> They could have cited the industry standard to block third party cookies in other browsers and done so without a replacement, the reason they are being prohib

> They could have cited the industry standard to block third party cookies in other browsers and done so without a replacement, the reason they are being prohibited from doing so is because they are motivated to maintain data access for themselves via privacy sandbox. This is ignoring the facts. Last summer it was made clear that no privacy-increasing replacement for 3p cookies was going to be acceptable to the CMA. So Google's announced plan was to make 3p cookies an opt-in feature, with a dialog forcing users to make the choice. That plan was not conditional on any of the privacy sandbox replacement mechanisms. (Your guess is as good as mine for what option the average user would choose when forced to.) But clearly even informing the users and having them make a choice was unacceptable to the CMA. And no, they cannot just act unilaterally citing precedence in other browsers like you study. Regulators aren't going around threatening to break up Apple or Mozilla, so they get to do whatever they want. Google does not have that luxury. (And none of the privacy sandbox projects for ad targeting without 3p cookies was giving Google some additional data source denied from other advertisers, like you claim.)