google is leading the privacy charge there. Just a guess, but Apple’s move to ensure transparency might have something to do with this.

Still, glad to see this. Question is, is this very public move by Google because they have found another path to make sure their ownership of the ad space is secure?