If I were a product manager at Google working on solving that real problem, I'd ask, "What are the APIs and permissions an ad-blocker needs to be able to functi

If I were a product manager at Google working on solving that real problem, I'd ask, "What are the APIs and permissions an ad-blocker needs to be able to function performantly?" And that would typically then involve going to stakeholders, i.e.: people who actually write adblockers, and asking them what they need. That is very, very obviously not what happened. And any attempt to spin this as "solving a real problem" ignores that Google employs tens of thousands of professionals who are trained to follow the approach above in response to solving problems. This is a business decision and the stakeholders aren't ad-blockers, they're ad networks.