Because, frankly, my Google account is full of 17 years and counting of excellent user data. They have my past trends but if they expect to keep mining me for data in the future then they better let me keep using my adblockers. Go ahead, ban me, I’ll call yer fuckin’ bluff mate. I’ll be off the grid faster than they can say “please deactivate ublock”. I only still use Google because it’s convenient and because I have so much of my life and history tied up in it, but every day that I use it I think about how I shouldn’t. If they want to burn that bridge, it’ll be highly effective and I’ll never come back.

And I think a lot of people are in the same boat these days. Of course you’ll always have your “normies”, your simple majority who while they may hate the ads don’t even know what an ad blocker is and will just put up with whatever Google does in order to get their youtubes. But if you piss off a nerd we have options. We’ll build our own social network empire, with blackjack and hookers. We’ll jump ship to a search engine that gives a damn about the user. We’ll host our own email domains. We’ll build newer, better ad blockers, that Google can’t even detect.

If Google truly wants to fuck around like that they may well just find out, just like reddit is doing.