[culi]

> Unfortunately, ad-blockers go against a business model that is central to Google. Despite the changes possibly being in good faith

I don't think you've kept up with the way Google has treated certain extensions if you're still considering the possibility that it's in good faith

Anybody remember AdNauseam (still available on Firefox)? It's an adblock that doesn't just block ads but in the background silently clicks ads to create noise and make you harder to track. Clearly against Google's business model

It wasn't enough for Google to find some rules in their policy to exclude it from their app store. They literally labelled it as malware (completely unfounded)

Google's been pretty ruthless about this stuff

[encryptluks2]

I agree that they've made questionable decisions, but if an extension is clicking on ads in the background wouldn't that be considered a violation of their ToS for related products that they control.. essentially, a way to game ad revenue? If someone released an extension to silently DDoS ad organizations in the background, even if the user was aware of the purpose, then I'd imagine it would still be against their ToS. Extensions like this can still be installed from a packed extension. I don't think Apple would do anything different if there was an app in their app store that did things in the backgrounds to violate their policies.

[sanxiyn]

As far as I know, AdNauseam is not against relevant Google ToS and no ToS term was ever cited.

[encryptluks2]

If it does as you say then at least in the United States it may actually be considered a form of fraud. By clicking an ad that you've hidden, you're essentially telling the advertiser to pay for something you didn't even see.

[culi]

regardless, that's not the point. The point is they didn't simply take it down. They actively spread lies about the project

[encryptluks2]

I wasn't able to find anywhere that they spread lies about the project. Are you able to share where Google stated that?

[culi]

> a violation of their ToS for related products that they control.

I don't actually think so, but that's not my point. If it was against their ToS, fine. Take it down

But they didn't just do that. They made baseless accusations of malware against this (open-source) project in order to spread misinformation and make people even more hesitant to use it. That's not just an abuse of their platform but an abuse that goes outside their platform

[encryptluks2]

Can you send me a link where they did that?

[culi]

Sure. It used to be on the Chrome Extensions page. It wouldn't let you download the extension and had a big "malware" flag on it. I don't think that's up still but there's articles written about it:

https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_fr...

[encryptluks2]

Yeah, I saw that one but other stories around the same time say something different. Were you able to find an arhive.org page that actually shows the extension listed as malware?

[culi]

I don't even know what URL I'd have to put in archive.org to find it, but I'm telling you I saw it myself when it first happened. I had it installed and Google uninstalled it for me and told me it was malware

What do "other stories" say about it? I'm seeing multiple articles confirming the same thing. Not sure why you find this so hard to believe...