Ah, yes, a classic: "All criticism of success and power stems from envy."

Impervious to pushback (since that would only prove you'd pushed the hot button of painful truth) and always plausible-sounding, this is truly a brilliant weapon for snuffing out legitimate complaints and healthy conversation.

> Unless we want to start paying for google searches

I, and many others, would jump at the chance to pay for an internet without advertising and dark advertising tactics. I happily pay $10/month for youtube red, just to avoid the ad videos, and that's cheap at the price.

That's your personal opinion, and that's ok. However, others may and do have a different opinion.

Now I use youtube-dl and avoid supporting google in every way I can. They seem to break every principle and promise made to a calculated degree so someone can always point at someone else doing it worse. The real result is they are eroding the status quo. Privacy, content rights, fair search, unburdened UX, have all taken big hits over the last decade and it’s all by choice. Google didn’t accidentally end up here.

I find Microsoft’s behavior annoying and desperate but it’s also not so different from Google. We just consider the contexts different since Google “owns” its website it can do what it wants even if it’s on in a browser on my machine vs the windows shell.

This used to exist: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

Not many people were interested, so it got scaled back to an opt in model.

So it's not that many others willing to pay for this.

https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9012903

https://developers.google.com/third-party-ads/adx-vendors

Edit: And about it being "evil" or "bad", let's just say that it is "unnecessary" (from a user viewpoint). You can still make money from ads without hovering up user data. But then you don't make money from users not clicking on the ad, and it is slower to build up an effective profile. Relevant ads are better than irrelevant ads, but nothing beats no ads at all. The best future ads will not look like ads at all (but will be hidden inside reviews and editorials).

If I followed you around with a paper advertisement, wrote down where you frequent and who you talk to in my notebook, and left a copy of the advertisement everywhere you went, you would call the police. Online advertising does just that and much more and they do it with impunity.

In a sense this complaint and PR is such a form of obfuscated advertising. The money and technological skills is in the hands of the advertisers, not the users, so this will be an unfair fight (advertisers will be better at hiding ads, than users are able to detect them).

Besides, a lot of ad supported sites are hideous, and the sooner they can’t support themselves and stop cluttering the net, the better. HN will still be here, most of the sites with articles submitted here will be too. The best content out there is free, crowdfunded, or paywalled, while the worst of clickbait is ad supported. Besides, it’s so much more relaxing to avoid ads, I don’t have to waste thinking about how they’re trying to manipulate me into buying tat, make me feel inadequate unless I buy their products, etc. When you stop seeing ads online, on tv, and then you watch some cable or unfiltered internet... it’s horrible. Marketing is a grim, tiring, assault on the senses aimed at the absolute lowest common denominator, and I’m glad to be rid of it and hopefully eventually, the businesses which make it.

This industry that abused everyone it could until a technical means to fight back was developed, doesn’t deserve any more chances. This whole, “oh we’re the good parasites, we’ve figured out that it’s bad to kill the host, we just want a slice out of you,” shtick deserves to go over like a lead balloon.

> I’m sorry but that isn’t evil or bad.

It isn't evil, but it can be bad, and very much so.

Google doing the filtering and targeting follows after Google has profiled and labeled you, an action you generally would have no recourse against. This is similar to the No Fly List: you might have no idea how you got on there, but once you're on it, that sticks.

With Google's reach being what it is, the consequences after having been automatically labeled can be a frightening thought. You don't even have to have a Google account to feel the effects, shadow profiling can lead to the same result.

One of the positive things of the GDPR is that it recognized this problem in Article 22, and provisioned that a data subject has a right to contest decisions based on automatic profiling.

...that said, I installed Brave this weekend and am posting this comment from it, and I gotta say that it's really nice viewing a web without ads. I'd forgotten how pleasant browsing the web can be when you're not downloading the 100 or so ads & trackers on a typical news article and playing cat-and-mouse with their anti-AdBlock code. So from my selfish user's POV, this is a win.

It is far more practical to download an already adblock-included brower than having to mess with extensions on mobile.

I installed it soon after switching to Android from iOS and I have no complaints, it is fast and it just works.

You don't need to "opt in to receiving ads sold by Brave Software in place of the blocked ads" for that.

https://www.bromite.org/fdroid

The earlier concern about data sharing and privacy by advertising companies is not an identical problem to users being served ads.

That's nice, but as a user I have no interest in rescuing the ad industry. The sooner it dies, the better.

I do not like targeted advertising one bit. It makes the ads boring, repetitive, and potentially embarrassing. I want to see ads relative to whatever content I am consuming. If that content is so general that it can't be targeted, then so be it. All other advertising works this way, and it has been doing just fine. Not to mention 3rd party scripts running, which only happens because the advertisers and content producers do not trust each other, so they sacrifice the security of their users.

We never had a choice of an alternative model. The monopolies involved demand privacy for their services.

You can serve ads without targeting or target content instead of audience: broadcasters have had to do this for a long time and it can be very profitable.

It is evil and bad to profile people and worse to force it on them by abuse of market position. Audience targeted ads are a form of discrimination.

Some of the data Google harvests has the potential to get people killed. For instance, when Google are gathering data about who uses membership areas of political sites, frequent sites for certain sexualities, using regulator pages to blow the whistle, etc. Google doesn't have a right to collect this data. It's evil.

Not necessarily. There is always the model of selling ads without such obnoxious tracking. If Google would base their targeting only on the phrase typed into the search bar, then I'd be okay with that. But them stalking me everywhere I go around the web is not cool.