Blocking of ads and trackers is an important part of maintaining user privacy and the ability to browse the internet without being constantly surveilled or provided with skewed content based on the decisions of algorithms.

NetShield is cool, but it would be great to have a more comprehensive blocking capability in Proton VPN similar to the likes of AdGuard. Currently, it is clunky to use AdGuardd or DuckDuckGo tracking protection together with VPN because most platforms allow only one VPN connection at a time and a "fake" VPN is necessary for the blocking services to work.

Important features for this are:
-Ability to either activate some blocklists from a wider Proton-curated collection or to subscribe to custom blocklists and have the app regularly check for their updates.
- Ability to add custom block/allow rules.
- Ability to filter all DNS requests.
- Potentially ability to customize rules per app on platforms that allow this (Android only afaik).
- Ability to inspect HTTPS traffic by inserting itself into it with its own certificate. This is important for blocking DNS requests made by apps via HTTPS.
- Possibly a companion extension in desktop browsers to complement blocking with esthetical adjustments (removal of empty spaces left after ads) and adding blocking rules straight from the page.
- Log of requests. This is important for user troubleshooting in case important DNS requests get blocked.