How Chrome’s built-in ad blocker will work when it goes live tomorrow | Hacker News Reader

How Chrome’s built-in ad blocker will work when it goes live tomorrow

techcrunch.com

I'm torn by this move from Google. On one hand its almost certain to make my browsing a better experience.

On the other hand, this move just seems to have the stink of antitrust violation on it. I'm by no means a lawyer, but it doesn't seem right for Google to leverage its position in the browser market to advance the interests of AdSense. I'd love to hear a lawyers opinion on this.

It's not entirely Google's decision on what to block.

The group seems to be made of plenty of third parties.

https://www.betterads.org/members/

If you can't beat them, join them? Make ads less annoying and the argument for an adblocker kind of goes down, less people begin using adblockers and more people see ads eventually. I guess that's a win win.

Scary that a company which operates off ad revenue can now control the ad revenue of other companies. How will they be accountable/transparent for scenarios like that?

It seems already biased, as the forced ads in front of YouTube videos aren't substantially different from initial popups that block text content. Both force the end user to view an ad before the content. That one is HTML blocking HTML and the other is video blocking video seems unimportant to me.

I hadn't thought of that. Obtrusive ads are bad unless they are our obtrusive ads.

I also want to understand what % of ads they'll be blocking are from competitor ad platforms and what % are self impacting vs the same for ads they don't block. Will this effectively devalue their competitors in a significant way?

Good point. If the ad is integrated into the player, it does not seem to bother Google and Google won't treat it as a pop-up. They are using a very narrow definition to score points. I hope people figure this out.

As I see, it looks like Chrome will block mainly other ad companies' ads. If you try to use Adsense ads like this, it will result in penalty/ban because it's already forbidden by the rules of the program.

So this feature just blocks the interrupting ads, Google already announced earlier that they will be downgrading the sites on SERP if they contain annoying/interrrupting ads, like full screen, sticky, hard to close etc.

Cynically, I wonder if this is a plan to:

1. Provide a comparable ad-blocking service as other ad blockers.

2. Squeeze out the market share of existing chrome extension ad blockers.

3. Nuke the API's the extension ad blockers are using to block ads.

4. Slowly degrade the only remaining ad-blocking service ( theirs ) to open us all back up to aggressive ads.

Only if they plan on losing massive amounts of users to Firefox. The advice, "Google stopped allowing ad blockers because they're an ad company. Switch to Firefox and you'll be all set" will spread like wildfire.

Will it pop those annoying popup subscriptions

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