This article essentially outlines that the obvious winner will be Apple and the not so obvious ones will be the big entrenched players like Google and Facebook. But ultimately it might be a pyrrhic victory for Apple because it will show regulators the “awesome” dominant power that Apple has over the whole tech/ad space.

Some snippets:

Apple wins:

At present, “84 per cent of apps are free and developers pay nothing to Apple,” the iPhone maker says. But if Apple’s shift results in third-party data becoming less accessible, developers are likely to adapt, charging consumers for in-app purchases and subscriptions — models where Apple typically takes a 15 to 30 per cent commission.

Apple tracking and hypocrisy:

“I don’t believe Apple is doing this for altruistic reasons, definitely not,” says Lesley Hannah, partner at Hausfeld, a law firm. “It’s helpful they’ve got an attractive PR narrative by privacy campaigners, but ultimately that’s not why it’s being done.”

Trump supporters storm the Capitol in Washington DC in January. Many were identified after their phones were traced to specific homes hundreds of miles away, according to records obtained through an FBI search warrant which was served on Google © Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
Apple is already expanding its own fledgling ads business. Any iPhone user can turn off these “personalised” ads, but by default they are turned on — an option plenty of critics see as hypocritical.

Apple’s defence is that it tailors ads only from its own user data. This includes “the music, movies, books, TV shows and apps you download, as well as any in-app purchases and subscriptions . . . the stories you read and the publications you follow, subscribe to, or enable notifications from.”

To critics this sounds an awful lot like tracking, but Apple says this data gets aggregated into “segments” and that it does not “share personally identifiable information with third parties”.

Big Tech like Facebook and Google win:

Jane Horvath, Apple’s privacy chief, argued in January that a problem with the status quo was that “accumulation of large troves of data primarily benefits big businesses with big data sets”.

But Apple’s policy risks entrenching those businesses. Google has such a trove of data on its users that its reaction to Apple’s privacy push has been to shrug.

Mark Zuckerberg. He has said that if Apple’s anti-tracking feature stops companies from knowing which of their ads works, then they may opt to go straight to Facebook’s platforms © Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
Its reasoning is simple: losing access to third-party data is damaging, but if all of its rivals lose that access, too, then the company with the most first-party data wins. And that’s Google.

Apple’s policy stops developers from tracking users’ activity in third-party apps; it doesn’t deter companies with multiple apps from collating their activity. So Google could have a big advantage as it continues to build user profiles based on how consumers use Search, Maps, Chrome, Gmail and YouTube.

Facebook has come to the same realisation. When Sheryl Sandberg was asked this week if the iOS changes will shift from a “short-term headwind to potentially a tailwind”, the chief operating officer responded: “You’re exactly right.” She explained that the policy hurts, but versus its competitors Facebook is “relatively better positioned”. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in March that companies may opt to “conduct more commerce” directly on Facebook’s platforms.

Apple might potentially lose long term:

But winning, too, could have unforeseen consequences. Apple’s fight to redefine how digital advertising works is so public that some observers worry it could be a magnificent show of force at a time when it’s coming under antitrust scrutiny in both Washington and Brussels.

“If Apple succeeds, this actually shows the extraordinary power they have over their ecosystem and it actually hurts them as it relates to antitrust,”