How the W3C met its Waterloo at the Do Not Track vote showdown

And why the silent majority could defeat the web's madmen

An EU answer not expected

Fowler, Mozilla’s global privacy and public policy leader, believes success could consist of chipping away at the industry and seeding DNT as an established idea. Once DNT is picked up, a technology or solution could be sucked back into the W3C for ratification as a standard.

Mozilla was the first firm to put DNT into its browser; last week Mozilla also released Light, a Firefox plugin that allows you to see who’s tracking you online.

Fowler points to the fact two major social networks came out for DNT this summer. Twitter and Pinterest will honour users' DNT when enabled in the browser, by not collecting your movements online for serving you ads or passing the data on to others.

To make a difference, though, it’ll take all of the major web properties geting on board to kick it off. So far, the biggest social network, Facebook, hasn’t joined the cause.

Moreover, Facebook shows little appetite for DNT, arguing it’s “not sure” DNT enabled in a browser accurately reflects the user’s desire not to be tracked. This isn’t surprising given Facebook is still working out how it can best exploit its users’ information to make money from advertisers and marketing people.

If you want a parallel, look at Google.

Google is founded on free services funded through ads and was the last of the big browser makers to come around to offering a DNT setting in its browser. Even Microsoft accepted DNT before Google. You can argue Google did come around to DNT – eventually. Will Facebook follow suit?

“Whether it happens in the W3C or not, we are still very committed to some kind of standard evolving to help sites integrate do not track into their data handling practices. We are still committed to the W3C process,” Fowler told The Reg.

Sites like Facebook clearly respond to pressure; it’s just a question of whether sufficient pressure can be brought to bear on Facebook – and the advertisers.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the pressure isn’t there to bring either around.

Fowler reckons 18 per cent of Firefox users have DNT turned on in their browser in the UK and 12 per cent globally. He called it “an impressive development” but it’s just a subset of people using one browser that has about a fifth of the market.

The absence of pressure suggests there’s room to apply force in the form of regulation from officials in the US or in Europe, the latter more so.

The European Union raised that prospect in Europe.

Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president in charge of the Digital Agenda for Europe, last year tapped into the deadlock inside the W3C.

Kroes expressed her concern at the lack of progress and slow-speed on DNT and said member states were looking at how to enforce ePrivacy rules. Kroes promised the matter would be raised with the Article 29 Working Party before the end of 2012.

A year on, there’s nothing but silence from the EU.

The Reg contacted Kroes and her office for a response to the W3C breakdown and to find out whether EU member states are taking steps to enforce the EU's own ePrivacy rules. We also asked whether there is a plan to develop a DNT standard at an EU level.

Steelie Neelie didn't bother replying.

The puts the ball back in the court of the W3C.

The recent no-confidence vote was defeated by a narrow margin, with 17 voting for and 23 against. But that’s not the complete picture: 65 members of the TPE working group did not vote at all, for some reason – among them Mozilla’s Fowler.

This would suggest that DNT was a pressure release and that power still lies with the silent majority. If that is the case, though, the significance of the vote cannot be discounted: that split between tech companies and advertisers would still have happened even if the remaining 65 had joined in – but the ad people would have been more of a rump and the gap between yays and nays greater.

Fortunately, it's the tech companies who have the upper hand in this drama. Firms like Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo!, who are members of the working group and voted to continue the TPE work also own the websites, properties and ad networks that the madmen of DAA rely on to touch consumers.

It might, therefore, be realising the level of self-interest here that brings adland's madmen back to the DNT table and establishes TPE. ®