The future funding of journalism on the open internet remains in question despite news that Google will not kill off third-party cookies on its Chrome web browser after nearly five years of promising otherwise.

Matthew Scott Goldstein, a consultant who has written previously for Press Gazette on how publishers can avoid “extinction” amid the end of cookies, summed up the views of many when he said it is “unclear exactly what this means”.

“We need another two or three weeks to find out what the fallout really is. However, my concern is this is another meteor hitting the publisher ecosystem of the internet.”