You may as well question the purpose of the FDA regulating slaughterhouses since vegetarians have been found a way to avoid doing business with them. That's a nonsense position. A vegetarian should demand that the FDA regulate the meat industry, and a firefox user should demand regulation for corporations they've avoided.
Why is it abuse? No one is being forced to use chromium. Are you abusing your market position when you buy the cheapest toothbrush in a manner that's harmful to other toothbrush companies?
Google can easily force the other browsers to lose the Web Request API, because maintaining it when they're the only ones using it is a net loss of productivity, which will probably be needed elsewhere.
How do you measure this? Does the public include content creators who rely on ads for their livelihood?
The (bad actors within the) advertising industry are the enemy of people whose livelihoods depend on Internet advertising because they're the ones making ads either bandwidth-hogging, epilepsy-inducing, website-avoidingly annoying, privacy-invasive, or an actual virus/malware vector.
This is, directly, what has caused the popularity of ad blockers to skyrocket. Tech-savvy folks protecting their family from these dangers by installing ad-blocking software so they don't get regular family-tech-support calls about the various issues potentially arising from "bad" advertising.
Follow-up questions:
How many user ad clicks / views does it take for the revenue to be critical to one's livelihood?
Could you consider donations through any of the various options like Patreon?
Correct me if I'm misrepresenting your position, but I vaguely recall a discussion some time ago in which you compared adblocking to theft. If I'm remembering that correctly, you and I have no common ground upon which to have a civil discussion.
It's not possible for people to be well educated in everything and, as hard as it is to swallow for us techy types, a fair percentage of people don't have the time or inclination to even realise the potential down sides of using the Internet. They're too busy with whatever their own areas of expertise are.
Maintaining this shit is hard for a pro. The amateurs don't deserve to get shafted.
On the other hand, Google is getting bigger, expanding and hiring more people as the list of their failed projects increase. The chances of them screwing up their core products seems to be increasing, from my point of view. If they manage to do that, that would negate an inevitable future collision with anti-trust regulators. As for the EU and the GDPR I’m sure we are seeing the earliest warning shots and it’s going to be a big mess for them.
