Seeing as how Google themselves (possibly the world's largest advertiser) seems willing to compromise, I don't think it makes sense to assume no other advertisi

Seeing as how Google themselves (possibly the world's largest advertiser) seems willing to compromise, I don't think it makes sense to assume no other advertising company will be willing to follow them down that path. And even if no other advertisers were participating, isn't the fact that Google themselves are participating already a huge win? They are a pretty big player in the advertising industry after all. As a user, what you get out of this arrangement is that a large number of online advertising agencies will stop trying to build systems that track your online activity, because they won't need to track you anymore to run their business effectively. They can get what they need in a way that doesn't hurt user privacy. Yes, there'll be bad actors, but as you said that's a problem we'd have anyway. At least this way the number of bad actors will be reduced, and the economic advantage gained by such misbehavior will be minimized. Why would an advertising agency bother spending a ton of money trying to develop new fingerprinting techniques to fight cookie blocking if doing so doesn't result in any significant revenue increases over just using FLoC? In effect, Google is fighting a two-pronged battle against online tracking: they're increasing the cost companies need to spend to track users, while simultaneously decreasing the economic benefit gained from doing such tracking in the first place.