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Comment by Drakim | Hacker News Reader

This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!

Google has been the one pushing for getting rid of the v2 manifest for browsers extensions, which just so happens to seriously nerf ad blockers. Because so many browsers are forks of Chromium v2 will disappear from a majority of browsers. Meanwhile if you try to use a non-Chrome browser like Firefox a lot of websites are buggy and outright don't work. Opening images in issues broke in GitHub for firefox a year ago and they still haven't fixed it.

You are being *very* naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.

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> This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!

> You are being very naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.

No, I think you're being incredibly naive if you think the outcome you imagine would necessarily come to fruition without Google being a "monopoly" (however you define it). It didn't happen for Microsoft (Chrome is an angel compared to Edge), and nobody has managed to create comparable solutions for so many other products Google offers that have nothing to do with the browser or search.

gmail works really badly in firefox, it doesn't show new emails unless you force a refresh while it seamlessly loads them in chrome. There is also a popup whenever you use gmail, youtube or google search telling you to switch to chrome because it's "safer and faster".

Google was also caught giving special treatment to google-related domains in chrome, and had to revert the advantages around cookies that they gave to themselves.

> Because so many browsers are forks of Chromium v2 will disappear from a majority of browsers.

It rather sounds like a great marketing opportunity for anyone trying to compete with Chrome, whether they keep the v2 or just implement ad-blocking themselves.

That's a counter argument that can be used against any monopoly that abuses their position to extract value from the market. It's just a market opportunity for somebody else to topple them!

But in reality it just doesn't work out that way, the negatives from abusing their monopoly can be overshadowed by the power of the monopoly itself, for example Google promoting Chrome every time you you gmail, google search, or youtube. Or making their services not work well in non-Chrome browsers.

Or in the case of microsoft, their monopolistic behavior is overshadowed by the fact that too much important software only works on Windows. It's a tale as old as tech.

I don't think you appreciate how easy it is for the chromium forks to add their own ad blocking. This is simply not a good example of monopoly abuse on Google's part.

I could probably fork chromium myself and add some blacklist over ad domains in a couple of hours. But I fail to see how this refutes the idea that Google has a monopoly and abuses it to it's advantage.

Accurate ads does in fact help consumers. Ads facilitate free stuff. Better ads = less ads. When I was a kid every TV show timeslot was like 25% ads. Do you not remember those days? Do you want to go back to that?

When I was a kid cable TV was the the ad-free alternative, where you paid a monthly sum to finance the channel instead of the channel being financed by advertisements.

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