> Just because you didn't realize that companies exist to make money.

There are many different ways to make money though. I work with green energy tech in what is essentially an investment bank. Like most companies our main purpose is to make rich people richer, but we do this by building solar and wind power plants along with storage. We do this in the most ethically correct way possible, which is often also a much more expensive way, but it gives us the opportunity to sell our products to customers who will not buy things that are build in what they view as terrible countries. From a cynical perspective, I can see how this could get interpreted as being done because of money. But the truth is that it has been one of the organisational goals from the beginning, and it's hammered into every part of the company in such a way, that we don't hire people we don't think are committed to doing things the right way. It comes from the very Scandinavian belief that there is enough money to be made by doing things right. This isn't necessarily a competitive strategy on the 1-10 year plan, but when you look beyond those 10 years, it's slowly turning out to be the only profitable way to turn out a healthy consistant profit in the green energy industry.

I think Google had that when they had their "don't be evil" spirit going for them. In many ways I still think they have that going for them. I also think the company struggles to become more than just an advertising company, and I think it's a shame, because they seem to have some genuinely great products that are completely unusable for businesses (especially here in Europe). Which is also where I think things get sort of interesting with stuff like ad-blockers and Manifest V3. Because ad-blockers are consumer friendly (sort of), but they aren't business friendly.

If you want to run a website that offers content that is paid for by ads, then you can't do that if everyone uses an ad-blocker. Google, Apple and Microsoft can, because they have ways around it by building ads directly into their core products in a non-skippable fashion, but you can't. This is what has been hurting journalism, or at least the journalism that people don't want to pay for, but it's frankly hurting any sort of content creation. If you want to create videos about something, you're going to put it on YouTube. Both because it gives you exposure, but also because it gives you an easier revenue stream with the (sort of) unblockable ads in their app. Once you get enough people following you, you may build your own content-site and rely on subscribers, but you're not going to do that when you're just starting out. This is a stark difference compared to the early web. I remember running a Diablo 2 fan site for the fun of it, that generated enough ad revenue from a single non-intrusive banner add, to pay for a laptop back when I was a teenager. You can't do that on the modern web, and ad-blockers are a big part of the reason.

I don't have a good answer for you, but I don't think you can say that ad-blockers are inherently good, or, that Google is inherently evil for wanting to change the way advertisement works. I'm also not sure you can expect power houses like the EU to uphold the right for browsers to be capable of blocking ads. They may but the EU is also looking for ways to save journalism.

Lastly. I'm as much a fan of the old punk saying "the guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to" as you seem to be, but I'm just not convinced it really applies here.