The Improving Web Advertising Business Group (IWABG) is a

subcommittee A committee or commission is a body of one or more persons subordinate to a deliberative assembly. A committee is not itself considered to be a form of assembly. Usually, the assembly sends matters into a committee as a way to explore them more ...

of the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

with a focus on

online advertising Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. ...

. In January 2020,

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

encouraged advertising technology companies to join the group as a way to participate in the company's Privacy Sandbox initiative. The IWABG was formed in 2017; it had 412 participants.

Structure

The IWABG was formed in 2017 and is chaired by

Wendy Seltzer Wendy Seltzer is an American attorney and a staff member at the World Wide Web Consortium, where she is the chair of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group. She was previously with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Selt ...

. , it had 355 participants. IWABG participants attend periodical conference calls and collaborate on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

Googleʻs Privacy Sandbox initiative

In January 2020,

encouraged advertising technology companies to join or contact the IWABG as a way to participate in the company's Privacy Sandbox initiative.

Allegations of dominance by Google

Member organizations in the IWABG each get one vote, but can send any number of representatives to participate. , there were 258 participants in the group, of which 33 were Google employees. In August 2020, a group of IWABG members wrote an

open letter An open letter is a Letter (message), letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally. Open letters usually take the form of a letter (mess ...

to the

advisory board An advisory board is a body that provides non-binding strategic advice to the management of a corporation, organization, or foundation. The informal nature of an advisory board gives greater flexibility in structure and management compared to th ...

of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), expressing concern that "a disparity in organizational size" was preventing the W3C from fulfilling its purpose of equally representing all web stakeholders.

References

{{W3C standards, state=collapsed World Wide Web Consortium Online advertising