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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

What ads would get blocked? The ones not sold by Google, for the most part.

I can see it coming - "Host on AMP, and your ads will get through". "Use Google Ads, and your ads will get through." "Pay dues to the Acceptable Ad Consortium, and your ads will get through."

Look what happened with TrustE and their ratings. It started out as a good idea, and ended up as a cover for scumbags. Today, a TrustE seal has negative value.[1]

[1] http://www.benedelman.org/news/092506-1.html

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I'm a little more hopeful. They have a clear incentive to keep really bad ads off their own services because if they don't a lot of people will just reinstall another ad blocker. If I didn't have to deal with unmutable autoplaying video ads or ads spouting malware I'd be more willing to browse with a limited ad blocker.

Google will never be able to pry uBlock Origin from me! Stay away!

Me neither BUT I am optimistic about this. If ads become better, horrifying ones get blocked and most users have blocking we will see some great things:

- non-technical users with safer and better experience

- better revenue models / more innovative businesses that are based on actual sales

- better uBlock experience because ads are not incentivized to be horrible

Also, the problem is less adverts than tracking which is fed by this. Obviously companies like FB and Google still will but hopefully tracking relaxes either by the awareness this causes driving a change in user behavior AND defunds some of the tracking as businesses shift to dif Models.

I won't stop filtering and blocking, but I would love the experience to be better, safer, and faster. If the main advert company, Google, does something about this we will be better off. Nontech users will definitely be.

And if Google takes steps to prevent third-party ad blockers from working in Chrome? Or renders them worthless through exceptions to the filtering API?

Even if you ignore Google's Funding Choices and its potential to increase adoption of view-ads-or-pay (a lose/lose for privacy, btw) you are very vulnerable if you use Chrome and/or a Google controlled OS. The Coalition for Better Ads won't be helping you by keeping Google in check. It is more or less the same companies you are fighting right now (check membership and note NAI, IAB, DMA, and other trade associations).

Would it be hard to maintain a minimal fork, with enough changes to allow an adblocker, and nothing else changed? I would pay a couple bucks for that.

Hello again Firefox

You mean Waterfox, of course?

Sure and there'll be tons of die hards like you who won't stop using blockers. This still makes a lot of sense if it keeps new people from installing a 3rd party blanket ad blocker and eating into ad revenue from Google's own platform.

Based on the article, I didn't see any evidence they are shutting down chrome add-ons. I'm really lost on why people are getting the impression of that. When Google made Google+, they didn't block you from visiting Facebook, why would this be different

By 'keeps' I didn't mean Google would programmatically block ad blockers but remove enough of the annoying ads that people wouldn't think using a total blocker is necessary.

Google already has a history of banning extensions and apps. For example, ad blockers are against the Google Play ToS.

> If I didn't have to deal with unmutable autoplaying video ads or ads spouting malware I'd be more willing to browse with a limited ad blocker.

Not being able to install noscript/adblock at work means that every time I go to bloomberg it does the garbage autoplay shit. So frustrating.

Why when I come to read an article would you think I'd want to hear someone talking??

If you are using a Mac the new Safari can help you with this at the least.

Hooray, our circus includes free bread!

This product change is mainly about the majority of people who don't use an adblocker.

Why wouldn't people willing to install an ad blocker just use Google's and another?

That has already happened. One of the reasons Goole renamed itself "Alphabet" and started using different brand names (e.g. "Waymo") for other products is to confuse consumers about their source. The "Google" brand has become synonymous with advertising and invasion of privacy, and the reversal of strategy (used to stick the brand on everything vs. isolating it to search and ads) is a hedge against the growing consumer distrust.

I think you have that backwards; the move was to allow higher risk ventures to go forward with the chance of visible failure without harming Google's brand reputation which, contrary to your description, is actually quite strong.

This is another way of saying the same thing.

No, deprave and dragonwriter are making opposite claims. Deprave is claiming that Google created new brands like Waymo and Alphabet so that the (claimed) distrust of Google would not negatively affect these ventures. Dragonwriter is claiming that Google created new brands so that if the new, risky ventures failed, those failures would not negatively affect the well-liked Google brand.

The premise that visible business failure harms brands is false. It's your opinion and it sounds like it makes sense, but it's not supported by any data.

> The premise that visible business failure harms brands is false.

Given that many forms of visible business failure literally cause brands to cease to exist, it seems indisputable that at least some of the time they're harmed.

Some of the times they're harmed, some of the times they're not. There's no correlation, ruling out the slightest possibility of causation. Is it risk management, then? No, because a product with a well known and trusted brand has much higher chances of success. Is Google internationally reducing the success chance of their billion dollar bets? No. The only reasonable conclusion to make is that Google doesn't want to taint their new offerings with the existing brand.

What you describe in your first sentence is a correlation. Additionally, risk management sometimes involves preventing things that have never happened before.

We may just have to disagree on the value of Google. It seems obvious to me that it is a critical asset to Alphabet that must not lose search/product share before another Alphabet subsidiary pays off. I believe the purpose of spinning companies out of Google is more about improving capital allocation than protecting either brand, with the possible exception of Waymo if there is a huge backlash against autonomous vehicles.

Your logic is flawed.

"Some of the times they're not" does not exclude a potential correlation.

For example: "Some of the time, going to the hospital will not make me better, therefore there is no correlation between going to a hospital and getting better"

>There's no correlation, ruling out the slightest possibility of causation

That sounds like an interesting study, where can I read it?

How well established is it that there is no correlation?

> The premise that visible business failure harms brands is false.

Maybe, but it's a popular belief in business anyway; moreover, however true or false it is in general, I think it's pretty clear that Google, specifically, has a problem (whether rational or not) in some potential customer sectors with service/product discontinuations reflecting negatively on perception of other services/products under the Google brand, even if that is a sui generis effect rather than a reflection of a generally-applicable effect of product failure on brand image.

> The "Google" brand has become synonymous with advertising and invasion of privacy, and the reversal of strategy (used to stick the brand on everything vs. isolating it to search and ads) is a hedge against the growing consumer distrust.

I really don't think so. Even Microsoft is not there yet for most people.

> One of the reasons Goole renamed itself "Alphabet" and started using different brand names (e.g. "Waymo") for other products is to confuse consumers about their source.

Citation needed.

Agree. It could easily also be about the legality of being a software company and a car company, and so on. After all, when you file corporate taxes you have to write down a number indicating your industry. I always wondered what they put there.

This, along with Safari's 'stop-ad-tracking' feature released on WWDC17, will very probably kill the Internet ads business (the others). I would be surprised if stock prices of the ads networks don't plumage.

s/released/announced/ afaik

yes, and s/plumage/plummet/. :)

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