No adblocker detected

The context is that the courts have found Google holds two illegal monopolies within the online adtech market [1], the remedy for which has yet to be determined. Furthermore the DoJ has sued Meta for holding one as well and that trial is now underway. [2]

I don't know about you, but to me, if the counterparty breaches a contract, that contract is now null and void. Same goes for a social contract, and if someone tries to kill me or rob me, whatever social contract we may have had, is now null and void.

Fortunately Google and Meta aren't actually taking hits out on anyone as far as I know, but the fact remains that the market makers for these online ads, are either outright convicted criminals, or being sued by the government for such. I don't see that we have any social contract to respect or allow any of this. It is right, just and moral to oppose the very existence of online advertising in my opinion, until the illegal abuses are corrected.

If the court has resolved that Google's breaking the law, how about we get an injunction ordering them to halt their ad tech business until the remedies are implemented. Why are we going so easy on them?

You don't owe crooks anything, neither do I.

This isn't about being cheap or breaking a fair deal. It's about asking that law and order be restored within American business and society. What's the point of this society, what moral justification does it have to exist as it is, if it keeps on breaking its own laws to protect the most powerful?

Now it's unfortunate that publishers (websites) get caught in the crossfire of this, they might not agree with me when I say you should oppose all online ads full stop until the problem is corrected, but they are getting screwed by Google and Meta and they would be more than happy to see justice done.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/18/court-ruling-agains... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_v._Meta

Mega corporations that have been sucking up personal data for a couple decades now are not people. There is no social contract with them. They just sell your data.

If you know what they are doing, know how to block it, and refuse to, you are complicit in making the world a worse place. Corporations are not people that should be treated with the respect you are talking about.

If ads weren't profitable, you wouldn't find no results for your search about which kitchen knife to buy, you would would find better, less weaponised, more relevant results. If you don't block ads then you are directly contributing to a world with more ads and less content.

If the ad was delivered without cookies and without tracking, as just a stationary gif, I'd be more okay with it.

But without tracking, back in 2008/9 ish before the real estate crash, the Simpsons made a reference to the dancing cowboys ad for selling mortgages. These were the adjustable rate mortgages that went sky high shortly after closing on the house.

https://trailers.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/1f73a011-858b-418b-940...

* Autoplay videos that preemptively take my bandwidth.

* Autoplay audio that takes over my speakers unexpectedly and interrupts other things.

* Forms of pop-ups that clutter or disrupt my tab/window control.

* Being spied-on by a system that tries to aggregate and track all of my browsing habits.

* A mostly unaccountable vector for malware and phishing sites.

* Just a genuinely horrible experience whenever a page is one part content to three parts blinking blooping ever shifting ads that would make Idiocracy blush.

They try to pretend customer resistance is just over the most innocent and uncontroversial display of ads, but it's not true, and it hasn't been for decades.

The actual freeloaders are the ISPs, because they don't share the profits with the networks they provide access to.

In a better world, Browsers would all be peer to peer, and share their caches end-to-end, with verifiable content hashes, so that websites don't need to provide the majority of bandwidth.

But here we are, Google not giving a fuck because they actually like being a monopoly that does not need to create a healthy ecosystem because everyone involved is paying them anyways. With resources, and with money. Who would have thought?

Their behavior is abusive, and our behavior is self defense.

Let the ads networks do the hard work of 1) cleaning up their act, and 2) rebuilding trust before you worry about your end of the social contract.

[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...

I have been thinking about some kind of render proxy that runs all the JS for you somewhere else in a sandbox and sends you the screenshot or rendered HTML instead. Or maybe we could leverage an LLM to turn the Bloated JS garbage into the actual information you are looking for.

    setTimeout(() => {

        // fuck up all future javascripts

        setTimeout = setInterval = requestAnimationFrame = () => {};
        Element.prototype.appendChild = () => { throw new Error("Blocked"); };
        document.addEventListener = () => {};
        window.addEventListener = () => {};
        Object.defineProperty(document, "readyState", { get: () => { throw new Error("No JS"); } });
        document.write = () => {};

        // fuck up canvas
        if(window.HTMLCanvasElement) HTMLCanvasElement.prototype.getContext=()=>null; 

        // fuck up webgl
        if(window.WebGLRenderingContext) window.WebGLRenderingContext.prototype.getParameter=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}};

        // fuck up webgl2
        if(window.WebGL2RenderingContext) window.WebGL2RenderingContext.prototype.getParameter=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}};

        // fuck up websockets
        window.WebSocket=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}}; window.EventSource=function(){e=>{throw new Error("Blocked")}};

        // fuck up popups
        window.open=()=>null;

        // ...

    }, 500);

Often. It might have something to do with my adblock settings though...

> Most sites are completely unusable without their stylesheets

Those sites are generally completely trash anyway.

I wonder if they actually watch the ads on purpose, even in private or if they turn their adblocker off just for the video, as not to give ideas to their viewers and potentially losing ad revenue.

Instead of adblockers, I remember sites that are user hostile one way or another and just avoid those sites. Those sites that are heavy on ads usually aren't worth my time anyway, so the presence of those auto-playing videos in every corner ends up being a signal for me to go somewhere else.