This is the sort of messaging I would expect from a journalist who has a stake in the online-advertisement game. Does anyone really buy this argument?
I enjoy this Apple-Google death spiral as a spectator, and I hope it will drive more websites to subscription-based, freemium models, instead of playing friends with global spy regimes that incentive advertisement platforms to extract every detail of your internet browsing in order to "serve you better ads", aka, develop behavior profiles of consumers in order to find the "terrorist", and definitely not aggregating the behaviors of individuals in order to create a huge information disparity that becomes a vector of population control. Yes, that poorly placed Google AdSense blurb is trying to take over the world.
Advertisements suck, and they're only getting worse, and more subversive, and the intent of the platform creators is only becoming further aligned with these spy regimes.