Tag: advertising

Google Removes the Final Workaround for Full Ad Blocking in Chrome

Google is removing the last technical workaround that kept effective ad blockers alive in Chrome.

When Chrome 150 ships on June 30, the browser will delete a hidden setting called the ExtensionManifestV2Disabled flag, a switch that power users had been toggling to keep old-style extensions running after Google officially discontinued them.

Without it, uBlock Origin and every other extension built on the old Manifest V2 framework, the set of rules that governed how browser extensions worked for years, will stop functioning permanently. Chrome 151, expected in July, will strip the remaining MV2 flags entirely. No policy override and no hidden setting will bring them back.

The company that sells more advertising than any other on Earth now controls whether you can block those ads. And it just decided you can’t, at least not effectively.

What Google took away and why it took it

The technical change is the replacement of Chrome’s webRequest API with the declarativeNetRequest API.

Under the old system, extensions like uBlock Origin could watch your browser’s traffic as it happened, see an ad or tracker trying to load, and block it on the spot before it ever reached your screen.

Under the new system, extensions have to hand Google a pre-written list of things to block and Chrome decides whether to follow those instructions. The lists are capped at a fixed number of rules, and the extension can’t react to anything that isn’t already on the list.

uBlock Origin’s developer, Raymond Hill, has been clear that a Manifest V3 version cannot replicate the original’s full capabilities. A stripped-down version called uBlock Origin Lite exists for MV3, but it handles only a fraction of the filter lists, the community-maintained databases of known ads and trackers, that the original supported.

It also can’t perform cosmetic filtering, the process of hiding ad containers and promotional elements that remain on a page even after the ad itself is blocked. Without it, you get blank boxes where ads used to be, or sponsored content that looks native to the page. For more than 40 million Chrome users who relied on the original, the replacement is a downgrade by design.

Google engineer Devlin Cronin confirmed the timeline in a Chromium code review commit, a logged change to Chrome’s underlying source code that other developers can inspect, writing that “MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won’t be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we’ve actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.”

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Google Removes the Final Workaround for Full Ad Blocking in Chrome

Google is removing the last technical workaround that kept effective ad blockers alive in Chrome.

When Chrome 150 ships on June 30, the browser will delete a hidden setting called the ExtensionManifestV2Disabled flag, a switch that power users had been toggling to keep old-style extensions running after Google officially discontinued them.

Without it, uBlock Origin and every other extension built on the old Manifest V2 framework, the set of rules that governed how browser extensions worked for years, will stop functioning permanently. Chrome 151, expected in July, will strip the remaining MV2 flags entirely. No policy override and no hidden setting will bring them back.

The company that sells more advertising than any other on Earth now controls whether you can block those ads. And it just decided you can’t, at least not effectively.

What Google took away and why it took it

The technical change is the replacement of Chrome’s webRequest API with the declarativeNetRequest API.

Under the old system, extensions like uBlock Origin could watch your browser’s traffic as it happened, see an ad or tracker trying to load, and block it on the spot before it ever reached your screen.

Under the new system, extensions have to hand Google a pre-written list of things to block and Chrome decides whether to follow those instructions. The lists are capped at a fixed number of rules, and the extension can’t react to anything that isn’t already on the list.

uBlock Origin’s developer, Raymond Hill, has been clear that a Manifest V3 version cannot replicate the original’s full capabilities. A stripped-down version called uBlock Origin Lite exists for MV3, but it handles only a fraction of the filter lists, the community-maintained databases of known ads and trackers, that the original supported.

It also can’t perform cosmetic filtering, the process of hiding ad containers and promotional elements that remain on a page even after the ad itself is blocked. Without it, you get blank boxes where ads used to be, or sponsored content that looks native to the page. For more than 40 million Chrome users who relied on the original, the replacement is a downgrade by design.

Google engineer Devlin Cronin confirmed the timeline in a Chromium code review commit, a logged change to Chrome’s underlying source code that other developers can inspect, writing that “MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won’t be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we’ve actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.”

Cronin’s sign-off, that “other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire,” suggests the removal as a Chrome-specific choice. It isn’t. Google controls 65% of the desktop browser market and the MV2 code being stripped from Chromium, the open-source project that Chrome and many other browsers are built on top of, affects every browser that shares that foundation.

Google justifies the migration on security grounds and there’s some substance to the argument. The old webRequest API gives extensions deep access to every network request a browser makes, from images and page loads to login credentials, and the extension sees the data before Chrome acts on it.

A compromised or malicious extension with that access can read your passwords as you type them, redirect you to fake websites, or slip harmful code into pages you trust.

The declarativeNetRequest API is designed to prevent exactly this kind of attack by restricting extensions to predefined rule sets. Instead of giving an extension free rein over your browser traffic, Chrome only lets it submit a list of instructions in advance and handles the blocking itself. That narrows the ways a bad actor can exploit an extension because the extension never gets to touch your data directly.

But Google generated roughly $239.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, and content blockers directly reduce the number of ads users see. The MV3 restrictions don’t ban ad blocking entirely. They cap how many rules an extension can use and eliminate dynamic blocking, the ability to recognize and stop new ad formats and trackers as they appear in real time.

Ad companies constantly change how they deliver ads, rotating domains and disguising tracking scripts, and the old extensions could keep up with that. The new ones can only block what’s already on a list that was written before the ad loaded. The result is ad blockers that work against yesterday’s ads but struggle against the ones that adapt daily.

The same company that built Chrome and sells the ads it displays also wrote the rules governing what ad blockers can do inside it. Whether those incentives shaped MV3’s design is the most obvious question in the room, and Google has never given a convincing answer.

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Ads in New York must now label AI-generated ‘synthetic performers’

Any advertisements in New York that feature artificial intelligence-generated people in place of actors will now be violating state law if they don’t clearly label that they have used a “synthetic performer.”

The law, signed in December by Gov. Kathy Hochul, went into effect Tuesday. Her office is calling it a “first-in-the-nation law” that will boost transparency at a time when it says AI generated performers are popping up across all forms of media, including on social platforms and in digital advertising.

Synthetic performers are defined under state law as “digitally-created media that appear as a real person.” The law applies to ads in any medium.

“In New York, we are setting the rules of the road instead of letting AI run the show,” Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement. The “simple, honest disclosure” required by the law “protects consumers, respects our creative workforce and keeps New York at the forefront of responsible innovation,” she said.

Ads that don’t “conspicuously disclose” that they have used a synthetic performer will be subject to a penalty of $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for any further violations.

There are specific carve outs listed in the law to exempt ads for movies, television shows, streaming content, video games and other works that feature synthetic performers in the entire work. It also doesn’t apply to audio advertisements or ads where AI is solely used for language translation.

When the law was making its way through the state legislature last year, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and several other advertising organizations issued statements in strong opposition to the law.

The 4As, as the organization is better known, said in one blog post that it would hurt advertisers by “injecting compliance uncertainty into the advertising process, burdening brands (and their agencies) who advertise in New York and undermining creative and technological innovation.”

Other organizations, like the The New York State Broadcasters Association, said in public statements during the legislation’s journey to become law that they were relieved to see some of those carve outs that were created through amendments, but remained concerned about the broad definition of a synthetic performer. David Donovan, the president of the organization, said in a statement to The Associated Press on Tuesday that local broadcast stations are ready to comply with the law.

The biggest supporter of the law was SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that recently ratified a new contract with studios and streamers that they say provides further protections against synthetic performers.

The law is one of many proposed or enacted in several U.S. states with the goal of boosting job security for real humans or curbing the potential privacy and safety risks posed by AI. The existing state laws that have been passed include barring deepfakes in specific instances, limiting the collection of certain personal information and requiring more transparency from companies.

Just after Hochul signed the synthetic performers law in December, President Donald Trump signed an executive order pressuring states not to regulate AI. The move came out of fear that the patchwork of regulations across the states could impede AI companies’ growth and allow China to catch up to the U.S. in the AI race. Critics of the executive order argue it will allow tech companies to operate with little to no oversight.

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Amsterdam Bans Meat Ads as the War on Food Expands

Amsterdam’s decision to ban meat advertising should be viewed as part of a much broader trend that has been unfolding for years. Politicians insist this is about climate change. Every new restriction is presented as a noble sacrifice for to save the environment. Yet the target is almost always the same: farmers, ranchers, livestock producers, and regular people who are forced to sacrifice their health and livelihood for the globalist agenda.

The Netherlands has already spent years battling its own farming community through nitrogen regulations, forced buyouts, and restrictions that have pushed many family farms to the brink. Massive farmer protests erupted because people recognized that this was never merely about emissions. Agriculture was being redesigned from the top down. Now the campaign has moved beyond production and into culture itself. If citizens cannot be persuaded to abandon meat voluntarily, then governments will gradually make meat less visible, less available, more expensive, and increasingly stigmatized.

Many people dismissed concerns years ago when international organizations began discussing alternatives to traditional meat consumption. The World Economic Forum published articles exploring insects as a future protein source and repeatedly promoted dietary shifts away from actual meat. The argument was always framed around sustainability, carbon reduction, and environmental goals. They attempted to normalize chewing on bugs as an alternative to a steak. They claim it is our duty as global citizens to sacrifice essential nutrition to save the planet, despite knowing well that these measures would not make a meaningful dent in anything.

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AI Is Losing The PR Battle And The Consequences Could Be Huge

Lately, when watching high-profile sporting events like the NBA Playoffs, you may have noticed a rash of commercials for artificial intelligence (AI) companies. While average commercials strive to show off new products or services or recruit new customers, these AI commercials seem to have a different primary objective. They seem to target goodwill.

Heartwarming commercials show families bonding over AI-generated memories, where AI brings life to old family photos. Emotional voice-overs promise connection, creativity, and even nostalgia. These AI companies are trying to sell people a good reputation.

This strategy should tell us something. Companies don’t often spend millions trying to make you feel good about their brand unless they know, deep down, that you don’t trust it.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into AI development, the industry is quietly losing the battle for hearts and minds. And sentimental advertising is not doing much to fix this problem.

Rare Bipartisan Agreement on AI

A new national survey from Marquette University Law School should give the AI industry serious pause. According to the poll, roughly 70 percent of Americans believe artificial intelligence will do more harm than good for society. Even more striking, the skepticism cuts across party lines.

Poll Director Charles Franklin put it bluntly: “It really is striking … there’s pretty much bipartisan skepticism … That’s an awful lot of partisan agreement, where we normally see Republicans and Democrats on opposite ends.”

In today’s political climate, bipartisan agreement on anything is rare. On AI, however, Americans seem united, just not in the way Silicon Valley might hope.

Worse yet is the fact that this poll supports similar findings on AI skepticism from numerous other surveys. A particularly damning NBC News poll from last month showed that AI’s net favorability rating ranked lower than nearly every other topic.

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Carbon Neutral, Speech Negative: Amsterdam Bans Ads Featuring Meat & Fossil Fuels

In “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I write about how censorship often becomes an insatiable appetite once countries go down the road of speech regulation. There is no better example than the Dutch and their recent ban on public ads for meat and fossil fuels. Activists have imposed similar limitations on advertising for products in the United States, from alcohol to tobacco. However, the Dutch law reflects how this tendency can metastasize into shielding citizens from unhealthy choices or influences.

It appears that Dutch painters such as Pieter Aertsen (with his work A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, above) were promoting harmful imagery in their work. As for Rembrandt’s “Slaughtered Ox,” the Dutch master is now little more than a climate change denier.

Starting on May 1, the ban on such images became part of Amsterdam’s push to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. While purportedly neutral on carbon, it is manifestly negative on free speech.

As with other anti-free speech measures in Europe, this push again came from the left. The GreenLeft Party’s Anneke Veenhoff explained “I mean, if you want to be leading in climate policies and you rent out your walls to exactly the opposite, then what are you doing?”

The answer is engaging in free speech.

This is, of course, commercial speech, which is often subject to a lower level of protection. However, this shows the danger of using the differential standard to target products or industries viewed as unhealthy or ill-advised for consumers.

In Amsterdam, the ban will cover industries such as airlines, including KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, one of the largest employers and revenue generators in the country.

Notably, activists compare this to cigarette advertising bans, confirming the very slippery slope danger that those companies raised when they were targeted.

Hannah Prins, a paralegal at Advocates for the Future, is quoted as saying, “I don’t think it’s normal to see murdered animals on billboards. So I think it’s very good that that’s going to change.”

Other Dutch cities are now following suit, including Haarlem, Utrecht, and Nijmegen.

Of course, prostitutes still advertise live in Amsterdam and marijuana is a major industry for tourists.

If you want drugs, there are ample choices.

However, if you want a steak, you will have to rely on word-of-mouth directions.

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Rental ads detected in London excluding applicants based on religion and offering “Muslims only” housing, a practice under scrutiny for potential illegality under UK law

A new controversy has emerged in London after the discovery of rental listings that explicitly restrict access to housing based on religion. Several ads published on digital platforms and social media include phrases such as “Muslims only” or “Muslim girls only,” raising concerns about discrimination and legal compliance.

This is not an isolated case. Independent reviews have identified multiple examples of such listings, prompting legal experts to warn of potential violations of the Equality Act 2010, which governs equal treatment in the United Kingdom. The law clearly prohibits discrimination in housing based on religion, among other protected characteristics.

The issue lies in a particularly sensitive legal area. On one hand, the principle is clear: landlords cannot exclude tenants based on their faith. On the other, limited exceptions exist in shared housing situations, where lifestyle compatibility may be considered.

This is where ambiguity arises. Some listings may relate to rooms within occupied homes, where landlords seek tenants who align with certain customs or religious practices. However, legal experts emphasize that explicitly stating religious exclusion in advertisements can still breach the law.

The growth of digital platforms has made it easier for such listings to circulate without prior oversight. Online marketplaces, social media groups, and rental apps allow users to publish ads instantly, complicating enforcement efforts.

This trend comes amid intense pressure on London’s housing market. Limited supply and rising costs have created conditions where demand far exceeds availability, opening the door to irregular practices.

Equality advocacy groups are now calling for stronger institutional action. They argue that allowing discriminatory listings, even sporadically, risks normalizing behavior that undermines legal standards.

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FTC Settlement: Ad Agencies Agree to Stop “Brand Safety” Collusion to Defund Media Outlets

Three of the world’s biggest advertising conglomerates have agreed to stop colluding to defund media outlets whose politics they didn’t like.

The Federal Trade Commission and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined by seven other states, filed a complaint and simultaneous settlement against Dentsu US, GroupM Worldwide (WPP’s media-buying arm), and Publicis on April 15, accusing them of running what amounts to a coordinated censorship operation through the advertising supply chain.

Starting in 2018, these agencies, which collectively control over $81 billion in ad-buying power, agreed to adopt identical “brand safety” standards that treated so-called “misinformation” as a category of content too dangerous for any advertiser to touch.

They did this through two industry groups: the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Advertiser Protection Bureau, and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media, better known as GARM. The result was a shared “Brand Safety Floor” that could starve publishers of revenue without any single company having to take public responsibility for the decision.

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Big Advertisers Settle Case with FTC over Leftist Censorship in Advertising and Suspected Collusion Against Breitbart, Other Conservatives

Three of the world’s largest advertising companies settled Wednesday with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over claims that they colluded on policies to combat alleged misinformation that denied advertising revenue to conservative publishers such as Breitbart News.

The FTC said in a complaint filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas that WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis coordinated on policies that limited the number of ads that ran on sites with content that the industry had identified as misinformation. The policy resulted in fewer ads running on media outlets such as Breitbart News, punishing outlets that ran content that was “lawful but disfavored.” The filing explained that these advertisers sought to impose common “brand safety” standards across the digital advertising industry. The FTC stated that the ad agencies, with their primary competitors, Omnicom and IPG, operated through their trade associations to establish a “Brand Safety Floor” to combat “misinformation.”

“The ad agencies’ brand-safety conspiracy turned competition in the market for ad-buying services on its head,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a written statement. “The antitrust laws guarantee participation in a market free from conduct, such as economic boycotts, that distort the fundamental competitive pressures that promote lower prices, higher quality products and increased innovation.”

“As we explain in our complaint, the brand-safety agreement limited competition in the market for ad-buying services and deprived advertisers of the benefits of differentiated brand-safety standards that could be tailored to their unique advertising inventory,” the FTC chairman said.

Ferguson continued:

This unlawful collusion not only damaged our marketplace, but also distorted the marketplace of ideas by discriminating against speech and ideas that fell below the unlawfully agreed-upon floor. The proposed order remedies the dangers inherent to collusive practices and restores competition to the digital news ecosystem.

A spokesman for WPP said in a statement that the agreement “reflects our existing and ongoing commitment to provide our clients with unbiased advice as they decide where to place their media.” A spokesman for Dentsu said the company was “fully committed to operating transparently, with integrity, and in strict compliance with all applicable laws.” Publicis had not responded to a request for comment from the New York Times.

The FTC said in its filing that the ad agencies “coordinated” through the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an entity created by the World Federation of Advertisers, of which the three advertisers are members.

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Our Post-Truth, Post-Trust World

That we inhabit a post-truth world seems to accepted wisdom. But that’s only half of it. We also live in a post-trust world. In a post-truth world, everything is shaped by the implicit goals of the entity claiming to state the “truth,” as the entire point of claiming to state the “truth” is to persuade the target populace to agree to something favorable to the issuer of the claimed “truth.”

In other words, the “truth” as something that has no intentional spin of self-interest no longer exists. What is passed off as “truth” is spin intended / designed to serve the interests of those doing the spinning.

This is the definition of propaganda and marketing, which are pure expressions of self-interest, and they’ve been around since the dawn of civilization, as persuading others to do what serves your private interests is much lower cost / more profitable than having to modify their behaviors with force.

The first step in the con of propaganda and marketing is to win the trust of the mark. This is a fascinating process, as some people are willing believers and others are skeptical, and so the trust campaign must speak to both the skeptics and those primed to embrace the message for reasons that have less to do with the entity issuing the message and more to do with their internal beliefs.

The trick with skeptics is to present persuasive evidence–the “facts.” These can be first-person accounts, scientific studies, or something presented as self-evident. The con artist presents the facts as if they are objective and the mark is invited to “decide for yourself:” the con artist claims he has no intent to persuade.

This is humorously illustrated in Melville’s classic novel The Confidence-Man.

The rise of the collection of data and the scientific method introduced the idea of “objective truth” that was based on facts collected from observations that were repeatable by anyone able to isolate the same variables. In other words, these truths could be verified by anyone using the same tools to collect data that isolated the same variables, so it wasn’t a private truth, it was a public truth everyone had to accept as fact.

The power of “objective fact” was too good to pass up, and so manipulating the metrics of data collection and analysis became the new territory of developing trust and establishing “truth” to serve private interests. Sample sizes were kept small, subjects were selected for their likelihood of yielding the desired data, and analytic tools weeded out outliers that undermined or contradicted the pre-selected “results.”

As McLuhan observed, The medium is both the message and the massage, and so the synthetic media that broadcast the human voice and visual images captured our attention and imagination in ways the written word could not. Now we have AI, which mimics human speech so engagingly that we attribute it with human characteristics: intelligence, emotions, empathy, etc.

With social media and smartphones, these media/ AI technologies have scalable visibility and virulence: they are ubiquitous (everywhere) and extremely contagious / virulent, spreading quickly through vast populations.

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