Editor’s note: After this column published, AdExchanger reported that Apple’s WebKit blocklist has expanded well beyond the initial handful of companies — potentially to hundreds of ad tech, martech and data vendors. Read more.
When Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework took effect in April 2021 with the release of iOS 14.5, the ad industry treated it like a five-alarm fire and, to be fair, it was.
The number of stories AdExchanger alone published on the vicissitudes of ATT is staggering. (I personally wrote about ATT almost as much as I did about Google’s abortive plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, which is saying something.)
It’s logical that Apple’s latest iOS update blocking The Trade Desk from serving ads in Safari would bring ATT to mind. It did for me, anyway.
Because there’s a familiar pattern: Apple makes a privacy-related change, ad tech braces for impact and everyone wonders which companies will lose the most revenue and what workarounds will emerge.
But what Apple did with ATT and what it appears to be doing now create very different kinds of headaches for ad tech.
You got served (but also not)
AppTrackingTransparency, which is Apple’s requirement that apps get permission before accessing a user’s mobile ad ID (known as IDFA on iOS), turned what was a once-routine mobile signal into something much scarcer.
Targeting got harder, measurement got fuzzier and attribution became an exercise in modeling – for everyone. (Apple aside.)
But ATT didn’t stop app developers from collecting data or running their businesses; it just stopped them from using identifiers to track a person across other sites and apps without an opt-in.
Mobile measurement companies scrambled, but they accommodated themselves. The data got messier, but the pipes stayed connected.
What AdExchanger Senior Editor James Hercher reported earlier this week is a different problem entirely.
By adding adsrvr.org, The Trade Desk’s core ad request and delivery domain, to a WebKit blocklist, Apple is preventing it from serving ads in Safari for Apple device owners who have updated to iOS 27.
And Apple is lumping TTD together with identity and data infrastructure companies like LiveRamp, ID5, Permutive and Audigent, which are caught in the same net.
That should make everyone in the programmatic advertising ecosystem sit up in their chair – not just the companies already named.
Not exactly a neutral party
But there’s even more cause for concern hidden in the details.
In the message that Ian Meyers, The Trade Desk’s senior director of engineering, sent to the WebKit team flagging the issue, he shared an example from a Yahoo browsing session in which TTD’s bids were blocked on Safari while Google’s bids went through.
One example isn’t enough to demonstrate that Apple is deciding winners and losers as a matter of policy. But it does illustrate the competitive stakes, because, for the time being at least, a major independent DSP appears unable to serve ads in Safari on updated Apple devices, while Google can still participate in the same environment.
That asymmetry is worth a little side eye – especially in light of Apple’s other business arrangements with Google.
Speaking of competitive concerns, Apple is not a disinterested privacy referee. ATT, whatever its merits for users, also happens to be good for Apple’s own advertising business. If third-party tracking is harder, Apple’s first-party data is more valuable. Regulators in France, Italy and Germany have pursued Apple over ATT on exactly this theory.
Meanwhile, a 2 billion-pound class action lawsuit now pending in the UK accuses Apple of holding third-party developers to stricter tracking standards than it imposes for its own services. Apple has denied any wrongdoing.
Bueller … Bueller … Bueller?
Apple is entitled to protect users from cross-site tracking and data practices it believes violate its privacy principles. The ad-tech industry has not earned the benefit of the doubt on either front.
But privacy enforcement and infrastructure disruption are not interchangeable.
Blocking an identity-resolution service is one thing. Blocking a domain that handles an ad platform’s requests and delivery is something else. One limits what a company can know. The other limits whether it can operate.
ATT was a policy. There was a lot of uncertainty, but Apple eventually published developer guidelines and even hosted a few WWDC sessions about it. Companies could argue about the implications, but they understood the rule.
Here, The Trade Desk is waiting to find out whether its core delivery domain was blocked by mistake or by design. The WebKit team says it’s investigating.
The industry can adapt to difficult rules. ATT is a perfect example. What’s harder to adapt to is uncertainty.
If you don’t know why you’re being blocked, whether the decision is final or how to challenge it, there’s no engineering your way out.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. This column is part of a series of perspectives from AdExchanger’s editorial team.
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