Indeed, almost the entire ad-blocking market is controlled by the company behind Adblock Plus (eyeo GmbH), who has contracts with Google. It appears they also own AdBlock, and uBlock (not confused with uBO), so during the last years they basically tried to capture the entire market. The fact that Eyeo has >150 employees tells us something about the amount of money to be made from ad blocking. Although they have only published the numbers from 2016, it seems they are quickly approaching around €50 million yearly revenue, with almost 50% of pure profit. For Google this Acceptable Ads Program may be more than a 100 million dollar business.
The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google's own software to eliminate their core business model.
Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved.
Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.
Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users.
In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads.
ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users.
Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don't see the stuff they recommend to you.
The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user.
ABP/Eyeo is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.
The only real nuisance is uBO and the future possibility that someone comes along and uses Google's own software to eliminate their core business model.
Basically in this entire environment if an extension does not take part in extracting money out of people, it becomes a problem for most parties involved.
Someone at Google in the higher ups probably realized at one point that giving the user so much freedom and control could theoretically backfire enourmously.
Google indirectly controls ABP, but they want the ABP model to apply to all blockers, so that they both get money from non-blocking users as well as from blocking-users.
In the perfect world of Google content-blocking does not exist beyond mere visual ad-blocking of the most annoying ads.
ABP already allows cookies and network connections, so google still knows everything about those users.
Personally I use a combination of pi-hole, third-party cookie blocking and uBO, which takes care of basically all cross-site tracking. But when I recently had a look at another system of someone who uses ABP I noticed that the blocking really is only visual, theres still a profile that is being sold to data brokers, you just don't see the stuff they recommend to you.
The default settings of ABP are also extremely anti-user.
ABP/Eyeo is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
uBO users on the other hand are basically invisible to the survaillance capitalists.