I work in advertising, and have been for over 15 years. Two points to make:
a) Advertising is (and always has been), fundamentally, the application of data science to drive return-on-investment decisions. Any company that can do data science and understands RoI will eventually converge to be an advertising company. Calls for Google to "find a product to sell instead of being an advertising company" are calls for Google to throw away their data science expertise. Not gonna happen.
b) Breaking adblockers is a technically solved problem; just serve web pages as server-rendered blobs. (Think 'flash pages' of yore.) We're not doing it yet because the proportion of adblock users is still too small to make this profitable.
But if this proportion changes in the future, so will the web. So calls for more adblocking are just calls for a vastly more closed and proprietary web than today.
a) Advertising is (and always has been), fundamentally, the application of data science to drive return-on-investment decisions. Any company that can do data science and understands RoI will eventually converge to be an advertising company. Calls for Google to "find a product to sell instead of being an advertising company" are calls for Google to throw away their data science expertise. Not gonna happen.
b) Breaking adblockers is a technically solved problem; just serve web pages as server-rendered blobs. (Think 'flash pages' of yore.) We're not doing it yet because the proportion of adblock users is still too small to make this profitable.
But if this proportion changes in the future, so will the web. So calls for more adblocking are just calls for a vastly more closed and proprietary web than today.
That is probably not what you really want.