I don't see how Chrome's new anti-ad blocking isn't seen as anti-competitive, considering Google basically runs the ad business on non-Google sites, etc. Sure, Facebook and Amazon also serve up ads...but Google is by far the company that is hurt the most by ad blocking. Then at the same time Chrome is essentially blocking "intrusive" ads by default...and by intrusive they basically mean non-Google ads that have the same CPC and CPM model Google has.
It is absolutely anti-competitive garbage, and you should be prepared to see more and more of it (and increasingly anti-consumer iterations if it) until people wake up and start demanding that their political leaders do something about it.
“Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story.
You're right that this is potentially anticompetitive, but
“Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story.
I've never heard libertarians say that. Rather, they say that consumers have the potential to regulate companies if they choose to do so, by voting with their feet. We should do so more often than we do; when there's a free market (monopolies are not free markets) it feels pretty good to tell a company to go screw themselves.
Personally I switched back to Firefox when Chrome tried to force login to my Google account, and I haven't missed a thing (other than some dev tools, e.g. websocket inspection). Firefox Quantum is really good, and their bookmark sync has replaced my previous usage of the now-defunct Xmarks.
“Companies will regulate themselves” is libertarian orthodoxy, and suggesting otherwise is ahistorical and silly. (But then again so is libertarianism.)
Google never said they were blocking ad-blockers. It was the hyperbole Firefox crowd who used some post by Raymond Hill from the creator of uBlock Origin as a reason to start another "Switch to Firefox" campaign.
However, Hill admitted that adblockers aren't going away and it is just a proposed change in the WebRequest API to make things more akin to Safari to help adblockers operate in a standard in speedy way.
Mozilla on the other hand did expose a bunch of users to ads and malicious sites recently though when they didn't renew a certificate and didn't push out a fix for over 24 hours in which all addons were disabled in their browser and the configurations were lost as well.
I didn't "admit" anything -- I never made the statement "ad blockers are going away" in the first place. If you want to argue I did, please provide a specific source supporting this.
> Ad blocker uBlock Origin “can no longer exist” if a proposed change to Chrome goes through.
First, I never ever referred to uBlock Origin as an "ad blocker", so the article is wrong there. Second, I specifically point out that uBlock Origin can no longer exist, not that "ad blockers" can no longer exist.
