Anonymous sources told Bloomberg Friday that Google plans to release an ad filter for an upcoming version of its Chrome browser, rather than an ad blocker, as was reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. It’s not just a semantic difference: fears of a Google-controlled ad blocker on the most widely used desktop browser swept through media industry following the WSJ report. The ad filter, according to the Bloomberg report, would merely filter out ad types that have been labeled as “undesirable online ads” by the Coalition for Better Ads, which includes Google but also Facebook, The Washington Post, and several other publishers and ad agencies. We shall see: Google I/O is less than a month away.
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