
How Chrome’s built-in ad blocker will work when it goes live tomorrow - perseusprime11
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/14/how-chromes-built-in-ad-blocker-will-work-when-it-goes-live-tomorrow/
======
tengbretson
I'm torn by this move from Google. On one hand its almost certain to make my
browsing a better experience.

On the other hand, this move just seems to have the stink of antitrust
violation on it. I'm by no means a lawyer, but it doesn't seem right for
Google to leverage its position in the browser market to advance the interests
of AdSense. I'd love to hear a lawyers opinion on this.

~~~
h1d
It's not entirely Google's decision on what to block.

The group seems to be made of plenty of third parties.

[https://www.betterads.org/members/](https://www.betterads.org/members/)

------
lakechfoma
If you can't beat them, join them? Make ads less annoying and the argument for
an adblocker kind of goes down, less people begin using adblockers and more
people see ads eventually. I guess that's a win win.

Scary that a company which operates off ad revenue can now control the ad
revenue of other companies. How will they be accountable/transparent for
scenarios like that?

~~~
tyingq
It seems already biased, as the forced ads in front of YouTube videos aren't
substantially different from initial popups that block text content. Both
force the end user to view an ad before the content. That one is HTML blocking
HTML and the other is video blocking video seems unimportant to me.

~~~
lakechfoma
I hadn't thought of that. Obtrusive ads are bad unless they are our obtrusive
ads.

I also want to understand what % of ads they'll be blocking are from
competitor ad platforms and what % are self impacting vs the same for ads they
don't block. Will this effectively devalue their competitors in a significant
way?

------
bonjurkes
As I see, it looks like Chrome will block mainly other ad companies' ads. If
you try to use Adsense ads like this, it will result in penalty/ban because
it's already forbidden by the rules of the program.

So this feature just blocks the interrupting ads, Google already announced
earlier that they will be downgrading the sites on SERP if they contain
annoying/interrrupting ads, like full screen, sticky, hard to close etc.

------
ldiracdelta
Cynically, I wonder if this is a plan to:

1\. Provide a comparable ad-blocking service as other ad blockers.

2\. Squeeze out the market share of existing chrome extension ad blockers.

3\. Nuke the API's the extension ad blockers are using to block ads.

4\. Slowly degrade the only remaining ad-blocking service ( theirs ) to open
us all back up to aggressive ads.

~~~
Spivak
Only if they plan on losing massive amounts of users to Firefox. The advice,
"Google stopped allowing ad blockers because they're an ad company. Switch to
Firefox and you'll be all set" will spread like wildfire.

------
petraeus
Will it pop those annoying popup subscriptions

