The worst part is that quite a huge percentage of the Internet relies on it! Soon we won't be able to use any sites whatsoever because of it. I don't like where this is going. :/
Indeed, I definitely am not happy with how much control Google has over the Internet in general. Everything from how they present and rank search results, Google Analytics scripts everywhere, the sometimes vaguely-political messages on their homepage, the ostensibly-anti-bot checks including CAPTCHAs and just plain banning you if you want to do more "advanced" searches (like the ones Fravia would've taught...), etc.
There's other (mysterious to me) stuff that sites call to Google for, apart from captchas and analytics.
As a uMatrix (and former NoScript) user, I've long noticed that many sites make calls to ajax.googleapis.com for I have no idea what. Quite often the site will refuse to work without that.
To be fair, a lot of sites make use of javascript from a lot of other sites as well: cloudfront and amazon are common.
As a uMatrix user as well, I have manually whitelisted ajax.googleapis.com. It is actually not tracking scripts, but hosted libs like jQuery, which many many sites use and will not function without. See here: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/
