Plausible Deniability and Gaslighting in Fighting Ad Blockers

Google is planning changes in Chrome impacting ad blocker extensions and people are wondering whether those changes are motivated by self-interest or whether there are plausible benign explanations. The change to by itself would completely break ad blockers, privacy-focused extensions and so on, so Google is adding a new API, called . In context of the proposed extension changes, the most benign assumption I can come up with is that of distant indifference by Google towards ad blockers: they do not see the value in them, but they are aware that lots of users like them, so some minimal efforts are made to let them exist in some form.

Source: secarch.dev