IAC was at one time Google's largest single advertising customer. Detail of the complaint from the wsj article linked above:
> Many users of IAC extensions expressed agitation, the audit found. “Tricked into installing it and can’t delete it,” said one user in a review on the Google Chrome store, which the audit called representative. “DO NOT INSTALL” warned another.
“IAC’s business model appears to rely almost exclusively on unintentional installs,” members of the Chrome safety team wrote in the audit.
Of special concern in the audit were ads that IAC ran against search terms such as “how to vote,” “vote by mail” and “voter fraud.” Users who clicked on the ads didn’t get voting-related information, the audit found. Instead, their browser home pages were reset to MyWay, and the separate, IAC-owned Ask.com toolbar was installed on those users’ browsers, the audit found. The audit found that IAC continued to run such ads even after Google told the company to stop.
I haven't used Windows in many years, but back in the day adware would get itself bundled with native applications' installers - for example, you download and install Java on Windows, they try to trick you into installing a toolbar.
Once your adware is installed as a native application, you simply install two copies, each of which immediately reinstalls and restarts the other should it get removed/stopped.
This is a Chrome extension - they're supposed to be sandboxed, and unable to pull such tricks. If it really couldn't be uninstalled from the installed extensions list in Chrome, I'd love to know how they did it.
> Many users of IAC extensions expressed agitation, the audit found. “Tricked into installing it and can’t delete it,” said one user in a review on the Google Chrome store, which the audit called representative. “DO NOT INSTALL” warned another.
“IAC’s business model appears to rely almost exclusively on unintentional installs,” members of the Chrome safety team wrote in the audit.
Of special concern in the audit were ads that IAC ran against search terms such as “how to vote,” “vote by mail” and “voter fraud.” Users who clicked on the ads didn’t get voting-related information, the audit found. Instead, their browser home pages were reset to MyWay, and the separate, IAC-owned Ask.com toolbar was installed on those users’ browsers, the audit found. The audit found that IAC continued to run such ads even after Google told the company to stop.