I get you, yes. And I get your argument. Purely logically, ethics shouldn’t matter whether being applying to big evil corpo or to tiny mom&pops. That’s why it’s ethics and not whatever-i-just-fell-like-now. But to me it does matter. And it’s not really about blocking ads so google will starve. What I do doesn’t matter in the slightest in the grand scheme of things, just like you said. It’s just about being able to look in the mirror not spitting at the reflection because I’m true to my values. It’s about what google (alphabet, whatever) has become I so despise. I grew up with the net growing up, and I witnessed every single step downwards and it’s mostly thanks to google. I must admit i’m a horrible hippocrite, because I only use Pixel-phones. Which is ironic in itself, but they’re the only phones you could easily DE-google. All others will throw layer of layer of “protection” in your way, so you’ll never really own your own phone. And I hate myself for doing it, but I see no alternative.
Besides that. Yes. I simply don’t use ANY google product. Not even youtube. Never cared, never will. Only thing I ocassionaly watch there are music-videos (which I’ll then download and never use youtube for that again). If I HAD to see an ad, I would simply close the tab and be done with it.
I couldn’t work for such a company. No matter the pay, I would always feel bad. I once worked for a great charity in Krautland (which you’ll most likely know) which cares about cancer. As an Admin, so kinda like a software-engineer, but for hardware :-) I thought it was a dream working for a charity! Boy how wrong I was. As an admin, I could see everything (of course). And what I saw was horrible. The only reason for this charity is 0,1% help for cancer, 50% pay for the CEOs and their expensive cars and daily “buisness trips” and 49,9% upkeep. Which includes a complete floor of people who’s job it was to extort old people for their inheritance. The cellar full of millions of assets in paintings and whatnot. Simply rotting around. Money’s being brokered from shell-charity to trust-fun and whatnot. I quit withing the first 6 months. Disgusted. And it was a good pay and essentially an un-fire-able job (they never do, no matter what you do, just because you could talk bad and ruin their image). And guess what, nobody understood how I could value my “silly morals” over a great job.
Long story short: it’s a complex topic for a tiny comment and I don’t even know where to cut off or what to include :)
So in a re-phrase: What if I do not block ads, but am totally immune of the effects of ads? Isn’t that even more cheating? I can’t be influenced by those things. Except maybe having a preference then for NOT choosing the advertised product simply because its ad annoyed me. Wouldn’t it be more fair to just block it and accidentially buy that product I never saw an ad of?