Comment by gorhill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorhill | Hacker News Reader

> Google appears to be shipping the entirety of EasyList and EasyPrivacy; which includes blocking rules for Google’s own AdSense and DoubleClick advertisement platforms as well as Google Analytics, and other Google services.

This is confusing. EasyList is not bound to the "Better Ads Standards", its purpose is to block all ads, regardless of their perceived intrusiveness.

Also, I failed to understand why would EasyPrivacy be used: its purpose is outside that of "Better Ads Standards".

The article further claims:

> Google’s ad blocking capabilities will be on par with the best tools available from day one.

How is this even possible if the web sites targeted are only those which are not compliant "Better Ads Standards"?

The blockers making use of EasyList do not care about "Better Ads Standards", so the result can't possibly be "on par with the best tools available"[1]

I would like to know how the author of the article got the information about EasyList and EasyPrivacy, I find it difficult to believe these would be used by Chrome's integrated blocker given its claimed purpose.

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UPDATE: After looking around a bit, I understand better now how this works. As per ghacks.net[2], excerpt (my emphasis):

> Google Chrome will download rules from EasyList and EasyPrivacy at regular intervals and apply them to sites that failed reviews automatically.

So EasyList/EasyPrivacy are used on sites which fail to comply with "Better Ads Standards".

In retrospect I suffered reading comprehension, the sentence in the article was clear enough:

> These lists are used to limit what resources are loaded on websites identified by Safe Browsing as being non-compliant with the Better Ad Standards.

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[1] Add to this that EasyList is just a complementary list on top of more advanced blocking features found on blockers such as uBlock Origin or Adguard.

[2] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/02/details-about-googles-ad-b...

I think I can clarify now that I understand. What they are doing is using their "safe browsing" hidden partial-hash-based list to determine if a site "deserves" to be subject to the EasyList/EasyPrivacy lists. So it's selectively choosing where the lists are applied unlike your awesome tool. I have confirmed even in current Chrome they are already downloading these lists (in Windows at ~/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data/Subresource Filter)...both the indexed and unindexed sets have the EasyList licenses. Also, from my quick perusal of the code, I don't believe they apply cosmetic filters.

People work hard on those lists, not sure they appreciate selective application of them.

Also, the statement "Google’s ad blocking capabilities will be on par with the best tools available from day one" is impossible like you claim because it's only a subset of what other blockers would do unless the author is claiming that not-blocking ads means better or on-par capability.

>its purpose is to block all ads, regardless of their perceived intrusiveness.

and that's what chrome's adblocker will do. The purpose of chrome's adblocker is not to block ads that don't conform to the better ad standards, it's to block ALL ads on websites that don't conform to the better ad standards. There's no way to block individual ads that don't comply, since the standards define things like the number of ads you can have visible at a time, or how close ads can be to each other. if your site is 90% ads and 10% content, which of those ads are intrusive and which ones should you allow through? So what google is doing instead is flagging the site as "has intrusive ads", and then blocking all advertising on that site.

>I would like to know how the article author got the information about EasyList and EasyPrivacy

the author says at the beginning of the article that this information comes from inspecting the chromium source code.

> apply them to sites that failed reviews automatically

Wait, sites that failed automatic reviews or sites that somehow "automatically" failed reviews (sounds like, because of 'some reason' they aren't eligible so they default-fail). Because the latter would, of course, play right into Google's hand.

Automatically applied to sites that failed whatever review Google chooses to do.

I found that confusing, too. I thought, they were actually running EasyList and EasyPrivacy in full and fulltime, which would have been completely orthogonal to Google's entire business model.

So, what it actually means is that if you follow the visual guidelines, which Google has been following for reputation reasons for a long time, then you get to track users all you want, which is where Google is market leader. If you don't follow the visual guidelines, then your ads and tracking gets blocked, fostering the monopoly of Google.

Sounds like a primary example of anti-competitive behaviour then.

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