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Comment by treden | Hacker News Reader

This of course. Why is anyone in the least surprised that Google doesn't want the ads that fund Chrome (and everything else they do) to be blocked by the users of Chrome. Shall Google fund our nice things (like Firefox, Chrome, gmail, google maps, etc etc) with hopes and dreams in place of cold hard cash? The audacity.

Clearly an unpopular opinion here, but anyway: I'm happy to let a few ads slip through (which I will happily ignore anyhow) in exchange for the possibility of a future where I dont have to drive a car to get places.

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It's not either/or, just like you can have a factory making cheap widgets without letting that factory pollute the local river with industrial waste.

Ads are funding the Internet only because it's the easiest legal business model to pull off, so everyone gravitated to it. But it's not like there wouldn't be money for self-driving cars without adtech, and in reality, them being tied with advertising companies only ensures that the future will be shitty.

To add to this, ads are currently the best way to collect micropayments from users online without requiring you (the website maintainer) to have a database or profile on each customer, or to handle complicated return processes, or to deal with merchant accounts. You just make an adwords account, serve content to people, and that's it.

I'm convinced that in a world where collecting anonymous micropayments was as easy as serving ads, the web would look at lot different.

People look at this as a choice between paying $5 a month for every website they visit, or getting it "free" with ads. But in a world with good micropayments, most websites wouldn't cost $5. Outside of the biggest players, most sites aren't currently making $5 a month per user via ads.

> I'm happy to let a few ads slip through ...

But should that mean letting the fox guard the henhouse though? The problem here is that the largest ad provider also controls the largest ad display platform (i.e., Chrome), and is using the latter to benefit the former.

Ironically, developers helped create the henhouse they’re now worried the fox might get, by only using Chrome.

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