Adblock Plus negotiates with Google about adblocking restrictions in Chrome
The German company Eyeo that develops Adblock Plus is in negotiations with Google about the proposed restrictions on adblocking that Google wants to implement on its Chrome browser. Eyeo says he is preparing ‘for the worst scenario’.
Eyeo tells Golem that it is trying to reach an agreement with Google but that there will be no preferential treatment. “The planned changes affect us like all other ad blockers,” said Laura Dornheim, spokeswoman for Eyeo. The German company relies on the Acceptable Ads program for its revenue. Advertising companies pay Eyeo to be whitelisted by Adblock Plus, provided their ads meet Eyeo’s requirements. They must guarantee that the advertisements are ‘acceptable’. Google, among others, pays the German company for this.
The negotiations follow the release of Chrome Extension Manifest V3 in October last year. In it, Google announced its intention to block access to the webRequest api for Chrome extensions and replace it with the declarativeNetRequest api. Many ad blockers use the webRequest API, but with the replacement, the browser determines what to block based on a maximum of 30,000 calls.
According to uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill, the changes cause his extension to be bound to a maximum of 30,000 adblocking filters. “Even without dynamic filters and per-site switches, uBlock Origin already maintains more than 90,000 filters,” he writes on GitHub. According to him, the EasyList list alone already contains 42,000 filters, making it unenforceable with the declarativeNetRequest API.
According to Hill, the changes are mainly aimed at properties of ad blockers such as uBlock Origin and uMatrix. He also writes that Google introduced the webRequest API to gain market share over Firefox, when Adblock Plus, Ghostery, Disconnect, and NoScript were that browser’s most popular extensions. Mozilla enabled Tracking Protection by default for its Firefox browser this week.
Google responded in February to concerns from uBlock, Ablock Plus, Malwarebytes, AdGuard and Ghostery with promises that the limit of 30,000 calls would be increased, although it is not known by how much. Paying enterprise users will also have the option of using the webRequest API for adblocking. The Chrome team defends the modification by stating that it provides more security and potentially makes ad blockers faster.