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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

“Given the legal precedents, it’s clear that users have the right to try to block ads,” he said. “But at the same time, publishers have the right to respond, either by blocking access to ad-block users, or allowing us to help them serve ads in ways undetectable to ad-blocking software.”

That's a bit like saying that encrypting a DVD is going to prevent someone copying it. If you reveal something to the user you reveal it to the computer too and then it's just an arms race.It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system.

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>It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system.

There's some things that seem inevitable to me. True flat-rate music streaming services was one of those things and we're pretty much there. Moving away from ad-supported websites to a convenient subscription model is the other.

I don't think the war against AdBlock can be won. How do you disable a software that simply hides content? Force users to click the ads? Put them into more and more annoying places? We already know the endgame of that and it's shady pop-up orgies. I doubt the New York Times wants to be associated with that. But I also won't pay $10 for every single website I might visit a month (some, maybe, for only an article or two in a link).

What we need is a common subscription flat-rate that fairly splits revenue between websites you actually visit. Not sure about the privacy concerns but at least here, the user data wouldn't have to be used for advertising.

Agreed. More to the point, it can be argued that if I do not want to consume ads, my browser displaying them means my browser is broken.

This entire thing where your attention is hijacked because you have a passing interest in subject X is out of date. Yes, we've had passive ad sponsorship of all kinds of events in times past, but it wasn't a situation where the advertisers monitored your every move and were aggressively interfering with your content consumption. It was a situation where they wanted to be recognized for supporting the content you were consuming. Ads have gone from being passive, supportive, widespread constructs to being aggressive, directive, in-your-business constructs. Not good.

Also agree. It's especially broken on mobile, which seems to be the Wild West of grabbing accidental clicks and seedy tracking.

I don't mind ads. Trackers need to be outlawed. I'll tell an ad service what kinds of ads I'd like to see if they'd like. I don't want to be tracked though.

I would love to have an option between flat rate and non-expiring prepaid. Let me pay e.g 100$ into an account and subtract some cents for every article I read. Or maybe I'm just weird with my dislike of subscriptions in general:)

I'd be happily spending the equivalent of a annual nyt subscription per year but I'm not willing to pay that amount to a sole news site. As it is, everybody tries to do a vendor lock-in while whining that people are not walking into or get out of that trap.

Interesting concept: a centralized content micropayment service. You pay in ten bucks a month, a little gets taken out every time you visit various sites.

I like it. Not sure how to get enough vendor participation, though. I imagine the way to go would be to pair up with one of the large ad networks -- you could even work it where if you pay, the ads don't come. If you're not in the system, you get ad-ed like everybody else.

This is what flattr.com does - my understanding is that it's far from having success.

About two year ago, I read a blog post by someone who tried to work on a centralized payment service with german/swiss/austrian publishers. Unfortunately I can't find the link at the moment, but as I remember his conclusion was, that they were not willing to try something like this at all. Everyone wanted to have the precious user data for themselves alone. Which correlates with the experience I had working for a big publisher: News papers aren't just competitors, they are antagonists.

My prediction is, if centralized content micropayment service is ever going to happen, it won't come from the publishers, but a big player with enough leverage like Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. Then the publisher will write outrage articles about how unfair and anti press freedom the cut they get is. Until they adapt silently.

Maybe I'm a bit pessimistic, but I doubt that the proud traditional companies have learnt much from what happened in the music industry. Which on the bright side might be good for new media startups and different approaches to journalism.

I'm not sure if it's intentional but the DVD copy protection is a some emotive comparison.

There are clear laws against copying content without permission, not so with adverts. I am not obliged to sit in front of TV and watch ads during the break, nor when visiting a website unless there is some contractual obligation for me to do so. I have yet to come across a site that tells me I must agree to view the adverts to access the content.

Not necessarily. Browser extension APIs have to provide APIs for the way ads are loaded. For example if they are magically loaded, chrome needs to give you an API to intercept magic. I'm not sure if chrome requests API allows you to block websockets, but maybe it's possible to load ads over websockets and Adblock would be unable to interfere. Even if it is not possible, there's probably a lot of ways to abuse Adblock to make it do a much worse job.

Loading doesn't matter as much as display does. You pretty much have to alter the DOM to show your ad, and we already have the ability to mess with the DOM.

"It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system."

What's the closest to this at the moment ?

Don't think there's any serious options but check out Google Contributor: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

It's never really managed to gain much traction, but I've long been fond of Flattr's model: you allocate a monthly budget, and that's then split across all the sites you've flattr'd that month. (If you really liked something, you click more than once, to give them that many more slices of the pie)

That way, you know how much you're spending every month, avoiding the tip jar situation where you might wind up donating more than you'd reckoned, and you're able to contribute, even if modestly, to that many more sites than with, say, Patreon.

I would like to see someone challenge ads and/or ad blocker blockers in court. They're a huge waste of resources especially on mobile: bandwidth, battery life, etc. Bandwidth is very expensive on mobile especially outside the USA.

This uninvited use of your resources is stealing. I think you could make the case that all of the resources wasted by visitors is more valuable than the website is generating via ads (or losing from being blocked).

There would be many hurdles to cover especially due to all of the technical details (you requested a resource, they just served it) but I think you can argue that when you click a link to an article the user intends to request the article not the junk they're forcing you to have with it.

It actually would be nice if Google ranked pages by page size or had some way to tell you what you were in for by clicking on a link in your search results...

It's not uninvited, you're requesting the website.

Perhaps some distinction between domains could be made.

The law should/could be interpreted in a way so that a website belongs only on a certain domain. Then access outside of it would be uninvited?

I mean, I feel like outlawing cross-domain site access in order to shut down online advertising is like burning the house down while you're still inside it to avoid taking out the trash.

Hyperbole.

Cookies were banned in European Union, e.i. only made available if the user agrees. Then it is up to the user to white/black list sites. The same could be made for external domains.

Most blockers already support that. It is already happening. What we need is merely making it mandatory by law.

You're not reading what I said. I covered that:

> you requested a resource, they just served it

Again: If you tell me a link will take me to very specific content (eg, a news article) I expect to receive only that content. Surprising me with other content is not welcome. Maybe it would be easier for you to relate to if the unwelcome material I'm forcing you to download is porn, gore, or malicious? Ads are equally unwelcome and you shouldn't be allowed to force someone to receive them.

This is why it would be great for search engines to analyze all of the elements on a page and rank those with less javascript and smaller page load higher than those with tons of junk...And if a website is entirely javascript it should go at the bottom of the bin, because so much can be hidden and we don't need to play cat and mouse games with search engines...

When you have a 500MB data plan and a single news page loads 50MB of junk, that's 1/10th your allotted transfer for a few KB of text! THIS IS CRIMINAL.

I'm getting the feeling nobody here has ever read RFC 1855? I think it's just as relevant now as back then when tailored towards mobile users and the current way we consume content.

> Don't send large amounts of unsolicited information to people.

They did in Germany, Adblockers won: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/27/german-broadcas...

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