Evidently whenever money and safety are opposed, money wins every time.
Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.
Why do we need to throw AI at everything? It's a huge waste of resources for a problem that is/was easily solved by uBlock Lite (and other alternatives).
Currently, yes. But Google (et. al) are actively pursuing minimising the ability - uBlock Lite being example numero uno.
The "Mag 7", as they're referred to, are dominated by companies that are either advertising companies, or have services that are infested with advertising.
AI might be the last hope for blocking advertising in the future. And potentially only generated by local LLMs because OpenAI and Anthropic are already pwned by members of the aforementioned Mag 7, so ad blocking could well be a verboten path of questioning.
Yes, it's a huge waste of resources - but blocking advertising could be one of the least wasteful use cases if we maintain this dark timeline.
Your bank, school, doctor, and government would all still have websites. Companies would still sell things online. Video calls and chat systems would be there. All the websites run by donation or self-funding would be unchanged. Without ads, the worst parts of the internet might stop existing though.
> It's not just Google, the Internet stops existing.
Uh? No?
The internet existed before being overrun by corporate presence. It still does.
Advertising pays a lot, but take the ad money away and let it scale accordingly.
It's like free software. When it exists you can use it. When it doesn't exist you can't demand anyone to make it exist. And yet we still have free software. Not as much any more though as a lot of it changed to open source.
Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.