> which is like calling up a casino for gambling addiction

The analogy holds but I just want to point out that this is very common and all serious casino and poker businesses have staff working with terminating accounts for people requesting to be banned due to addiction. The same people are going over chat logs that get flagged due to mentioning of certain words like "addiction" and ban them even if they haven't requested it. If you tell a support agent that you're addicted you will be banned in an instant.

As a counterpoint, there's a This American Life story about how Harrah's/Caesar's casino hosts specifically marketed to people who clearly had gambling addictions:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/466/...

Is that because addiction is a recognized medical disability and thus the people would have a claim against the casino in case of losses? Or more for PR?

I can only speak for certain jurisdictions but apart from the reasons you mention it was a requirement from the Gambling Commission where I worked. In reality the casino found its ways to circumvent this for the whales though but that's a different topic.

And this exactly is my point. Google's main business is selling ads, why would it start blocking ads in it's flagship browser?

it's going to start banning all ads except google ads.

It's never that direct.

They would probably publish some policy what is an acceptable ad and what isn't, and let the others self-regulate. For them, the ability to finger-point ("it's only your fault that you are not compliant with the blocking policy") is very important.

Consider that there are plenty of ad blockers but no "unreasonable-ad blockers" (according to some policy). There's at least a niche here to be filled for people who only want some ads (the worst ones) to be blocked.

Compromise solutions do tend to be more popular with people in a position to benefit if a compromise can be reached.

> Consider that there are plenty of ad blockers but no "unreasonable-ad blockers" (according to some policy).

There are - such as https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads . This puts ad blockers in the ironic position of earning money via ad revenue...

Oh that's right. I guess we'll see which policies become popular.

Who want ads to be blocked but are ok to be tracked.

I don't really care and don't see why should I. Hysteria over tracking / "loss of privacy" seems overblown to me.

> which is like calling up a casino for gambling addiction

A random aside - the gambling addiction helpline in the US includes an item in the IVR for making reservations at a casino (I believe it's the first item mentioned), or at least it did several years ago.

Try ungoogled chromium

I thought chromium was ungoogled. Chrome is googled chromium.

There's a decent sized market of people who don't believe that the Chromium open-source project isn't full of nefarious hidden google spy codes.