It’s full of dodgy VPN ads and the links I tried too.

Not just students…postdocs too :/

…the only way this would have fought them was before the election, now they’re in the walls, that is palliative care.

But do they have “canaries” that allow the user to verify they are indeed doing that?

…but why? What do they gain from it?

I’d guess it would be a vertical breakup rather than horizontal: separate android, cloud, youtube, search, chrome, ads…depending on how aggressive they want to be.