I remember a small story, decades ago, about a company/univeristy which was left holding the bag when the government cancelled their contract. They were constructing a lens system to go into a satellite which could purportedly read the issue date on a dime lying on the sidewalk. It was something like $15M. The implication was that the government had found something even better, and gone with that instead. If Google is publicly giving up on a particular, unpopular technology to buy some PR, I strongly suspect that they've already figured out something which will work "better" behind the scenes.
There's a lot of confusion over what this story is actually saying, and, given the obscurity with which Google deals with it's tech, I don't think this is going to get cleared up, leaving room for a lot of speculation. But one thing is absolutely certain: There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker that would make them LESS money. Maybe that just means that they consider their duopoly enough of a barrier that advertisers will be forced to accept less-targeted marketing, but I doubt it...
There's a lot of confusion over what this story is actually saying, and, given the obscurity with which Google deals with it's tech, I don't think this is going to get cleared up, leaving room for a lot of speculation. But one thing is absolutely certain: There's no possible way that Google is going to make a change to their biggest money maker that would make them LESS money. Maybe that just means that they consider their duopoly enough of a barrier that advertisers will be forced to accept less-targeted marketing, but I doubt it...