<story><title>Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users</title><url>https://9to5google.com/2019/05/29/chrome-ad-blocking-enterprise-manifest-v3/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ljm</author><text>This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium&amp;#x2F;Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the embedded framework...&lt;p&gt;We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7&amp;#x2F;8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome.&lt;p&gt;The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in the browser space, not helped by the underlying HTML&amp;#x2F;JS spec becoming exponentially more convoluted to the point where building your own renderer is nigh impossible.&lt;p&gt;And since everyone is standardising on a Google, their decisions on ad blocking and supporting APIs are automatically going to flow down into every dependent product.&lt;p&gt;It’s frustrating that MS copped out and went Chromium. Like we never learned this lesson the first time.&lt;p&gt;We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least. These need to be protected if we don’t want Google and the ad network to totally control the browsing experience.&lt;p&gt;Although, controversially, we as a web dev collective have learned nothing if we continue to only develop for a single browser. Not for the web itself, but for one particular rendering engine. “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept.</text></item><item><author>user17843</author><text>Indeed, almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. The fact that Eyeo has &amp;gt;150 employees tells us something about the amount of money to be made from ad blocking. Although they have only published the numbers from 2016, it seems they are quickly approaching around €50 million yearly revenue, with almost 50% of pure profit. For Google this Acceptable Ads Program may be more than a 100 million dollar business.&lt;p&gt;The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google&amp;#x27;s own software to eliminate their core business model.&lt;p&gt;Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved.&lt;p&gt;Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.&lt;p&gt;Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users.&lt;p&gt;In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads.&lt;p&gt;ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users.&lt;p&gt;Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don&amp;#x27;t see the stuff they recommend to you.&lt;p&gt;The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user.&lt;p&gt;ABP&amp;#x2F;Eyeo is a wolf in sheep&amp;#x27;s clothing.&lt;p&gt;uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.</text></item><item><author>phiresky</author><text>From the author of uBlock on this:&lt;p&gt;What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to &amp;quot;sell&amp;quot; the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do.&lt;p&gt;This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3:&lt;p&gt;In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.&lt;p&gt;The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google&amp;#x27;s primary business.&lt;p&gt;The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;uBlockOrigin&amp;#x2F;uBlock-issues&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;338#issuecomment-496009417&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;uBlockOrigin&amp;#x2F;uBlock-issues&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;338#iss...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdponx</author><text>Why do people act like this is all some great big accident, the result of eternal human fallibility?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not. This was planned. It was the objective all along. Why else do you think Google Maps is free? Gmail? Why did they drive around 1,000s of cities with cameras on a car taking photos for Street View? Was it really just to become the world&amp;#x27;s most comprehensive search engine? Hell no, it was to get people into the ecosystem and to stay there, and be content with doing so. Just think how much money and manpower went into each of those free products we take for granted, not the least of which includes the Google search engine; now think about how they make so much money off your attention that they can offer it &lt;i&gt;free of charge&lt;/i&gt;, because sucking you into the ecosystem is just that profitable.&lt;p&gt;Chrome is the same thing. Why would a for-profit company develop a web browser more or less unprompted and give it away for free? To draw people into the system and get them comfortable with staying there. Now that they have monopoly power, they can start tightening their grip with the good old embrace, extend, extinguish.&lt;p&gt;Google isn&amp;#x27;t unique in this. Similar arguments could be made about Facebook.&lt;p&gt;To be sure, Google and Facebook have produced tremendous advances in science and technology. But let&amp;#x27;s not forget what funded them, or why they were developed in the first place. Lest we forget why these things play out the way they do.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users</title><url>https://9to5google.com/2019/05/29/chrome-ad-blocking-enterprise-manifest-v3/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ljm</author><text>This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium&amp;#x2F;Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the embedded framework...&lt;p&gt;We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7&amp;#x2F;8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome.&lt;p&gt;The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in the browser space, not helped by the underlying HTML&amp;#x2F;JS spec becoming exponentially more convoluted to the point where building your own renderer is nigh impossible.&lt;p&gt;And since everyone is standardising on a Google, their decisions on ad blocking and supporting APIs are automatically going to flow down into every dependent product.&lt;p&gt;It’s frustrating that MS copped out and went Chromium. Like we never learned this lesson the first time.&lt;p&gt;We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least. These need to be protected if we don’t want Google and the ad network to totally control the browsing experience.&lt;p&gt;Although, controversially, we as a web dev collective have learned nothing if we continue to only develop for a single browser. Not for the web itself, but for one particular rendering engine. “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept.</text></item><item><author>user17843</author><text>Indeed, almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. The fact that Eyeo has &amp;gt;150 employees tells us something about the amount of money to be made from ad blocking. Although they have only published the numbers from 2016, it seems they are quickly approaching around €50 million yearly revenue, with almost 50% of pure profit. For Google this Acceptable Ads Program may be more than a 100 million dollar business.&lt;p&gt;The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google&amp;#x27;s own software to eliminate their core business model.&lt;p&gt;Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved.&lt;p&gt;Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.&lt;p&gt;Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users.&lt;p&gt;In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads.&lt;p&gt;ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users.&lt;p&gt;Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don&amp;#x27;t see the stuff they recommend to you.&lt;p&gt;The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user.&lt;p&gt;ABP&amp;#x2F;Eyeo is a wolf in sheep&amp;#x27;s clothing.&lt;p&gt;uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.</text></item><item><author>phiresky</author><text>From the author of uBlock on this:&lt;p&gt;What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to &amp;quot;sell&amp;quot; the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do.&lt;p&gt;This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3:&lt;p&gt;In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.&lt;p&gt;The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google&amp;#x27;s primary business.&lt;p&gt;The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;uBlockOrigin&amp;#x2F;uBlock-issues&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;338#issuecomment-496009417&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;uBlockOrigin&amp;#x2F;uBlock-issues&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;338#iss...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m-p-3</author><text>I ditched Chrome and came back to Firefox, next step is to donate to Mozilla.</text></comment>