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Comment by rand846633 | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I am not convinced that Ad blockers are such big of a problem for Google. Especially when these are not used much on Mobil, and the world is clearly transitioning to Mobil.

Do we know the financial impact ad blockers are thought to have?

I’m guessing ad fraud is a way bigger problem, although some would argue that add fraud is not googles problem, it still hurts Google.

Maybe it’s also a third thing I just can’t think of right now, ad blocks just seem to niche to me. How about just enforcing a stronger monopoly on user tracking?

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Google is an advertising company. That's their bread and butter, everything else largely serves to boost that business unit. Blocking ad blockers, alternate clients..etc, is absolutely in line with their business goals of serving more ads.

And also, frankly, I don't really frakking care if their purpose is to prevent ad fraud. That's not my problem, why should I be the one paying for Google to make more money from a problem they created themselves in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, if Google really wants to prevent ad fraud, they can just stop doing advertising; Problem solved.

Yes, ad blockers aren't big right now, but Safari on iOS and Samsung Browser on Android has ad blocker support. What happens if Apple or Samsung decides to bundle an ad blocker? Google wants to defend against any future moves.

Already, other browsers have led on tracking protection and control of third-party cookies, affecting Google's business model. So Google built Chrome, invested in it so people would prefer it, pushed it on their websites to ensure people would prefer it, and built a walled garden with Chrome Sync + Passwords.

Then they started using it to decrease privacy by signing in to Chrome when you sign in to Gmail. They track your websites visited and use it to improve their advertising even when the website doesn't use Google ads.

Theirs is the only password manager for Android which is limited to their browser. That's for a reason.

Signing into chrome upon signing into a Google service really rubs me the wrong way.

Why does Google get to do something that no other website in the world is allowed to do? This feels like something Microsoft would have gotten hit by antitrust over decades ago.

There’s no reason why logging into a Google site should silently give them all of your web browsing history across every site you browse. I know you can turn both those settings off but most people don’t even know they exist.

They make a big fuss about it like the movie industry does about privating movies. They "lose" millions sure but they are making "billions" even with a few people doing it.

They just blame adblockers for the Google Ads scandal happening right now where they faked ads reports to customers.

They can only blame themselves for faking data.

There's indeed more than Ad blockers to this matter. Web scrapers became a major issue since they realized the great economical potential of LLMs and AI in general. Incumbents may wish to make it hard for competitors to run their own bots.

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