In the aftermath of Google's collapsed Privacy Sandbox experiment, the W3C — the quiet institution that underpins the web's foundational architecture — is advancing a new proposal called the Attribution API, designed to measure advertising effectiveness without exposing individual users to surveillance. The effort represents a genuine attempt to reconcile commerce with privacy, yet critics warn that the standards process itself may be structurally tilted toward the very platforms whose dominance it risks entrenching. By 2026, what emerges from these technical working groups could quietly deter