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Thats just mutually assured destruction - all IE/edge browsers would start blocking all google ads, firefox would block everyone, chrome would black all not google ads, and half the internet economy collapses


Microsoft doesn't have any serious advertising business. Firefox has none. So how exactly could it be mutually assured destruction?

More likely is an antitrust lawsuit.


My guess is any such collapse (if it could even happen, sans some pretty serious privacy-protecting regulation) would be very temporary. Free ad- and spying-supported services make all sorts of other business models very difficult or untenable (see, for example, private, local voice recognition—why offer that product when you'll surely fail because the spytastic Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft offerings are free?) and even weaken the motivation for community-driven and Free, open source competition. Those other things would fill the void left by the death (please oh please) of the spy/ad economy. Hell, traditional non-spying ads might even make a comeback.


Or better ad creators start behaving nicely. Remember zombie cookies in flash, or shitty animations that chew 100% battery, or IE toolbar spam, or ActiveX ad scripts that could read local files.

Blocking ads is not an easy job. Especially with things like native ads. Blocking shitty ads should be easier though.




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