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Comment by trealira | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Google counteracts indirectly. Why can't they just ban adblockers from the Chrome Web Store? If that's not possible, why not just remove specific adblockers one by one? Removing the big ones would probably stop most people from using them.

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My assumption is that banning them outright will make it super obvious you can’t run adblock on chrome. With Manifest V3 limiting their capabilities but not getting rid of them, the layman user will still feel like they have adblock and aren’t likely to know it’s not as powerful as it was before.

Google might be trying to have their cake and eat it too - hamstring adblocking enough that their sites and ad networks can work around it but other sites and ad networks will remain blocked.

Keep your friends close, your enemies' closer kind of thing.

This implies we are so stupid we won't realize we are seeing ads where we never saw them before.

>> we won't realize we are seeing ads where we never saw them before.

Ads are the new content.

The killer app for LLMs is generating new and innovative ads that are entertaining and feel like content.

Imagine fun games like "Avoid the Noid" (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1095/avoid-the-noid/), "Cool Spot" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Spot), and "McKids" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.C._Kids), but with modern graphics and sound and promoting the most annoying brands and products.

Help people save money on their insurance by playing as the Geico lizard! Find out the dirt on used cars as the CarFax fox! Yesterday's annoying mascots are today's folk heroes.

Ads will never be the 'new content'. If I want to read a news story, or find some key information, do you really suppose I will appreciate being confronted with "Avoid the Noid" or other fatuous games?

News stories are often straight ads too, just quickly paraphrased retelling of a propaganda piece from the companies public relations department.

Banning them will invite antitrust regulation, because there's a conflict of interest between giving away the browser and crippling it to benefit their advertising business. I suspect that for the legal department, it's too close to the historical example of Microsoft leveraging its operating system dominance to benefit Internet Explorer and hurt competitors like Netscape. If they bury the anti-adblock strategy under layers of technicalities, they can plausibly deny that they're targeting particular vendors.

That would get them a lot of bad press and many people would leave. It might even get AGs attention. If they just do ambiguous annoying things, that's safer for them.

I wish they'd just ban ad blockers from their store. It would instantly turn uBlock Origin into the Firefox killer app.

Perhaps that’s exactly why they don’t. They know there would be an exodus because they know what the install-base of ad blockers are in Chrome. Their market dominance is worth more than the marginal lost revenue from some ads being blocked.

and after manifest v3 is shipped, the updates for "selected" extensions get slower and slower which makes them less and less effective

and they will just look slow instead of actively targeting ad-blockers

Didn't happen on mobile.

They benefit from people blocking ads, just not their ads. And they can't just build something into their browser to block everyone else's ads by default because that'll be uncompetitive.

Is it? I've seen ad blockers try that "privileged ads" model. It's hilariously unpopular and unprofitable due to product market mismatch.

Maybe I am cynical about the law, but I assume the only reason they don't block other networks is because it would be their same advertisers, and they would be furious enough to take action.

Chrome already ships with ad blockers built in for ads which are disruptive or use too much resources.

https://blog.chromium.org/2018/02/how-chromes-ad-filtering-w...

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com...

All ads are disruptive.

Note however that they get to decide this criteria, I as a user does not have any input as to which ads are "disruptive". And hey, it just so happens that their criteria allows for their own ads.

It’s not an add blocker. It is a competitive as blocker.

Yes, which is not "block everyone else's ads". Your own first link says that websites eventually fixed their ads to comply with their "Better Ads Standards" and thus became able to show them again.

> Why can't they just ban adblockers from the Chrome Web Store?

The answer is legal antitrust lawsuits. Chrome has a near monopoly and Google is the largest advertising actor, banning ad blocking altogether risks giving ammunition to the inevitable antitrust lawsuits.

What they prefer to do instead is degrade their effectiveness step by step, it's way less risky for them.

Google has of course considered doing this. We can't know their exact calculus, but whatever it was, they came to the conclusion that playing cat-and-mouse is financially advantageous to them. Maybe it's a legal concern, maybe it's a market share concern, maybe adblockers don't actually erode their overall ad profitability to the degree we think it does. But whatever the reason, Google decided they will profit more this way.

There is a baseline assumption that this is motivated by ads. I really don't think Google is coordinated enough for ads to exert pressure between orgs in that way. People in chrome really are just optimizing for security and safety.

Hard disagree, this is a play from the top

What do you base this belief on?

How is their anti-Adblock fight on YouTube not a clear sign?

because google is an ads company

And if you've ever worked for 'em, even in a department related to neither Chrome nor Ads, you'll soon know the influence of the Ads team. Prestige, high-pressure jobs, top people, and influence everywhere.

I am not sure if this is not a sarcastic take, but I will bite.

Google are generally not coordinated well on anything, but this current war on adblockers is a notable exception. Consider the following 3 things all happening in the same time frame:

1. Youtube's rollout of detecting adblockers and updating their code a couple times a day to prevent you from running an adblocker

2. The manifest v3 standard

3. The Privacy Sandbox trash

They are using the dominant position of Youtube as video content platform (point 1), chrome/chromium (point 2) as a browser engine and their current dominant position in the ads market (point 3) to achieve a couple of goals. With the privacy sandbox, they force ads to go through their ecosystem, with the manifest v3 they deliver a big kick to the adblockers, and with Toutube, they are using one of their most successful platforms to further push their ads agenda.

To me, unskippable ads are going to:

- make me hate the brand that's wasting my time by advertising crap I don't need and making me watch it

- make me hate the platform on which this ad is played, especially knowing the platform jumped through specific hoops to make the ads unskippable for even the power users

They've done so in the past when they blocked the AdNauseam extension several years ago.

If only there was a headless version of AdNauseam, I would finally have a use for the many Raspberry Pi's sitting in my drawer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

That would also prevent lots of if not most people from using Chrome too. They have to pretend to care privacy & security so that they can put more into their pocket.

Because they don't want to ban adblockers, obviously. They even implemented a whole new subsystem in the browser tailored for efficient adblocking.

Ad blocker are legal, banning them could be illegal.

Porn is legal but you can't out a porn app in the Chrome or Google Play store. No rule says they have to allow everything legal.

Not sure about the second part. Considering they have a dominant market position/gatekeeper/whatever, they probably have to actually make an argument for "why not" in the case of tracking blockers (age restricted content is another discussion entirely).

Otherwise, abusing dominance in the phone app store market to benefit their (also dominant) ad surveillance business sounds very, very much like something the DMA could and should punish.

If Google had their own porn app in the Chrome or Play stores, but banned all other porn apps, I guarantee they'd lose quite a few anti-trust related lawsuits, and quickly.

Porn isn't legal for minors and Chrome extensions store doesn't have an age check.

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