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Google and its parent company, Alphabet, which dominates the market for online ads and made an estimated $79 billion from them in 2016, has taken a largely hands-off approach to the potentially existential threat of ad blockers. And, according to recent reports, it now plans to include “ad-filtering” software pre-installed in Chrome—an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach to making the web less annoying.
But AdNauseum isn’t like the other ad blockers: It takes a more activist approach. Rather than just concealing them, the app sends noise into the system by automatically clicking on ads in the background, muddling efforts by advertisers and ad networks like Google’s to determine your preferences and your identity as you browse the web. [...]
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Instead, the team suspected a simpler motive behind Google’s decision: AdNauseum directly conflicts with the way that the company makes most of its money.
Google used the single-purpose policy to explain the banning
Google’s decision to ban AdNauseum was only the latest salvo in an ongoing war over online advertising. The industry and publishers have recently been fighting back against ad blockers, for instance, by requiring visitors to disable them if they want to view a page. In August, Facebook announced it was blocking anti-ad software across its platform. And while AdNauseum is the first desktop ad blocker Google has blocked, it has previously banned mobile apps like anti-tracking tool Disconnect and ad blocker AdBlock Fast from its Android Play Store, citing a rule that says one app can’t interfere with another.
The ad industry also knows that ads can be a nuisance, and it’s taking pre-emptive measures to make them more palatable—or, in Google’s case, to block the unpalatable ones. “We feel like there are a lot of challenges in advertising. There are a lot of wrong ways,” Darin Fisher, vice president of Chrome engineering, told CNet last year. But “if publishers and advertisers do ads the right way, it can be great for the users and for the ecosystem.”