Security News > 2020 > December > Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Google makes its money from being the world's middle man for online advertising.

The more ambitious can install software like PiHole, which sits on your home network and does the same for all traffic, if you're comfortable with setting up servers and tinkering with DNS. The more technical you are, the more options you get - although why no mainstream home router makers have put ad and track filtering in their products is slightly mystifying.

Ad money goes into ad networks, into products designed to serve more ads and monetise your sweet bippy ever more efficiently.

Good advertising - the sort targeted at readerships by the reader's own actions - would prosper because the stuff that reaches only the right people is worth far more than the stuff that gets spaffed across all our screens.

Bad advertising - the stuff that makes our lives hell and the ad-tech monsters rich - would suffer, but the crazification factor, that 35 per cent of people who seem certifiably and irretrievably permanent strangers to logic, would probably keep it going enough so the rest of us still enjoy some free stuff.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/12/14/google_manifest_plugin_opinion/