[cqz]

Making their tracking data useless is kind of the point of the extension. Obviously it's well within Google's interests to stop people using it. I guess if you're privacy minded it's probably best not to use a browser made by a giant ad company.

[andybak]

I'm not sure how I'd feel if something like this became widespread and I was paying Google for clicks.

Well. I guess that's the point. But then surely it's fairly understandable for Google to try and stop them - at least on their own turf?

Google doesn't fund Chrome out of a sense of altruism - they want to have control over those aspects of the web-browsing ecosystem that potentially threaten their bottom line.

And here is that strategy behaving exactly as it should. You want the stuff Google has paid to build? You probably have to accept that "I want to automatically hide and click ads" falls under the banner of "maybe you should use a different browser then".

[kuschku]

> they want to have control over those aspects of the web-browsing ecosystem that potentially threaten their bottom line.

That’s exactly what they can’t do, and where antitrust laws come in.

Google has to run Chrome out of altruism, or not at all.