111–120 of 504 posts
My cynical side can't help but think they will do this first, then later disable uBlock / other ad blockers (or the APIs they rely on) and claim that "we can do it better." I can't imagine that this isn't a violation of some kind of law (RICO, antitrust, or otherwise), but I don't imagine this would ever be prosecuted.
If you go to a restaurant and order a salad, you're not obligated to eat the olives, and you have the right to take them off your plate. Likewise, you have the right to bring an intermediary who looks at your salad and hides all the olives for you. If your intermediary happens to work for Green Olive Co. and he hides the black olives but not the green ones, you have the right to switch to another intermediary. Or get…
My first instinct is that this feature will involve google contributor, where users can block ads and still send revenue to sites they frequent. https://contributor.google.com/ I went to check on the status of that program and got this message: We’re launching a new and improved Contributor in early 2017!
My cynical side can't help but think they will do this first, then later disable uBlock / other ad blockers (or the APIs they rely on) and claim that "we can do it better." I can't imagine that this isn't a violation of some kind of law (RICO, antitrust, or otherwise), but I don't imagine this would ever be prosecuted.
My cynical side can't help but think that accusing Google of RICO violations is pretty silly if you don't have reason to believe that they will commit one of the specific set of crimes (which are illegal in their own right) you need to to even have a snowball's chance in hell of a RICO charge/civil suit. I'm confident that Google wouldn't need to murder or assault anyone, or commit wire fraud, or steal cars, or forge…
I wonder how this will impact their competitors (Facebook?). I assume these features will be opt-in instead of enabled-by-default. it could be pretty catastrophic if it is enabled by default. For an optin feature, it is not much different from today, where a user can install adblocker extension. Very few consumers opt to do so. A while ago, Apple added ad blocking features to iOS 9, however users had to explicitly en…
They wouldn't be impacted by this at all, in my opinion who this hurts most is publishers.
"In one possible application Google is considering, it may choose to block all advertising that appears on sites with offending ads, instead of the individual offending ads themselves. In other words, site owners may be required to ensure all of their ads meet the standards, or could see all advertising across their sites blocked in Chrome." I like this approach. It punishes site owners for running malicious or badly…
It may be laudable to try and lead an "industry-wide" effort to clean up ads but it stinks of hypocrisy when Google repeatedly allows all shades of garbage to permeate its' own Adsense network. We talked about this only a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094083
If chrome team who thinks about the world and ads team who thinks about $$$ are total separate entities who don't influence each other for special interests then I applaud the effort.
I hope this is done in the open in chromium source code. Basically the current way extensions work is by injecting massive amounts of CSS and js in the page. This makes a lot of optimizations in chrome useless for fast page renders. Doing an optimized ad block engine would make chrome feel faster
If you go to a restaurant and order a salad, you're not obligated to eat the olives, and you have the right to take them off your plate. Likewise, you have the right to bring an intermediary who looks at your salad and hides all the olives for you. If your intermediary happens to work for Green Olive Co. and he hides the black olives but not the green ones, you have the right to switch to another intermediary. Or get…
Sure, if you're blocking ads on a platform where you paid a subscription I'd agree with you.
"In one possible application Google is considering, it may choose to block all advertising that appears on sites with offending ads, instead of the individual offending ads themselves. In other words, site owners may be required to ensure all of their ads meet the standards, or could see all advertising across their sites blocked in Chrome." I like this approach. It punishes site owners for running malicious or badly…
An AdSense robot flagged us two times for violating policies regarding "calling attention" to advertising because of this "sticky" ad unit. I appealed, didn't work, and had to roll back AdSense lest our company get banned.
In a later conversation, a Google rep reached out to wonder why we weren't showing Google ads. I explained the policy violations and that we were more interested in our floating ad unit then AdSense. A few emails later and poof! I was assured there would be no more policy violations issued over this ad unit, and we were able to roll back onto AdSense inventory.
Would Google partners get blocked at the same rates as non-Google partners? Perhaps not.
With such seemingly capricious decisions by Google, and so little customer service resources outside of robot policy automation and appeals, I worry about the company playing this role.