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Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

233 points by gjkood 9y ago

dubiousOne 9y ago
the crown jewel in the google-oligopoly
Shank 9y ago
> Google, a data mining and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers The content in this article, is, for the most part, good content. What annoys me is that The Intercept seems fit to act like a heroic good guy insofar as being completely biased against Google from start to finish in what could have been a mostly informational article. An opening lead like this serves no purpose other than making this bias known. Are we really beyond "just the facts" journalism, even by new journalism companies?
- deleted 9y ago
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- __jal 9y ago
  Google is a data mining and extraction company. That's hard to argue with. Are you complaining about the "sells personal information" part?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    Google does a lot of different things, but people with an axe to grind often like to label Google as something specific that they dislike. In this case they call it a data mining company, which is both meaningless due to how vague the term is, but also slightly menacing sounding. Does Google do things that would fall under a reasonable interpretation of data mining? Definitely. Is it their primary activity? Not by a long shot. Even the people who want to label Google an advertising company have more of a point on a revenue basis. But these characterisations are needlessly reductive and lead you to believe false conclusions like "Google wants all of your data"
    - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
      > slightly menacing sounding As it should be. They are aggressively capturing and selling people data from phones and browsers, as proven by large amounts of evidence. This is pretty factual, please don't call it "bias".
      - Klockan 9y ago
        > They are aggressively capturing and selling people data from phones and browsers, as proven by large amounts of evidence. I'm interested, where can I go and buy some user data from Google?
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Google's primary activity is collecting and monetizing your personal data. That's what their ad business is based on, and their ad business is really the only thing they do that makes money (in Google scale terms of money, anyways). It doesn't matter what department someone at Google works at, their paycheck is paid for by the monetization of that data mining. Anything else Google does is either a route to more data mining and extraction, or a fun side project they do with money made off data mining and extraction.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  "Just the facts" journalism was always a myth, because journalists inherently choose which facts to report. IMHO The Intercept has been pretty up-front about their POV: they're supposed to be the publication that speaks truth to power, meaning that they're opposed to basically all big institutions (Google, Facebook, big corporations, establishment media, both political parties, the government, all governments, etc.) If you share their POV, of course they're the heroic good guy. If you don't, they can be kinda annoying. Even if you don't fully share their POV, though, it can be good to read them to get a diverse array of POVs. I'm an ex-Googler, so of course I found their anti-Google bias a bit grating. Nevertheless, I'm glad I read it, because it was informative and offers a perspective that other mainstream news sources are not reporting on.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I think journalism itself should go away in its present form (and in the form it has been for the past centuries). Because as it is today, it's held to ridiculously low standards. I mean, consider how would you handle any kind of factual investigation that actually matters to you. Say your production server suddenly overloaded and died, and everyone in your company is trying to figure out what happened. Would the search involve interviewing engineers and management, and then writing biased stories about their life and decisions? Would you treat "investigators inherently choose which facts to report" as an acceptable standard for their work? No. You'd start with a fact database, you'd go on collecting every bit of related information, making it available to see and analyze, you'd gather conclusions and add things, mark some entries as "dead ends", etc. until the real cause reveals itself. Suddenly it's entirely possible to reach unbiased facts. I wish we created our news the same way.
    - jerrylives 9y ago
      Lol unfortunately reality is a little more complicated than your contrived and arbitrary scenario
    - jerrycruncher 9y ago
      Most reportage deals with those pesky humans, and not a "production server(that) suddenly overloaded and died," or with something that is similarly deterministic, in a forensic sense. While one could certainly attempt to create a "fact database" about a busted server, trying to do the same about an event involving humans, each with their own undiscernable motivations and varying degrees of willful duplicity, is often impossible. Instead you get stories about the life decisions and bias of the actors involved, because that's what a person who's been trained to tease out the facts from a myriad of fallible sources, any of whom may or may not be lying or trying to advance an unstated agenda, does.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  The Intercept has never been a "just the facts" journal: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-research-group-in-washington-is-funded-by-oracle/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-rese... They are more of a think-tank or advocacy group than a newspaper.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    That article is about the Google Transparency Project, which is a separate organization from The Intercept. Think of GTP as being a PR firm and The Intercept as being a publication. PR firms work to place sources & articles with publications that they feel will be friendly to their message, but the publication itself is a separate organization that reports on many topics besides what the PR firm wants.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      So as you mentioned, The Intercept is "friendly to" anti-Google messaging, which is exactly what I'm saying.
- draw_down 9y ago
  The Intercept has a viewpoint, and they're expressing it. That's kinda what we do on the internet.
- anth1988 9y ago
  The lead is not only factual, but greatly strengthens the points made within. Google makes the vast majority of their money off advertising and data, they are taking steps that will help them to get an even stronger hold on that market with high potential to be extremely anti-competitive.
  - orangecat 9y ago
    Google makes the vast majority of their money off advertising and data By selling the service of targeting and delivering ads, not by selling personal information.
    - partiallypro 9y ago
      Kind of, but really they -are- selling personal information, just not outright. You advertise with Google and get to see the demos, trends, etc so you can target your own ads. It's almost like a SaaS for data mining, especially when you pair it with analytics...which of course you do, that's what goals in analytics are for.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  I think you're confusing blogging with journalism. This person is a blogger and, thus, research and fact checking do not apply.
- e12e 9y ago
  What would you add or remove [from that quote] to make it more factual?
  - pgeorgi 9y ago
    Replace "that sells personal information to advertisers" with "that uses personal information to match consumers to advertisers". Unless Google really sells personal information somewhere, in which case I'd like to know the price tag on the file about me that's supposedly for sale. My understanding is that such a product doesn't exist. (Disclosure: I work at Google but on Chrome OS, ie. client hardware. No idea what the servers are doing except that I've heard that there must be lots of them.)
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      The only practical difference here is that Google isn't giving away their main value proposition. Why give people the product when you can charge them for it over and over? Either way, at the end of the day, Google is still selling our data.
      - Klockan 9y ago
        They are selling data but they are not selling personal information, big difference. If I can't pay them to lookup information about a specific person then they don't sell personal information.
pmoriarty 9y ago
"What ads would get blocked? The ones not sold by Google, for the most part." That is hilarious. Talk about self-serving. How can they do this with a straight face? I guess "Don't be evil" doesn't imply "Don't be slimy".
- nyc640 9y ago
  Well, to be fair, it seemed to me from the release announcement that they were blocking ads on webpages where the publisher set their pages up for a frustrating experience (pop-up display ads, auto play video ads), irrelevant of which ad systems were serving the ads on the pages. They aren't blocking ads from certain ad systems or advertisers. In theory this means the ad blocker shouldn't treat any ad system, including Google's, preferentially. In practice, who knows?
  - DiabloD3 9y ago
    Someone is going to make that argument however: Google Ads disallows displaying their ads that way, and is extremely good at finding websites that do that, and not only banning them but keeping any potentially earned money as well. EU has already tried to make similar arguments to "break up Google" (lol, it's an American company, glwt) by basically blaming them for having a fair ToS and enforces it like no tommorow, thus producing services that attracts users. Thus, having an ad service that bans shitty publishers and advertisers both makes publishers and advertisers (sometimes exclusively) do business with Google. So, Google making Chrome ban shitty publishers and ad networks that harbor shitty publishers and advertisers ... makes Google look like they're not attacking themselves: which, well, they aren't, because they simply don't engage in that behavior on their ad network. There's probably a shorter way of explaining this.
    - nyc640 9y ago
      This makes sense. Thanks for explaining. I don't really know the ads ecosystem that well, so those were just my inferences from the blog post. I'm sure that was the intention of the post :-)
  - 9y ago
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
If this actually results in an internet mostly free of super annoying ads, then I can't get too broken up about that even if it does give Google a major advantage over its competitors. The question, of course, is whether Google can/will abuse this in anti-consumer ways. Some people have said that Google's criteria for "good" ads aren't that great. The article implies that Google can somehow force adblocker users to either pay per pageview or turn off their adblockers, which is awful if true, though I'm not clear how it's supposed to work.
- shusson 9y ago
  > The article implies that Google can somehow force adblocker users to either pay per pageview or turn off their adblockers, which is awful if true, though I'm not clear how it's supposed to work. And that's when you download a different browser...
- cpncrunch 9y ago
  >If this actually results in an internet mostly free of super annoying ads This seems highly unlikely, since most of the annoying ads already come from google. Try watching a dailymotion video and you'll see. Even with a brand new Macbook Pro, it starts to stutter after a while because of all the fucking video adverts around the content. Same with some forum sites that have google ads beside each post. In the end I created a simple blacklist in /etc/hosts, which completely resolves the problem and gets rid of virtually all adverts. Note that I don't have any philosophical objection to ads, and some of them are actually useful, but I draw the line when they make it impossible to actually see the content on the site. 127.0.0.1 adserver.adtech.de content.tomyvid.com adserver.adtechus.com gce-or.bidswitch.net tpc.googlesyndication.com s.apxtarget.com nym1-ib.adnxs.com googleads.g.doubleclick.net p.algovid.com serve-east.acuityplatform.com cas.ny.us.criteo.com cat.ny.us.criteo.com
renlo 9y ago
> According to the Financial Times, Google will allow publishers what it’s calling “Funding Choices.” The publisher could charge the consumer a set price per page view to use third-party sites that block all advertising. Google would do the tracking of how many pages users view, and then charge them. Users could then “white list” particular sites, allowing ads to be shown on them and removing the charge. If users decided to pay to block ads, Google would receive a portion of that payment, sharing it with the publisher. Assuming the price is reasonable this doesn't sound horrible (but it doesn't sound too great either). How much would a publisher charge for an article view? $0.01? Or something like $0.50+ ? If the price is too high then I'd have to ditch Chrome for Firefox or Safari; I do not like ads.
- partiallypro 9y ago
  Maybe they will make the article views like a reverse auction system which they have in Adwords.
Kenji 9y ago
Google's bold move only works this well because other browser developers like Mozilla (or even OS developers) were too hesitant to ship ad-blocking by default. Sad, a missed opportunity. I've said this a long time ago. It's unfortunate that Google does the first step when it really could have been one of the last if browser developers acted properly. Ad blocking is a more or less solved problem and could have been firmly integrated into browsers at least 5 years ago. And I mean free OSS ad blocking without bullying advertisers into paying fees to be unlocked.
- a_imho 9y ago
  There is a serious chance of backfire though. Calling it adblocking normalizes it across all the users. Once the genie is out, shipping a defective adblocker makes for a inferior product. I think the opportunity window is still open, and can't for the life of me understand why Mozilla is not doing the right thing.
- deleted 9y ago
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jfasi 9y ago
> Web users will quickly recognize their only options: pay to use the internet, or uninstall the ad blockers and surf the web for free. Or they could disable Chrome ad blocking and install their ad blocker of choice. If I'm reading this correctly then no portion of the user population is hurt by this. Power with religious objections to advertising are free to continue using them. Typical users who don't care don't have to deal with awful and broken stuff. People who feel charitable enough to pay for advertising get to do so. But doesn't it hurt the advertisers? That's not a given either. This article makes it sound like all non-Google advertisers will be shut out. But that's clearly not true: plenty of non-Google advertisers are represented in the decision making process, to the point where one can be convinced that a variety of views were considered. Ad blockers are a response to the absolutely worst of ads, to the detriment of better-behaved networks like Google, Facebook, and friends. While I agree it's a little creepy that an advertising company shoulda put out an ad blocker, Google is in a unique place to tackle the problem of poor advertising by filtering truly bad experiences, and doing so hurts no one except truly abusive networks.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  If Google and Facebook use this policy to establish an oligopoly (or cement their existing one), and that allows Google and Facebook to raise advertising prices above equilibrium pricing, then that squeezes companies that wish to advertise with costs that are shifted onto consumers. Additionally, having a Google/Facebook oligopoly hurts incumbents when Google uses its overwhelming advertising market power to give itself exclusive advertising deals in order to promote some product. Advertising monopolies can be used to prop up and establish other monopolies. The most obvious example of Google doing this is advertising Chrome on the front page of google.com.
  - anth1988 9y ago
    > that allows Google and Facebook to raise advertising prices above equilibrium pricing Maybe, but do they need to do that or do they just sit there and reap the profits of being an ever expanding proportion of the market (which is now thriving again because they killed other ad blockers). Regulators will just ignore them that way.
Animats 9y ago
What ads would get blocked? The ones not sold by Google, for the most part. I can see it coming - "Host on AMP, and your ads will get through". "Use Google Ads, and your ads will get through." "Pay dues to the Acceptable Ad Consortium, and your ads will get through." Look what happened with TrustE and their ratings. It started out as a good idea, and ended up as a cover for scumbags. Today, a TrustE seal has negative value.[1] [1] http://www.benedelman.org/news/092506-1.html http://www.benedelman.org/news/092506-1.html
- rtkwe 9y ago
  I'm a little more hopeful. They have a clear incentive to keep really bad ads off their own services because if they don't a lot of people will just reinstall another ad blocker. If I didn't have to deal with unmutable autoplaying video ads or ads spouting malware I'd be more willing to browse with a limited ad blocker.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    Hooray, our circus includes free bread!
  - acover 9y ago
    This product change is mainly about the majority of people who don't use an adblocker.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Why wouldn't people willing to install an ad blocker just use Google's and another?
  - russdpale 9y ago
    Google will never be able to pry uBlock Origin from me! Stay away!
    - PrivWeeble 9y ago
      And if Google takes steps to prevent third-party ad blockers from working in Chrome? Or renders them worthless through exceptions to the filtering API? Even if you ignore Google's Funding Choices and its potential to increase adoption of view-ads-or-pay (a lose/lose for privacy, btw) you are very vulnerable if you use Chrome and/or a Google controlled OS. The Coalition for Better Ads won't be helping you by keeping Google in check. It is more or less the same companies you are fighting right now (check membership and note NAI, IAB, DMA, and other trade associations).
newtem0 9y ago
I still dont understand why simple endorsments dont work for some sites. Just put a text banner somewhere prominent that says "thanks bobs burgers for being our sponsor" there is no way ad blockers could pick that text out of all the other text and block it. And there is no reason anyone would want to block it anyway.
- praxulus 9y ago
  You can't charge as much for that kind of ad, because it has poorer targeting, can't be updated as easily to facilitate shorter marketing campaigns, can't support A/B testing, and probably a dozen other major things advertisers care about. I do occasionally see that kind of sponsorship, but only on websites that take very little time/money to maintain.
- nitwit005 9y ago
  How much should you pay for that endorsement? Normally, you'd pay based on how many people see the ad. That, then incentives lying about how many people saw the ad, or creating fake views with bots. To deal with that, you add in Javascript that checks if the ad is genuinely visible and, try to validate that they aren't a bot, and whatever other fakery they try. Adding a layer on top of that, people generally have a target audience, so if you want them as a customer, you might have to inject some more Javascript to determine if the user is part of the target audience. And pretty soon the site is full of tracking beacons and blobs of JS.
  - taormina 9y ago
    Do we really have to track everyone? What ever happened to a flat fee per month to have a static banner in place on a relevant website?
    - tyingq 9y ago
      Aside from tracking, I assume they like the JavaScript because they get more metrics, a/b testing, etc. So they can tweak the ad to perform better.
- 9y ago
CryoLogic 9y ago
The company distributing the ads is controlling the ad-blocker. We have seen this before in other industries. It is never good.
aanm1988 9y ago
I really feel like this is where the government should step in and tell Google no. I'd rather see worse ads then let Google do this.
ucaetano 9y ago
It is worth remembering the The Intercept used to (still does?) work with and publish material from a Oracle-funded nonprofit that existed for the sole purpose of creating bad PR for Google: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-research-group-in-washington-is-funded-by-oracle/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-rese...
- partiallypro 9y ago
  That may be true, but what is untrue about the article? How is it ok for a company to be the largest ad company in the world, while controlling the most popular browser on the planet and just announced a service that will kill off its competitors (as if they have many at all?) That's monopolistic behavior. Ask yourself, if Microsoft did this or something similar, would they get hit with anti-trust? Yes.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    No, it isn't monopolistic. Look at ad prices continuously going down. "Monopoly" isn't a buzz word that you throw around randomly. It doesn't even have to do necessarily with market share or control or the market. There is no monopoly on the ad space, not by very, very far.
    - partiallypro 9y ago
      Microsoft was brought up on anti-trust charges because it packaged a browser with its operating system. Google controls the majority of ads on extended networks, it controls almost all publisher ads (even Microsoft network sites run Google ads.) If publishers have no where to go but Google, how is that not a monopoly? Ignore search, ignore Facebook and Twitter, those are first party. Google has 0 competition on extended network sites, and this ensures it never will.
      - ucaetano 9y ago
        "Ignore search, ignore Facebook and Twitter, those are first party" You're not getting the point: extended network sites is not an isolated product. It exists as a part of a large sub-segment (online ads) which part of an even larger market (ads). You can take a single sub-sub-segment and call it a monopoly. Its doesn't matter if Coke had 95% of the colas market (it does in several countries), it isn't a monopoly, because it competes with thousands of other drinks. And you can't just look at market share, you need to look at prices. CPMs are falling dramatically across the board, which is completely incompatible with a monopoly. There is the economical definition of a monopoly, and then there's the layman definition, which means whatever you want to mean.
bjd2385 9y ago
I had to do a double-take when I read the title, forget about the article. _Google_ developing an Ad Blocker? Ha! I'd never use it.
- bbcbasic 9y ago
  It's saying to be careful when celebrating. Don't take anyone's eye out with the champaigne cork. Make sure there is a designated driver. Etc.
joeyspn 9y ago
I'm curious to see how Google reacts when Brendan Eich's new browser project gets traction.... "Brave Browser Will Reward Users with Ethereum-Based Tokens for Switching on Ads": https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/brave-announces-blockchain-digital-advertising-platform-with-ethereum-based-token-rewards-for-users/ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/brave-announces-blockchain-d...
- davidcbc 9y ago
  Is there any reason to think this will actually gain traction with a significant portion of the population? This seems like the kind of thing HN gushes over but the general population couldn't care less about.
  - azakai 9y ago
    Sure, that part of Brave is focused on tech people. But all these trends start with tech people - then we recommend it and install it for our friends and family. Also, that's just part of the Brave strategy. It's going to block a lot more ads than Chrome by default. That has the potential for general appeal, not just for tech people.
  - wand3r 9y ago
    Idk, I tweeted Eich until he responded that a search engine is more important than a browser; but Brave is still great. Eich ran Mozilla, guy is smart. Google won because it was the best. I can see Brave being the best. Search is being encroached on, adverts are being killed Brave could win for simplicity and privacy which people are valuing more & more...I hope.
- deleted 9y ago
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- Rotten194 9y ago
  'when' is a pretty strong statement for something so unlikely.
Jimmie_Rustle 9y ago
I think this will be very beneficial to non-savvy web-users who may be tricked by misleading ads like the download buttons, and the like. Ads aren't really a problem for me (and I am guessing a lot of others), it's bad/misleading ads like pop-ups, auto-play video ads, etc. I think the idea to block ads that do not follow an established industry standard is definitely a step in the right direction. Savvy users will continue to use 3rd party ad blockers- no change there.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  Google hosts most of those download button ads... Also the biggest source of pre-roll auto-play video ads, youtube.
  - Tentakill 9y ago
    I feel like auto-play ads make sense on youtube because youtube is a video service and you go in expecting a video anyway. It's like a TV commercial. I get super pissed by auto-play ads on non-video websites, but when it's in front of a video such as on youtube I find it only a minor annoyance. [EDIT: I don't know if there are auto-play ads in the sidebar on desktop, I use adblock on desktop so I only see those video ads on the mobile version, which doesn't have anywhere else to put ads]
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      There's no shock of audio but it's still stopping you from getting to the content. It's just as bad as full-page interstitials. (By the way, does anyone else get unreasonably mad that the button to leave such an ad usually says "skip" even when the ad was already shown and stays up indefinitely?)
bitmapbrother 9y ago
>GOOGLE, A DATA MINING and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers Right off the bat this person couldn't even get his facts right. Google doesn't sell personal information to advertisers.
- Vermeulen 9y ago
  This is a really important distinction that apparently most reporters don't care about - I see this misconception everywhere
- Xorlev 9y ago
  Came here to say exactly this. Google doesn't sell your personal information. It personalizes the ads it serves you, but that personalization happens in Google, advertisers don't see it. https://www.google.com/settings/ads/ https://www.google.com/settings/ads/
  - e12e 9y ago
    It might be wrongly implying Google is selling the content of your Gmail - but between Google Analytics and stuff like: https://www.google.com/insights/ https://www.google.com/insights/ Google certainly helps tracking users?
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      Yes it seems that a determined advertiser could find out quite a bit about people who saw its Google ads...
bhhaskin 9y ago
Having Google decide what ads to block is like leaving the fox to gard the hen house.
deleted 9y ago
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801699 9y ago
company that sells ads says it will develop an ad blocker. why not stop selling ads as well? what is the goal?
- al_chemist 9y ago
  Company that sells ads says it will develop an ad blocker for their competition ads.
clock_tower 9y ago
The fox is in the henhouse, but he brought along a hammer and some nails and he really really doesn't like coyotes, so it's all good. Part of the article was a bit confusing, though: "According to the Financial Times, Google will allow publishers what it’s calling 'Funding Choices.' The publisher could charge the consumer a set price per page view to use third-party sites that block all advertising. Google would do the tracking of how many pages users view, and then charge them. Users could then 'white list' particular sites, allowing ads to be shown on them and removing the charge. If users decided to pay to block ads, Google would receive a portion of that payment, sharing it with the publisher." Third-party sites that block all advertising? I think the author has this confused with third-party ad blockers. And the part where Google does the tracking means that now is certainly the time to switch to Firefox and keep ajax.googleapis.com, google-syndication.com, google-analytics.com, and all the rest of them firmly on the banned list. At times I almost feel nostalgic for the bad old days of Internet Explorer 6... (But then I remember what IE6 was actually like, and the feeling passes.)
yuhong 9y ago
Thinking about it, printing money using basic income might make the demand for ads increase. The economy would be basically based on how much basic income consumers spend.
vinceguidry 9y ago
>According to the Financial Times, Google will allow publishers what it’s calling “Funding Choices.” The publisher could charge the consumer a set price per page view to use third-party sites that block all advertising. Google would do the tracking of how many pages users view, and then charge them. Users could then “white list” particular sites, allowing ads to be shown on them and removing the charge. If users decided to pay to block ads, Google would receive a portion of that payment, sharing it with the publisher. Pay for use ad-blocking is exactly what I want. Did you hear me? Exactly. I don't want to manage a zillion news subscriptions at $15+ a pop. I don't want to get nagged to turn off my ad blocker. I want a reasonable amount of money to to spent towards the people making the content that I'm vaguely interested in because other people on Hacker News are interested in it too. I've already solved the problem of content I really care about, I just buy a darned subscription. This is a huge market opportunity and I'm just absolutely silly with glee that Google finally decided to jump on it. Because only Google has the scale to make something like this work. Finally I'm going to see the end of mob rule and the establishment of law and order in web advertising. Couldn't have happened fast enough for me. Please please, just charge me for the content I consume. Why did it take the industry so long to figure this out?
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  Google contributor (their implementation of this idea) only kicks in if ad sellers don't outbid you for that slot. Its a hopelessly google-myopic idea.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    Well, if I can install a secondary ad-blocker to block those ads, I'd be fine with it. The market will eventually settle around a standard rate for a piece of content and then the world can finally know the real price for ads without all the perverse incentives.
- azakai 9y ago
whazor 9y ago
I feel an European Union Anti Trust case coming up.
fidrelity 9y ago
The state of online advertisement has to change. Customers and publishers are unsatisfied and there are massive bot scam networks out there. I am hopeful that Brandon Eich's brave browser[1] will make the ads economy less vulnerable to Google's dominance. [1] https://brave.com https://brave.com
balladeer 9y ago
The key part here is they are deciding to make it enabled by default. Does it not really amount to malpractice against their competitors in the guise of user experience. Anti-trust? Because just saying that one can always disable it and use something like uBlock Origin is missing the point that most of the people will not bother to do that except a tiny minority and that would essentially mean this coalition, which by all measures comes across more of a sham, will succeed in monopolizing ads completely. I think the least they could do to even look impartial is keeping it disabled by default rather than making it opt-in.
deleted 9y ago
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SamUK96 9y ago
I don't think many people were celebrating it. The vast majority of people saw it as a grubby power grab and a hit to the fairness of the internet.
romanovcode 9y ago
Let me tell you what will happen: - Google creates built-in adblocker that allows google ads - Google removes the adblockers from Google Store due to some reason - You don't have an adblocker anymore
- kermire 9y ago
  The fact that Chrome automatically disables extensions that don't exist in the web store, in the name of security, is probably not a good sign. If it is for security, then advanced users should've been given a way to bypass this restriction, but it doesn't exist. If the adblockers get removed from the store, there would be no easy way to use them without abandoning Chrome.
  - petra 9y ago
    Chrome is open-source, you could use an alternative chrome based browser, like srware iron.
- subverter 9y ago
  - You switch to another browser that allows ad blockers or has a good one built-in.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Ah, but not when all the (Google-powered) apps and services you use only work on Google's browser.
microcolonel 9y ago
For me the solution is simple. More of my preferred content is offering honest donation-based support (and receiving fully sufficient funds to operate. The rest is free (the real kind) or paid. My router just refuses to route to ad servers, and my DNS resolver refuses to resolve their domains.
Rotareti 9y ago
> Web users will quickly recognize their only options: pay to use the internet, or uninstall the ad blockers and surf the web for free. Or switch to an open source browser like Chromium/Firefox and go on using the ad-blocker of choice and avoid the pages that charge you.
fukusa 9y ago
"Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker. Here’s What’s Really Going On." I really don't like these kind of titles.
- news_to_me 9y ago
  More than that even, the article seems pretty heavily biased against Google. They bring up a good point which I hadn't considered before, but the way the article is written is awfully slanted. For example, this paragraph: > So this is a way for Google to crush its few remaining competitors by pre-installing an ad zapper that it controls to the most common web browser. That’s a great way for a monopoly to remain a monopoly. It seems like the author is really trying to paint Google in an unflattering light. Maybe that's how it is, but the facts should speak for themselves.
slaymaker1907 9y ago
Honestly, I think the methodology of charging a small amount per page is necessary for the continued success of the internet. The advertising model of revenue seems to be extremely difficult to pull off in practice.
- cpncrunch 9y ago
  >The advertising model of revenue seems to be extremely difficult to pull off in practice. It seems to work well enough for Google. Not so much for everyone else.
slaymaker1907 9y ago
Honestly, I think the methodology of charging a small amount per page is necessary for the continued success of the internet. The advertising model of revenue seems to be extremely difficult to pull off in practice.
slaymaker1907 9y ago
Also, technically all major browsers have featured a limited ad blocker for years. It is called a pop up blocker...
KirinDave 9y ago
It's really frustrating that we cannot have a browser that is both great and not out to get us.
ggggtez 9y ago
This article really has an apocalyptic tone, for what is essentially just an alternative adblocker. AdblockPlus already does most of this anyway (showing ads they get paid for).
hknd 9y ago
This article is so much garbage
naugtur 9y ago
I wonder what Mozilla did wrong that this thread is not full of "I'll just switch to Firefox" I'm on Firefox all the time and it's a RAM saver ;) Full disclosure: I'm not related to Mozilla in any way but definitely a fanboy.

233 points by gjkood 9y ago

the crown jewel in the google-oligopoly

> Google, a data mining and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers The content in this article, is, for the most part, good content. What annoys me is that The Intercept seems fit to act like a heroic good guy insofar as being completely biased against Google from start to finish in what could have been a mostly informational article. An opening lead like this serves no purpose other than making this bias known. Are we really beyond "just the facts" journalism, even by new journalism companies?

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__jal 9y ago
Google is a data mining and extraction company. That's hard to argue with. Are you complaining about the "sells personal information" part?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Google does a lot of different things, but people with an axe to grind often like to label Google as something specific that they dislike. In this case they call it a data mining company, which is both meaningless due to how vague the term is, but also slightly menacing sounding. Does Google do things that would fall under a reasonable interpretation of data mining? Definitely. Is it their primary activity? Not by a long shot. Even the people who want to label Google an advertising company have more of a point on a revenue basis. But these characterisations are needlessly reductive and lead you to believe false conclusions like "Google wants all of your data"
  - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    > slightly menacing sounding As it should be. They are aggressively capturing and selling people data from phones and browsers, as proven by large amounts of evidence. This is pretty factual, please don't call it "bias".
    - Klockan 9y ago
      > They are aggressively capturing and selling people data from phones and browsers, as proven by large amounts of evidence. I'm interested, where can I go and buy some user data from Google?
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Google's primary activity is collecting and monetizing your personal data. That's what their ad business is based on, and their ad business is really the only thing they do that makes money (in Google scale terms of money, anyways). It doesn't matter what department someone at Google works at, their paycheck is paid for by the monetization of that data mining. Anything else Google does is either a route to more data mining and extraction, or a fun side project they do with money made off data mining and extraction.
nostrademons 9y ago
"Just the facts" journalism was always a myth, because journalists inherently choose which facts to report. IMHO The Intercept has been pretty up-front about their POV: they're supposed to be the publication that speaks truth to power, meaning that they're opposed to basically all big institutions (Google, Facebook, big corporations, establishment media, both political parties, the government, all governments, etc.) If you share their POV, of course they're the heroic good guy. If you don't, they can be kinda annoying. Even if you don't fully share their POV, though, it can be good to read them to get a diverse array of POVs. I'm an ex-Googler, so of course I found their anti-Google bias a bit grating. Nevertheless, I'm glad I read it, because it was informative and offers a perspective that other mainstream news sources are not reporting on.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I think journalism itself should go away in its present form (and in the form it has been for the past centuries). Because as it is today, it's held to ridiculously low standards. I mean, consider how would you handle any kind of factual investigation that actually matters to you. Say your production server suddenly overloaded and died, and everyone in your company is trying to figure out what happened. Would the search involve interviewing engineers and management, and then writing biased stories about their life and decisions? Would you treat "investigators inherently choose which facts to report" as an acceptable standard for their work? No. You'd start with a fact database, you'd go on collecting every bit of related information, making it available to see and analyze, you'd gather conclusions and add things, mark some entries as "dead ends", etc. until the real cause reveals itself. Suddenly it's entirely possible to reach unbiased facts. I wish we created our news the same way.
  - jerrylives 9y ago
    Lol unfortunately reality is a little more complicated than your contrived and arbitrary scenario
  - jerrycruncher 9y ago
    Most reportage deals with those pesky humans, and not a "production server(that) suddenly overloaded and died," or with something that is similarly deterministic, in a forensic sense. While one could certainly attempt to create a "fact database" about a busted server, trying to do the same about an event involving humans, each with their own undiscernable motivations and varying degrees of willful duplicity, is often impossible. Instead you get stories about the life decisions and bias of the actors involved, because that's what a person who's been trained to tease out the facts from a myriad of fallible sources, any of whom may or may not be lying or trying to advance an unstated agenda, does.
ucaetano 9y ago
The Intercept has never been a "just the facts" journal: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-research-group-in-washington-is-funded-by-oracle/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-rese... They are more of a think-tank or advocacy group than a newspaper.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  That article is about the Google Transparency Project, which is a separate organization from The Intercept. Think of GTP as being a PR firm and The Intercept as being a publication. PR firms work to place sources & articles with publications that they feel will be friendly to their message, but the publication itself is a separate organization that reports on many topics besides what the PR firm wants.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    So as you mentioned, The Intercept is "friendly to" anti-Google messaging, which is exactly what I'm saying.
draw_down 9y ago
The Intercept has a viewpoint, and they're expressing it. That's kinda what we do on the internet.
anth1988 9y ago
The lead is not only factual, but greatly strengthens the points made within. Google makes the vast majority of their money off advertising and data, they are taking steps that will help them to get an even stronger hold on that market with high potential to be extremely anti-competitive.
- orangecat 9y ago
  Google makes the vast majority of their money off advertising and data By selling the service of targeting and delivering ads, not by selling personal information.
  - partiallypro 9y ago
    Kind of, but really they -are- selling personal information, just not outright. You advertise with Google and get to see the demos, trends, etc so you can target your own ads. It's almost like a SaaS for data mining, especially when you pair it with analytics...which of course you do, that's what goals in analytics are for.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
I think you're confusing blogging with journalism. This person is a blogger and, thus, research and fact checking do not apply.
e12e 9y ago
What would you add or remove [from that quote] to make it more factual?
- pgeorgi 9y ago
  Replace "that sells personal information to advertisers" with "that uses personal information to match consumers to advertisers". Unless Google really sells personal information somewhere, in which case I'd like to know the price tag on the file about me that's supposedly for sale. My understanding is that such a product doesn't exist. (Disclosure: I work at Google but on Chrome OS, ie. client hardware. No idea what the servers are doing except that I've heard that there must be lots of them.)
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    The only practical difference here is that Google isn't giving away their main value proposition. Why give people the product when you can charge them for it over and over? Either way, at the end of the day, Google is still selling our data.
    - Klockan 9y ago
      They are selling data but they are not selling personal information, big difference. If I can't pay them to lookup information about a specific person then they don't sell personal information.

pmoriarty 9y ago

"What ads would get blocked? The ones not sold by Google, for the most part." That is hilarious. Talk about self-serving. How can they do this with a straight face? I guess "Don't be evil" doesn't imply "Don't be slimy".

nyc640 9y ago
Well, to be fair, it seemed to me from the release announcement that they were blocking ads on webpages where the publisher set their pages up for a frustrating experience (pop-up display ads, auto play video ads), irrelevant of which ad systems were serving the ads on the pages. They aren't blocking ads from certain ad systems or advertisers. In theory this means the ad blocker shouldn't treat any ad system, including Google's, preferentially. In practice, who knows?
- DiabloD3 9y ago
  Someone is going to make that argument however: Google Ads disallows displaying their ads that way, and is extremely good at finding websites that do that, and not only banning them but keeping any potentially earned money as well. EU has already tried to make similar arguments to "break up Google" (lol, it's an American company, glwt) by basically blaming them for having a fair ToS and enforces it like no tommorow, thus producing services that attracts users. Thus, having an ad service that bans shitty publishers and advertisers both makes publishers and advertisers (sometimes exclusively) do business with Google. So, Google making Chrome ban shitty publishers and ad networks that harbor shitty publishers and advertisers ... makes Google look like they're not attacking themselves: which, well, they aren't, because they simply don't engage in that behavior on their ad network. There's probably a shorter way of explaining this.
  - nyc640 9y ago
    This makes sense. Thanks for explaining. I don't really know the ads ecosystem that well, so those were just my inferences from the blog post. I'm sure that was the intention of the post :-)
- 9y ago

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

If this actually results in an internet mostly free of super annoying ads, then I can't get too broken up about that even if it does give Google a major advantage over its competitors. The question, of course, is whether Google can/will abuse this in anti-consumer ways. Some people have said that Google's criteria for "good" ads aren't that great. The article implies that Google can somehow force adblocker users to either pay per pageview or turn off their adblockers, which is awful if true, though I'm not clear how it's supposed to work.

shusson 9y ago
> The article implies that Google can somehow force adblocker users to either pay per pageview or turn off their adblockers, which is awful if true, though I'm not clear how it's supposed to work. And that's when you download a different browser...
cpncrunch 9y ago
>If this actually results in an internet mostly free of super annoying ads This seems highly unlikely, since most of the annoying ads already come from google. Try watching a dailymotion video and you'll see. Even with a brand new Macbook Pro, it starts to stutter after a while because of all the fucking video adverts around the content. Same with some forum sites that have google ads beside each post. In the end I created a simple blacklist in /etc/hosts, which completely resolves the problem and gets rid of virtually all adverts. Note that I don't have any philosophical objection to ads, and some of them are actually useful, but I draw the line when they make it impossible to actually see the content on the site. 127.0.0.1 adserver.adtech.de content.tomyvid.com adserver.adtechus.com gce-or.bidswitch.net tpc.googlesyndication.com s.apxtarget.com nym1-ib.adnxs.com googleads.g.doubleclick.net p.algovid.com serve-east.acuityplatform.com cas.ny.us.criteo.com cat.ny.us.criteo.com

renlo 9y ago

partiallypro 9y ago
Maybe they will make the article views like a reverse auction system which they have in Adwords.

Kenji 9y ago

Google's bold move only works this well because other browser developers like Mozilla (or even OS developers) were too hesitant to ship ad-blocking by default. Sad, a missed opportunity. I've said this a long time ago. It's unfortunate that Google does the first step when it really could have been one of the last if browser developers acted properly. Ad blocking is a more or less solved problem and could have been firmly integrated into browsers at least 5 years ago. And I mean free OSS ad blocking without bullying advertisers into paying fees to be unlocked.

a_imho 9y ago
There is a serious chance of backfire though. Calling it adblocking normalizes it across all the users. Once the genie is out, shipping a defective adblocker makes for a inferior product. I think the opportunity window is still open, and can't for the life of me understand why Mozilla is not doing the right thing.
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jfasi 9y ago

> Web users will quickly recognize their only options: pay to use the internet, or uninstall the ad blockers and surf the web for free. Or they could disable Chrome ad blocking and install their ad blocker of choice. If I'm reading this correctly then no portion of the user population is hurt by this. Power with religious objections to advertising are free to continue using them. Typical users who don't care don't have to deal with awful and broken stuff. People who feel charitable enough to pay for advertising get to do so. But doesn't it hurt the advertisers? That's not a given either. This article makes it sound like all non-Google advertisers will be shut out. But that's clearly not true: plenty of non-Google advertisers are represented in the decision making process, to the point where one can be convinced that a variety of views were considered. Ad blockers are a response to the absolutely worst of ads, to the detriment of better-behaved networks like Google, Facebook, and friends. While I agree it's a little creepy that an advertising company shoulda put out an ad blocker, Google is in a unique place to tackle the problem of poor advertising by filtering truly bad experiences, and doing so hurts no one except truly abusive networks.

pcwalton 9y ago
If Google and Facebook use this policy to establish an oligopoly (or cement their existing one), and that allows Google and Facebook to raise advertising prices above equilibrium pricing, then that squeezes companies that wish to advertise with costs that are shifted onto consumers. Additionally, having a Google/Facebook oligopoly hurts incumbents when Google uses its overwhelming advertising market power to give itself exclusive advertising deals in order to promote some product. Advertising monopolies can be used to prop up and establish other monopolies. The most obvious example of Google doing this is advertising Chrome on the front page of google.com.
- anth1988 9y ago
  > that allows Google and Facebook to raise advertising prices above equilibrium pricing Maybe, but do they need to do that or do they just sit there and reap the profits of being an ever expanding proportion of the market (which is now thriving again because they killed other ad blockers). Regulators will just ignore them that way.

Animats 9y ago

What ads would get blocked? The ones not sold by Google, for the most part. I can see it coming - "Host on AMP, and your ads will get through". "Use Google Ads, and your ads will get through." "Pay dues to the Acceptable Ad Consortium, and your ads will get through." Look what happened with TrustE and their ratings. It started out as a good idea, and ended up as a cover for scumbags. Today, a TrustE seal has negative value.[1] [1] http://www.benedelman.org/news/092506-1.html http://www.benedelman.org/news/092506-1.html

rtkwe 9y ago
I'm a little more hopeful. They have a clear incentive to keep really bad ads off their own services because if they don't a lot of people will just reinstall another ad blocker. If I didn't have to deal with unmutable autoplaying video ads or ads spouting malware I'd be more willing to browse with a limited ad blocker.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  Hooray, our circus includes free bread!
- acover 9y ago
  This product change is mainly about the majority of people who don't use an adblocker.
- Larrikin 9y ago
  Why wouldn't people willing to install an ad blocker just use Google's and another?
- russdpale 9y ago
  Google will never be able to pry uBlock Origin from me! Stay away!
  - PrivWeeble 9y ago
    And if Google takes steps to prevent third-party ad blockers from working in Chrome? Or renders them worthless through exceptions to the filtering API? Even if you ignore Google's Funding Choices and its potential to increase adoption of view-ads-or-pay (a lose/lose for privacy, btw) you are very vulnerable if you use Chrome and/or a Google controlled OS. The Coalition for Better Ads won't be helping you by keeping Google in check. It is more or less the same companies you are fighting right now (check membership and note NAI, IAB, DMA, and other trade associations).

newtem0 9y ago

I still dont understand why simple endorsments dont work for some sites. Just put a text banner somewhere prominent that says "thanks bobs burgers for being our sponsor" there is no way ad blockers could pick that text out of all the other text and block it. And there is no reason anyone would want to block it anyway.

praxulus 9y ago
You can't charge as much for that kind of ad, because it has poorer targeting, can't be updated as easily to facilitate shorter marketing campaigns, can't support A/B testing, and probably a dozen other major things advertisers care about. I do occasionally see that kind of sponsorship, but only on websites that take very little time/money to maintain.
nitwit005 9y ago
How much should you pay for that endorsement? Normally, you'd pay based on how many people see the ad. That, then incentives lying about how many people saw the ad, or creating fake views with bots. To deal with that, you add in Javascript that checks if the ad is genuinely visible and, try to validate that they aren't a bot, and whatever other fakery they try. Adding a layer on top of that, people generally have a target audience, so if you want them as a customer, you might have to inject some more Javascript to determine if the user is part of the target audience. And pretty soon the site is full of tracking beacons and blobs of JS.
- taormina 9y ago
  Do we really have to track everyone? What ever happened to a flat fee per month to have a static banner in place on a relevant website?
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Aside from tracking, I assume they like the JavaScript because they get more metrics, a/b testing, etc. So they can tweak the ad to perform better.
9y ago

CryoLogic 9y ago

The company distributing the ads is controlling the ad-blocker. We have seen this before in other industries. It is never good.

aanm1988 9y ago

I really feel like this is where the government should step in and tell Google no. I'd rather see worse ads then let Google do this.

ucaetano 9y ago

It is worth remembering the The Intercept used to (still does?) work with and publish material from a Oracle-funded nonprofit that existed for the sole purpose of creating bad PR for Google: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-research-group-in-washington-is-funded-by-oracle/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-rese...

partiallypro 9y ago
That may be true, but what is untrue about the article? How is it ok for a company to be the largest ad company in the world, while controlling the most popular browser on the planet and just announced a service that will kill off its competitors (as if they have many at all?) That's monopolistic behavior. Ask yourself, if Microsoft did this or something similar, would they get hit with anti-trust? Yes.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  No, it isn't monopolistic. Look at ad prices continuously going down. "Monopoly" isn't a buzz word that you throw around randomly. It doesn't even have to do necessarily with market share or control or the market. There is no monopoly on the ad space, not by very, very far.
  - partiallypro 9y ago
    Microsoft was brought up on anti-trust charges because it packaged a browser with its operating system. Google controls the majority of ads on extended networks, it controls almost all publisher ads (even Microsoft network sites run Google ads.) If publishers have no where to go but Google, how is that not a monopoly? Ignore search, ignore Facebook and Twitter, those are first party. Google has 0 competition on extended network sites, and this ensures it never will.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      "Ignore search, ignore Facebook and Twitter, those are first party" You're not getting the point: extended network sites is not an isolated product. It exists as a part of a large sub-segment (online ads) which part of an even larger market (ads). You can take a single sub-sub-segment and call it a monopoly. Its doesn't matter if Coke had 95% of the colas market (it does in several countries), it isn't a monopoly, because it competes with thousands of other drinks. And you can't just look at market share, you need to look at prices. CPMs are falling dramatically across the board, which is completely incompatible with a monopoly. There is the economical definition of a monopoly, and then there's the layman definition, which means whatever you want to mean.

bjd2385 9y ago

I had to do a double-take when I read the title, forget about the article. _Google_ developing an Ad Blocker? Ha! I'd never use it.

bbcbasic 9y ago
It's saying to be careful when celebrating. Don't take anyone's eye out with the champaigne cork. Make sure there is a designated driver. Etc.

joeyspn 9y ago

I'm curious to see how Google reacts when Brendan Eich's new browser project gets traction.... "Brave Browser Will Reward Users with Ethereum-Based Tokens for Switching on Ads": https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/brave-announces-blockchain-digital-advertising-platform-with-ethereum-based-token-rewards-for-users/ https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/brave-announces-blockchain-d...

davidcbc 9y ago
Is there any reason to think this will actually gain traction with a significant portion of the population? This seems like the kind of thing HN gushes over but the general population couldn't care less about.
- azakai 9y ago
  Sure, that part of Brave is focused on tech people. But all these trends start with tech people - then we recommend it and install it for our friends and family. Also, that's just part of the Brave strategy. It's going to block a lot more ads than Chrome by default. That has the potential for general appeal, not just for tech people.
- wand3r 9y ago
  Idk, I tweeted Eich until he responded that a search engine is more important than a browser; but Brave is still great. Eich ran Mozilla, guy is smart. Google won because it was the best. I can see Brave being the best. Search is being encroached on, adverts are being killed Brave could win for simplicity and privacy which people are valuing more & more...I hope.
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Rotten194 9y ago
'when' is a pretty strong statement for something so unlikely.

Jimmie_Rustle 9y ago

I think this will be very beneficial to non-savvy web-users who may be tricked by misleading ads like the download buttons, and the like. Ads aren't really a problem for me (and I am guessing a lot of others), it's bad/misleading ads like pop-ups, auto-play video ads, etc. I think the idea to block ads that do not follow an established industry standard is definitely a step in the right direction. Savvy users will continue to use 3rd party ad blockers- no change there.

throwaway2048 9y ago
Google hosts most of those download button ads... Also the biggest source of pre-roll auto-play video ads, youtube.
- Tentakill 9y ago
  I feel like auto-play ads make sense on youtube because youtube is a video service and you go in expecting a video anyway. It's like a TV commercial. I get super pissed by auto-play ads on non-video websites, but when it's in front of a video such as on youtube I find it only a minor annoyance. [EDIT: I don't know if there are auto-play ads in the sidebar on desktop, I use adblock on desktop so I only see those video ads on the mobile version, which doesn't have anywhere else to put ads]
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    There's no shock of audio but it's still stopping you from getting to the content. It's just as bad as full-page interstitials. (By the way, does anyone else get unreasonably mad that the button to leave such an ad usually says "skip" even when the ad was already shown and stays up indefinitely?)

bitmapbrother 9y ago

>GOOGLE, A DATA MINING and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers Right off the bat this person couldn't even get his facts right. Google doesn't sell personal information to advertisers.

Vermeulen 9y ago
This is a really important distinction that apparently most reporters don't care about - I see this misconception everywhere
Xorlev 9y ago
Came here to say exactly this. Google doesn't sell your personal information. It personalizes the ads it serves you, but that personalization happens in Google, advertisers don't see it. https://www.google.com/settings/ads/ https://www.google.com/settings/ads/
- e12e 9y ago
  It might be wrongly implying Google is selling the content of your Gmail - but between Google Analytics and stuff like: https://www.google.com/insights/ https://www.google.com/insights/ Google certainly helps tracking users?
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Yes it seems that a determined advertiser could find out quite a bit about people who saw its Google ads...

bhhaskin 9y ago

Having Google decide what ads to block is like leaving the fox to gard the hen house.

deleted 9y ago

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801699 9y ago

company that sells ads says it will develop an ad blocker. why not stop selling ads as well? what is the goal?

al_chemist 9y ago
Company that sells ads says it will develop an ad blocker for their competition ads.

clock_tower 9y ago

The fox is in the henhouse, but he brought along a hammer and some nails and he really really doesn't like coyotes, so it's all good. Part of the article was a bit confusing, though: "According to the Financial Times, Google will allow publishers what it’s calling 'Funding Choices.' The publisher could charge the consumer a set price per page view to use third-party sites that block all advertising. Google would do the tracking of how many pages users view, and then charge them. Users could then 'white list' particular sites, allowing ads to be shown on them and removing the charge. If users decided to pay to block ads, Google would receive a portion of that payment, sharing it with the publisher." Third-party sites that block all advertising? I think the author has this confused with third-party ad blockers. And the part where Google does the tracking means that now is certainly the time to switch to Firefox and keep ajax.googleapis.com, google-syndication.com, google-analytics.com, and all the rest of them firmly on the banned list. At times I almost feel nostalgic for the bad old days of Internet Explorer 6... (But then I remember what IE6 was actually like, and the feeling passes.)

yuhong 9y ago

Thinking about it, printing money using basic income might make the demand for ads increase. The economy would be basically based on how much basic income consumers spend.

vinceguidry 9y ago

>According to the Financial Times, Google will allow publishers what it’s calling “Funding Choices.” The publisher could charge the consumer a set price per page view to use third-party sites that block all advertising. Google would do the tracking of how many pages users view, and then charge them. Users could then “white list” particular sites, allowing ads to be shown on them and removing the charge. If users decided to pay to block ads, Google would receive a portion of that payment, sharing it with the publisher. Pay for use ad-blocking is exactly what I want. Did you hear me? Exactly. I don't want to manage a zillion news subscriptions at $15+ a pop. I don't want to get nagged to turn off my ad blocker. I want a reasonable amount of money to to spent towards the people making the content that I'm vaguely interested in because other people on Hacker News are interested in it too. I've already solved the problem of content I really care about, I just buy a darned subscription. This is a huge market opportunity and I'm just absolutely silly with glee that Google finally decided to jump on it. Because only Google has the scale to make something like this work. Finally I'm going to see the end of mob rule and the establishment of law and order in web advertising. Couldn't have happened fast enough for me. Please please, just charge me for the content I consume. Why did it take the industry so long to figure this out?

throwaway2048 9y ago
Google contributor (their implementation of this idea) only kicks in if ad sellers don't outbid you for that slot. Its a hopelessly google-myopic idea.
- deleted 9y ago
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- vinceguidry 9y ago
  Well, if I can install a secondary ad-blocker to block those ads, I'd be fine with it. The market will eventually settle around a standard rate for a piece of content and then the world can finally know the real price for ads without all the perverse incentives.
azakai 9y ago

whazor 9y ago

I feel an European Union Anti Trust case coming up.

fidrelity 9y ago

The state of online advertisement has to change. Customers and publishers are unsatisfied and there are massive bot scam networks out there. I am hopeful that Brandon Eich's brave browser[1] will make the ads economy less vulnerable to Google's dominance. [1] https://brave.com https://brave.com

balladeer 9y ago

The key part here is they are deciding to make it enabled by default. Does it not really amount to malpractice against their competitors in the guise of user experience. Anti-trust? Because just saying that one can always disable it and use something like uBlock Origin is missing the point that most of the people will not bother to do that except a tiny minority and that would essentially mean this coalition, which by all measures comes across more of a sham, will succeed in monopolizing ads completely. I think the least they could do to even look impartial is keeping it disabled by default rather than making it opt-in.

deleted 9y ago

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SamUK96 9y ago

I don't think many people were celebrating it. The vast majority of people saw it as a grubby power grab and a hit to the fairness of the internet.

romanovcode 9y ago

Let me tell you what will happen: - Google creates built-in adblocker that allows google ads - Google removes the adblockers from Google Store due to some reason - You don't have an adblocker anymore

kermire 9y ago
The fact that Chrome automatically disables extensions that don't exist in the web store, in the name of security, is probably not a good sign. If it is for security, then advanced users should've been given a way to bypass this restriction, but it doesn't exist. If the adblockers get removed from the store, there would be no easy way to use them without abandoning Chrome.
- petra 9y ago
  Chrome is open-source, you could use an alternative chrome based browser, like srware iron.
subverter 9y ago
- You switch to another browser that allows ad blockers or has a good one built-in.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Ah, but not when all the (Google-powered) apps and services you use only work on Google's browser.

microcolonel 9y ago

For me the solution is simple. More of my preferred content is offering honest donation-based support (and receiving fully sufficient funds to operate. The rest is free (the real kind) or paid. My router just refuses to route to ad servers, and my DNS resolver refuses to resolve their domains.

Rotareti 9y ago

> Web users will quickly recognize their only options: pay to use the internet, or uninstall the ad blockers and surf the web for free. Or switch to an open source browser like Chromium/Firefox and go on using the ad-blocker of choice and avoid the pages that charge you.

fukusa 9y ago

"Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker. Here’s What’s Really Going On." I really don't like these kind of titles.

news_to_me 9y ago
More than that even, the article seems pretty heavily biased against Google. They bring up a good point which I hadn't considered before, but the way the article is written is awfully slanted. For example, this paragraph: > So this is a way for Google to crush its few remaining competitors by pre-installing an ad zapper that it controls to the most common web browser. That’s a great way for a monopoly to remain a monopoly. It seems like the author is really trying to paint Google in an unflattering light. Maybe that's how it is, but the facts should speak for themselves.

slaymaker1907 9y ago

Honestly, I think the methodology of charging a small amount per page is necessary for the continued success of the internet. The advertising model of revenue seems to be extremely difficult to pull off in practice.

cpncrunch 9y ago
>The advertising model of revenue seems to be extremely difficult to pull off in practice. It seems to work well enough for Google. Not so much for everyone else.

slaymaker1907 9y ago

Also, technically all major browsers have featured a limited ad blocker for years. It is called a pop up blocker...

KirinDave 9y ago

It's really frustrating that we cannot have a browser that is both great and not out to get us.

ggggtez 9y ago

This article really has an apocalyptic tone, for what is essentially just an alternative adblocker. AdblockPlus already does most of this anyway (showing ads they get paid for).

hknd 9y ago

This article is so much garbage

naugtur 9y ago

I wonder what Mozilla did wrong that this thread is not full of "I'll just switch to Firefox" I'm on Firefox all the time and it's a RAM saver ;) Full disclosure: I'm not related to Mozilla in any way but definitely a fanboy.