The reason for this volte-face appears to be concern that the EU would view killing third-party cookies as anticompetitive, since Google intended to maintain commercial surveillance using its Orwellian "Privacy Sandbox" technology in Chrome, with the effect that everyone *except* Google would find it harder to spy on us as we used the internet:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/googles-trail-of-crumbs
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