Apple's Safari Blockade Pushes Identity Vendors Server-Side

By Priya Raman

Apple's iOS 27 now blocks the domains of data and identity vendors including LiveRamp, Permutive, Audigent, ID5 and Unified ID 2.0 — and the industry's answer is to leave the browser entirely.

Digiday reports that ID5 is moving more of its identity infrastructure server-side. Other players are rallying around the IAB Tech Lab's Trusted Server Framework, which runs advertising functions outside web browsers on publisher-controlled infrastructure instead.

"There's nothing the device can do to block you," ID5 CEO Mathieu Roche told Digiday. He added that large publishers could reroute identity calls from third-party domains in the browser to their own servers in a matter of days.

AdExchanger first reported the iOS 27 domain blocks. Some blocked vendors, including Permutive, quickly spun up new domains that were not on Apple's blocklist. That fix is temporary. A server-side architecture is the more durable option.

What does the shift change for publishers?

For publishers with in-house engineering teams, the move is fast and cheap. For everyone else, it is not.

Smaller publishers that outsource their ad operations may struggle to make the transition, and those without engineers on staff face added infrastructure costs. The escape from Apple's blockade therefore widens the gap between large publishers that can own their infrastructure and small ones that cannot.

Skeptics raise a second question: will Apple treat the server-side shift as a privacy solution or as a dodge? If Apple judges it a dodge, the industry should expect another round of cat-and-mouse between the company and identity vendors.

Is the open web already lost?

"The internet must be put out of its misery," Miles Klee writes at Wired — though he notes evidence is piling up that the internet people once loved is already dead.

The month's record supports the mood. Google and Meta were both hit with massive penalties for violating user privacy. Governments around the world are banning children from social media over fears of harmful effects. Oxford University Press selected "rage bait" as its word of the year last December. And generative AI, in Klee's words, is "a turbocharged slop engine for the web."

"Dead internet theory," the idea that bots and bot-generated content are taking over the web, hardly seems like a theory anymore, Klee argues. It describes the future many tech companies are building: AI agents talking to each other while every user receives a personalized, endless content feed.

Advertising has contributed to the shift. Journalist John West, promoting his new book "The Internet Will Die, and So Will You," told Klee about an AOL-hosted anime blog he ran as a child. He can no longer access his AOL account to delete it, so the page lives on, unupdated for decades — and still runs ads.

FTC opens personalized-pricing inquiry into nine companies

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry into nine companies spanning airlines, rideshare apps and food delivery services. Delta, United, JetBlue, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Target and Walmart must provide detailed information on how they use consumer data to set prices and compensation. They have 45 days from receipt of the order to respond.

Rideshare and delivery apps may use what the FTC calls "opaque formulas" to set driver pay, possibly factoring in phone usage and whether a driver declined earlier ride or delivery requests. Consumers, meanwhile, are often charged different prices for the same products based on what a company knows about their preferences.

People "deserve to know whether companies use their web surfing habits or other personal data to estimate the highest price they can charge each consumer," FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said.

The practical takeaway for marketers: first-party data that drives personalized offers is now a regulatory target, not just a technical asset.

In brief

• Businesses in the UK and EU can opt out of Meta's new terms of use, which would otherwise permit Meta to train its AI on their content, according to 404 Media.
• A week after apologizing for suspending a "No Kings" Instagram account during a protest's organization, Meta is under fire for banning a Democratic candidate's page before a key get-out-the-vote rally, Newsweek reports.
• Ars Technica asks why Google's AI will not state outright who won the 2020 US presidential election.
• An ad by Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy featuring his opponent's estranged mother was created by Strategy Group, an Ohio firm embroiled last year in controversy over a $220 million no-bid Department of Homeland Security contract, The New Republic reports.
• Social-first creator agency NewGen appointed Jordan Carroll as chief AI officer.

The pattern across all five stories is one practitioners cannot ignore: platforms, regulators and AI systems are rewriting the rules of distribution and data use faster than most marketing stacks can adapt.