[downandout]

I was always curious as to how they made money. He used to ask for donations. Asking for money in exchange for not taking actions that will harm another person's business (i.e. blocking their ads) seeing seems awfully close to extortion. Yelp was sued for extortion, and their conduct was far less egregious than this. Google probably couldn't handle the PR hit after the NSA stuff, but I'll bet their first inclination was to sue rather than write a check.

[jmharvey]

Adblock and Adblock Plus are different.

[downandout]

I changed it to "they". It doesn't change the fact that someone managed to extort money from Google.