Google wants to disable Ad Blocking in Chrome, because it’s a business risk for them

This is interesting. Back to Firefox? Or will Google turn around? They have got a lot of shitstorms back, in advance – since this is not fully decided yet. But it shows a lot of the “Don’t be evil” attitude. Even Google is a business oriented enterprise, and thus wants to make money. What a surprise. I wonder what the security people say and think. A large part of successful attacks today utilize ads and ad-lookalikes…

Chrome to limit full ad blocking extensions to enterprise users – 9to5Google

The lead developer of uBlock Origin, Raymond Hill, has commented on the situation, both to The Register and on uBlock Origin’s GitHub, pointing out that allowing ad blockers goes completely against Google’s business model.

‘Google’s primary business is incompatible with unimpeded content blocking. Now that Google Chrome product has achieve high market share, the content blocking concerns as stated in its 10K filing are being tackled.’

Google themselves have even admitted as such in a recent SEC Form 10-K filing by Alphabet, uncovered by Hill, in which ad blocking extensions are labeled as a “risk factor” to Google’s revenues.

‘New and existing technologies could affect our ability to customize ads and/or could block ads online, which would harm our business.’

The article also links to the interesting FCC risk assessment paper Google has to file. A nice read.