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Someday I'd like to hear the inside story of how third-party ad-blocking discussions go inside Google. Do managers take new hires out to a one-on-one lunch and quietly tell them, "It's come from on high that we want to gradually shut down third-party ad-blocking. If you know what's good for your career, find reasons to interfere with ad-blocking and always nod along to the PR excuses."?

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Why would it be hush-hush? Google engineers are generally smart people. They understand decisions that align with the company's bottom line. The engineers can easily tie their performance and promotion evaluation to a revenue metric by interfering with ad-blocking. There is plenty of incentive on the individual level to interfere with ad-blocking without needing shadowy decisions from the top.

It might be uncomfortable for the team to have a naive developer constantly bring up well-intentioned strategies to improve support for third-party ad-blocking in meetings.

I'd kill to hear some of this.

Same for the people who do search ranking finagling and massaging of trends.

It's genuinely impressive that the secret policies don't leak.

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