German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I'm opposed to all tracking that isn't opt-in by default. I haven't thought about the topic at great lengths, so there may be cases which I'm failing to consider, but I've generally found "opt-out by default" to be highly hostile to users. e.g. In the US you're only allowed to digitally opt-out of credit card prescreening [1] for five years unless you're willing to mail something out. This considerably raises the burden on the user, even though I'd conjecture most people are not interested in receiving this kind of mail, and they'd largely consider it spam. I make a point of blacklisting any service that mails me spam, and I encourage others to do the same.
Additionally, I'm also opposed to ads because I've found they're generally against the user's best interests. Humans are more important than companies.
That said, there's now ublock origin for Safari which is what I use.
* lower power/memory use and greater battery life vs. Chrome or Mozilla
* being written by a hardware company vs. a surveillance company
Naive to put trust in either companies use of your details
The browser is 100% my main energy drain when I'm developing. Sublime Text barely takes up any of my power or memory.
Additionally, I don't use a single website where I noticed a performance hit when I switched from Chrome to Safari.
This is almost never actually the case. In reality, better performance tends to mean better battery due to improved usage of resources.
Not a single category other than energy consumption does Safari benchmark near Chrome, Firefox or even Edge http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/best-browser-internet...
Any of you are free to offer actual data proving otherwise
Finally, while Chrome definitely has a better html5 compliance, there's one thing I hate about Chrome. It doesn't keep the state of the previous page when using the back button unlike Firefox, Safari and IE. See this: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2879
This has not been my experience, but maybe that's just because I use an ancient text editor (Emacs). If my several-year-old computer with 8GB of RAM goes into a paging frenzy, the browser is usually at fault. Emacs may be using a few hundred megabytes at most.
As for privacy concerns, it's your call. Apple sells expensive hardware; Google sells surveillance-based advertising; Mozilla... sells its search box to either Google or Microsoft? I've made my uneasy peace with this choice.
Reader button
Scrolling performance
Most Mac-like UI
Privacy focus
Memory use and battery life
[0]: https://pi-hole.net
or use focus[1] instead of safari, it's what's recommended on the "block ads" website[2].
[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/focus-by-firefox-content-blo... [2]: https://blockads.fivefilters.org/
[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id691121579?mt=8
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/admosphere-free-ad-blocker/i...
[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-privacy-browse...
I've heard of uBlock and I continue to use ABP, so I guess your theory falls flat. :)
Theory does not hold.
So you have zero disadvantages, but one advantage. As a result, it’s strictly superior.
While I admit that ublock is faster, Adblock plus has much better integration and looks better. When it's installed it presents me with very few options and I'm basically good to go without changing and settings.
Additionally I use umatrix which covers and options abp does not,which helps abps speed to almost not matter anymore.
Lastly I would add that the latencies I've measured to be caused by Adblock plus fall almost into the region of "doesn't matter". What little benefit ublock has given me the Times I've tested it was barely worth it.
Purely by "it's faster" you should probably be using ed over any other editor right now since ed is objectively faster than any other POSIX editor. Or pretty much most editors.
>strictly
I'd refrain from using absolutes when making statements about personal opinion. It makes you look like a fool.
>no advantages
As stated earlier, abp has much better integration. It's one advantage vs one advantage.
Seems like personal choice to me.
you realize running abp on top of umatrix is completely redundant, right?
I utilize uMatrix to block unwanted scripts on websites, like some trackers that ABP doesn't catch.
I find uMatrix' AdBlocking potential to be rather lacking, I rely on ABP for that.
They work in perfect harmony.
Although for those people I usually recommend Adguard, not Adblock plus.
Develop in what sense? uBlock origin is at least 10% better than ABP just by not doing that.
The _only_ thing people want from such a program is to block all ads and trackers. That's it. That's the feature list. You decide to compromise the single goal to fund further "development"? How does that make any sense?
That's if 1. you stayed opted into the acceptable ads program when you used ABP and 2. you consider all ads equally bad and harmful.
I didn't and I don't, and I happen to agree with GP. I use ublock, but I found a constant stream of false positives and false negatives. The worst is with popups actually; a torrenting website I used to visit started doing "on page click" popups and ublock doesn't block those; ABP does.
I don't give a single hoot about tracking and want quality ads. Do I not exist?
Sure, people have all sorts of weird fetishes.
Id prefer a tiny payment option - €5- 10 a year would give any news publisher more gain from having me as a user than bombarding me with ads (just the same way it works for Wikipedia) - but that option in most cases doesn't seem to exist. Or the flattr option to directly reward qualitative reporting and recreate good incentives (quality over clickbait).
Nope, I said zero things about ideology. All I said was this: an AdBlock program is a program that block ads. That's what is reasonable to expect: that it does what it says in the tin. If an AdBlock program starts charging money to allow certain ads to go through, then it is betraying its users.
Some people want a program that filters ads according to some criteria of quality? Sure, I don't care. But it's not an ad blocker anymore, it's an ad filter. Right?
The only ideology in this discussion is coming from people who argue that the public has some obligation to accept ads or tracking in exchange for free content. I made no moral judgements, I just have a strong personal preference against ads and tracking, a lot of other people in my "box" or whatever the fuck it is do too, and this is why ad blockers became popular.
And let's be honest: people who claim to like to be exposed to "high-quality ads" typically have some vested interest in the ad business.
I hate TV ads and never watch TV as i find the ads intrusive. But taking the minor rewards from content creators that my presence can bring - when I'm benefiting from their content and cost them server resources - seems pretty unfair to me.
Here's your reason for populism and the disappearance of good journalism: no one is willing to pay or be even in the slightest inconvenienced.
Except, the acceptable ads list for larger companies can only be modified by Eyeo, and they only do it after being paid. It’s a racket.
[1]: https://gigaom.com/2015/09/30/adblock-plus-list-of-acceptabl...
ABP still is "evaluating" that, and currently has a beta where acceptable ads are handled by an ad network as intermediate, which validates the quality of your ad, and handles payment to get it whitelisted.
And the leverage by its users who do not get paid them. IIRC ABP gets paid around a third of the advertising revenue from whitelisting the advertiser if it reaches 10m impressions, so the more users seeing ads ABP has, the more money they make.
Otherwise, it is impossible: the blacklist are the same, the capabilities are the same, the only difference being that ABP will allow some ads by design.
That's only if people agree with your ideology. Instead of making blanket statements which are inherently subjective, just explain why you prefer Adblock Plus.
Personally, I vastly prefer Adblock Plus. I have no ideological objection to advertising or tracking in general, I just don't want intrusive ads. ABP does an excellent job of filtering out intrusive ads while still allowing me to support the sites I like where advertising is minimal.
I love the ad-supported web and strongly disagree with the notion that it's against users' interests. Getting free content and services in a competitive marketplace without switching costs is invaluable.
I use uBlock. But I approve of the existence and success of ABP and similar.
People differ.
uBlock requires you to do this explicitly for each site you want to support through ad revenue. I suspect most novice users will never do this.
ABP is now using their user base as leverage to extract payment from some sites to show ads by default. I don't think that is a good idea at first blush, but there may be arguments for the practice I haven't considered.
That is, I do not believe that other solutions have a very clear way for advertisers to determine what is and isn't acceptable; for the sake of argument, this puts aside the fact that some unacceptable aspects of ads should be common sense (loud noises, pop-unders, fake download links, etc). Basically when an adblocking user reaches the site, they have no means of communicating why they dislike the ads on that site - most of the time, it's just a blanket block that users never think about. So even if you really like a website and would love to support it through the ad revenue, your current options don't send a very clear signal as to what was disruptive and dislikable.
Again, I'm not saying I fully agree with this, but I think it's an argument that has some value, and reflects the greater difficulty with advertising in general; it's a one-way communication venue, and the few times that we as viewers are able to get a signal back to the other side, it's usually ignored until legislation gets involved. (See the CALM Act and it's overall ineffectiveness [1]) Basically there isn't really much control over what advertisers actually do, and even Truth in Advertising laws basically have no teeth except for extremely blatant falsehoods.
Adblocking is the first major way that viewers have been able to push back against advertising, and I'm with that 100% since I just think it's pointless in and of itself - it's wasteful in my opinion how much infrastructure exists out there just for the sake of providing advertisements. But I also understand that likely advertising isn't going away, so having some method to signal back clearly and directly to advertisers what is wrong with an ad is good in my mind. Said signal having some teeth to make sure they get the message is also important, else it's not much better than before. But not giving any indication as to what's wrong doesn't really help either. (I'm not blaming anyone but stubborn advertisers here, but I think it helps us as activists if we can make it 100% what we don't like about specific advertisements instead of just doing a blanket block).
I suspect most novice users will never install uBlock, because the article they read in <whatever> will mention ABP. :)
It just depends on what makes sense for the individual, a default whitelist because you want to support some advertising (that is, if you thought about it at all), or default black everything.
I'd much rather outsource the work of whitelisting to ABP than having to do an individual consideration on every single site I visit.
There's also the fact that I never want to see malicious/intrusive advertising. If I maintain my own whitelists, I have to experiment site by site. If I use ABP, they do that experimentation and enforcement for me.
The thing that totally frustrates me is how many people in this thread seem to be totally incapable of grasping that ABP in fact offers exactly what I want: someone blocking intrusive advertising, but not all advertising, with me having to do zero work. As a bonus, there's even a business model attached (so they're less likely to randomly sell out their install base to a malware provider).
Those niche blogs could choose to pay for their hosting and it costs less than 10$ a month ($5.99 or $8.25 at wordpress.com[1])
If the advertising based business model failed overnight, I highly doubt finding 75 to 100$ a year to stay online would be out of reach.
You do know that about 10% of the advertisers get in the whitelist by paying instead of conforming to the acceptable ads program ? You probably know that the acceptable ads is very limited in scope and most non intrusive ads never get whitelisted but surely you know that adblock plus has now evolved into an ad selling platform.
It seems to me that adblock plus does not fit your stated ideological stance as well as Brave[3] does. You should consider ditching ABP and using Brave instead which blocks tracking and replaces all ads by other non-intrusive ads and also offers and option to pay websites directly so you could contribute to the hosting fee of those niche blogs.
[1]: https://wordpress.com/pricing/ [2]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/13/12890050/adblock-plus-now-... [3]: https://www.brave.com/
IMHO you choose yourself the websites you want to whitelist, this way you can give away your privacy for fraction of pennies to the websites you choose to support. What if you want to support a controversial website that has been banned from most conventional advertising networks (for example the piratebay) ?
Then again the trade off between permanent own privacy loss for fraction of pennies make no sense to me.
You don't even have to do that. It behaves exactly the same as ABP if you use the same filter lists. It's just also happens to be more efficient than ABP.
That's not to say AdBlock Plus does a great job (I don't know) but some people think collective bargaining is a good thing.
For more read about countervailing power.
He mentioned that uBlock can use the same "reasonable" filter list as ABP, it's just better to use uBlock since it's more efficient.
How they reconcile this with the name "AdBlock" I'll never know.
or maybe adsellads [1]
[1]:http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/13/12890050/adblock-plus-now-...
We have very different opinions, because I don't see it as a bargaining situation. The reasonable and acceptable level of spam, web advertising, malware, and user tracking is zero. I won't accept any more than that because (very near) zero is easily achieved using the currently available tools.
If it were a pay-per-search model then I'd have to make a mental decision every time I do a search. This would impose massive cognitive overhead and present a deadweight loss.
If it were a subscription model, building a competitive search engine would suddenly become much harder. Right now, I can freely experiment between different search engines to find the right one for a given query. If I need a subscription, then it would much more firmly entrench the dominant player.
People spend a lot of time railing against advertising without considering how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years.
> how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years
... wait are you trolling?
Ad-blockers grew out of a need. It's been "only" a few decades, and before that advertisement wasn't quite the same thing, was it?
Nobody felt they needed an always on filter to protect their focus and attention from a constant 24/7 barrage of shitinformation screaming at you. Because advertisement hasn't always been doing that. Yes it's been lying a lot, maybe a lot more, maybe it always has, and I hate it for that as well, but that's a different discussion. That's not the discussion we're having today. We could have had that discussion but advertisement decided it wanted everything and right now it is paying people to flood the web with clickbait, listicles and other bullshit.
[0] at some point (more than 10 years ago), you started to have to be clever and use smart queries to filter and step around the shit advertising. but for years now Google basically stopped returning anything as results that deep. the pages still exist but they won't let you dig deep into the index any more because the 99.9999% shit finally tipped over into rounding error. for a while they called you "robot" if you tried and give you a captcha because robots were mining the trash for different (less noble) purposes. you still get these captcha's some times but they seem to be stale filter triggers from threats long gone. most of the time you just get zero results for 2-3 word queries that used to return hundreds in an era the Internet was 1% of today's size. actually no most of the time you get results that have nothing to do with the query. you just get zero when you insist. and no verbatim mode doesn't help here.
I suppose google search business model in a post-adwords world could also be "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead".
In the event of google search disappearing, affected people would use other search engines and it would make room for better search engines to emerge which is hardly possible right now as google owns the market.
They might have the money but why should they give it away? They are not a charity.
> it would make room for better search engines to emerge
How would those search engines fund themselves? what would their business model be?
But they only have this money because of AdWords. That means that, in this world, Google would still exist, but no-one could come enter the search space to compete with it—and surely that's not a desireable outcome.
Some have already transitioned to crowdfunding (see patreon, the dice tower getting funded on kickstarter,...) micropayment, subscriptions.
But this case of "your failed business model is not my problem" is not to blame on adblockers alone but also on dwindling ads revenue among others reasons due to facebook driving prices down. When facebook investor story time will come to an end the whole web advertising ecosystem might crumble on itself.
The day the usual website will receive 12 to 20Billions views a month and occupy 10TB of disk space, then we could use wikipedia as a representative example. Until then wikipedia should not be used as an example of how well the usual ad-supported website would fare with an alternative revenue model.
IINM wikipedia has chosen a business model not based on ads which successfully funds the project for about 10+ years.
Yes, that was my point — Wikipedia is probably the absolute best-case scenario for a free website that isn't supported by ads, and they're still panhandling. The usual ad-supported website would fare much, much worse, and would probably just stop providing its service to the world.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_reports#Fun...
Given that you put advertising in there with the other items, I assume this means that you pay for all websites that you block ads on? Because it seems to me that your model is "I get free stuff, fuck everyone else".
No, that's putting the cart in front of the horse. The World Wide Web was built for users by users, not for publishers by publishers. It's nice that publishers, who are themselves users, can make use of it. Good for them. If they can support themselves, even better.
However, any user has the moral right to filter any content delivered to them, as he or she sees fit. If publishers don't like that, they can build their own Internet instead of using ours, the users', Internet.
In fact, I would say it is a moral obligation for any Internet user to oppose any content-provider that attempts to put undue technical restraints on their content under threat of not publishing that content at all.
We're all in this shit together, and we need to give content providers the ability to earn money off that. At the moment most of us get away with being parasites, but it's not sustainable if we want to maintain quality content. The moral obligation, if any, is 'play fair'. If someone asks that you see an ad along with the rest of the content, then the moral answer is to view that ad if you want to access the content. It's 'play fair', not 'play selfishly'. If you don't want to play fair, then either don't consume the content, or don't pretend you're being moral.
Also, just because you can access certain content streams with technical trickery doesn't mean you're morally clear to do so. A clear example is private data. Just because I might be able to get someone else's private data with a few http requests doesn't make it moral for me to do so.
Right. And my network blocks advertisements. Deal with it.
> We're all in this shit together, and we need to give content providers the ability to earn money off that. At the moment most of us get away with being parasites, but it's not sustainable if we want to maintain quality content. The moral obligation, if any, is 'play fair'. If someone asks that you see an ad along with the rest of the content, then the moral answer is to view that ad if you want to access the content. It's 'play fair', not 'play selfishly'. If you don't want to play fair, then either don't consume the content, or don't pretend you're being moral.
It's not really a moral issue. There's a moral obligation to spend 2 minutes trying to punch the monkey or whatever ridiculous thing they're doing now? Give me a break.
The rest of that doesn't hold water, either. People will pay straight away for quality content. The pre-internet movie, music, and publishing industries are proof of it. Quality content will survive because if people have to pay for it they will.
There's a ton of shit on the internet these days funded via advertisements, and I won't mind if most of it dies.
> Also, just because you can access certain content streams with technical trickery doesn't mean you're morally clear to do so. A clear example is private data. Just because I might be able to get someone else's private data with a few http requests doesn't make it moral for me to do so.
If a company has private data publicly accessible to the internet then the moral thing to do would be to tell them so that they can fix it, not for everybody to close their eyes and pretend there's not a problem.
Good thing that that isn't what I said.
> People will pay straight away for quality content.
No, no they won't. The fact that you had to say 'pre-internet' proves that the convenience factor is significant. People paid for movies because that was the only way to get movies. To claim that paid-for movies were therefore 'quality' is arse-backwards.
> Right. And my network blocks advertisements. Deal with it.
That's fine. You're not the one claiming it's moral what you do (that was another user that I was responding to). I'm also of the opinion that your model is the "I get free stuff, fuck everyone else" model.
I'm midway on this myself, by the way. I use NoScript and no ad-blocker. Plain ads get through, but obnoxious ads don't (like the ones that cover text while you're reading). What I don't pretend, however, is that I'm choosing some sort of moral path in doing this.
> private data
My comment on private data was just an illustration that just because you can access something online, doesn't mean it's moral to do whatever you want with it. Another example of such is revenge porn.
They were "quality" in the sense that people willingly paid for them. The sad reality is that a huge amount of web content doesn't even meet that low bar.
And I said "pre-internet" mainly to avoid the issue of piracy from bit-torrent, but it probably wasn't necessary. A ton of movies here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films...) were made post-internet and they still made hundreds of millions of dollars. Likewise, the music industry is doing great.
The news industry is in the dumps because they were the ones stupid enough to devalue their content by giving it away for free on the web along side trashy advertising.
> There's a ton of shit on the internet these days funded via advertisements, and I won't mind if most of it dies.
Advertisement funds listicles and clickbait in a vicious cycle.
That is the kind of content that can only exist because of Internet advertising. That is the kind of content you "pay" for with your attention-span.
Investigative journalism is being actively replaced by clickbait, listicles and bullshit because Internet advertisements are so much more profitable. Because you don't need to be good any more, you just need to hack weak minds on scale.
THAT is the kind of Internet you're arguing I should support by not blocking advertising.
Actual quality content has so many ways of monetizing itself (online and offline) it's disingenuous to ignore. Just not this one. Real life dead tree newspapers also take a dive in quality when they go down the hole of cheap shitty advertising.
It will always lose against the low quality fire hose swamp of shit content because it's just as profitable (often more) and so much cheaper to produce. That is why people have been blocking Internet ads since forever. The ad-companies themselves are often shady, parasites come automatically with the territory.
I'm blocking ads until that shit goes out of business. Not because "fuck everyone else" but because "fuck everyone that supports it".
Interstate highways were created in the same manor. That is fun reading if you research it a bit.
And FWIW I do pay for or donate to several online services that I use often and that provide real value for me. At the same time, it's very unlikely that I'll ever pay to read somebody's blog, twitter, facebook, personal website, etc.
But I'm curious why you wouldn't put web advertising in with spam, tracking, and malware? They're all heavily entwined, AFAICT.
A URL is just an advertisement for a resource which is available on the web. Since when does seeing an advertisement obligate you to go acquire the object being advertised? Must I compensate the makers of highway billboards for the work they did presenting those advertisements, if I happen not to want to purchase their products?
No, it doesn't work like that. Web publishers can hope all they want that I choose to accept their invitations to download ads and look at them, but it's my machine and I'm paying for my own bandwidth, so I'll make my own choices about what to do with it. An adblocker is nothing more than an intelligent assistant for making those choices.
I was also in favor of that... until I noticed that the google ads[1] were links to malware and adware sites at times.
Now, I just block everything without distinction. And I make sure it's the same for every setup (i.e. rest of the family and friends who are not tech savy).
[1] AdBlock Plus unblocked adds from google after they started paying them. They introduced an opt-in button to "block non intrusive adds".
They key was the hex encoding of the hash of the contents. f4/c0/34/ad/91/... Notice the ad
I was QAing for a company. They had a link in an email go through a tracker as opposed to loading the tracker on another site. Obviously uBlock blocked it and confused me for a few minutes until I realized what it was blocking.
They didn't like my suggestion to have the tracker be loaded externally so if it was blocked, no big deal.
Have a look at performance comparison between the two, ublock origin offers better speed with memory footprint a third of ABP while blocking more a.k.a. saner defaults.
I don't care if ABP offers some mafia like option to deal with advertisers, I do care that my box stay snappy with memory available when I open 150+ tabs in my browser i.e. a regular day.
Whenever ABP offers the same level of performances than ublock origin then I may base my choice on ideology, but the required rewrite doesn't seems to be on ABP roadmap.
Basically ads that exploit you without you clicking on them. I don't know if it was on the acceptable ads list and you had a old copy of adobe acrobat, then you would be hacked. They didn't mention what sites but users in Central Europe got it on popular websites. Sites you'd probably trust.
Other than static ads between the hosting site and the site that wants to advertise without a middleman ad network, I don't trust any ads. In the case listed previously, a human is more likely to review the ad, making it safer.
Since I care about not getting hacked, the obvious conclusion for me is to block all ads.
Herein lies the problem
Opt-in > Opt-out
[1]: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...
As another poster said 'defaults matter'. If you want a representative sample of usage then "opt-in" taints your data. I would argue that there is nothing wrong with correctly anonymised, aggregated, opt-in tracking. I want most websites to track my usage and I hope they use the data to make their site better. Any time I don't want to be tracked I can switch to incognito.
However - there are many issues around data-sharing between 3rd parties and deanonymising techniques. It's also fairly hard to trust that companies stick to their word so I'm not entirely complacent.
By trying to force the user to consume this data through a specific channel (e.g. through a standard-compliant browser with no ad-blocking abilities), they implicitly try to deny him/her the right to use the content in accordance with the HTTP specification.
Per se there's nothing wrong with forcing people to consume information/media through a specific technological channel (some people might disagree here of course), and companies like Netflix and Amazon have been doing this for many years already.
The difference here is that "Der SPIEGEL" explicitly chose to use an open medium, the world-wide-web, and an open protocol (HTTP) to disseminate their content, probably with the intent to reach as many people as possible. Unfortunately (for them), both of these technologies are built on the premise that the information can be consumed in whichever way the user sees fit, using his/her own software of choice, be that a desktop browser like Chrome, a terminal browser like Lynx, or even just a text editor.
If they really want to force people to consume their content in a specific way, they should simply ask users to enter an agreement with them, which could state that the user needs to consume the content in its entirety (advertisements included). That they don't do this is probably due to the fear of losing market share, as probably many users would not be willing to enter into such an agreement.
The catch? The ads in the PDF are images without scripts and tracking.
Good.
Does the income from such ads not generate enough income?
Then GET OFF THE INTERNET or just close down the newspaper and take a long holiday. But don't tell me how to consume a http response please.
PDFs support scripting. Wouldn't that suffice?
[1] Fun fact: Okular has an "Honor DRM restrictions" checkbox in its settings dialog that you can actually uncheck.
But that's ok. Basically, dear newspapers, please invent your own DRM-enabled protocol and enforce your business models all you like. Just leave HTTP alone.
Wouldn't forcing to consume ads discriminate against people who use text-based browsers, and visually impaired people who use readers for that condition?
The latter especially works for me because I'm generally willing to disable my ad blocker for the domain and see what their ads are like. If their ads are reasonable I'll leave it off.
Except that it doesn't. Not everybody is expert enough to evaluate the risks of trading their data. Even if everybody was an expert, Google and Facebook are quasi-monopolies that are hard to avoid due to network effect and peer pressure. They play major roles in modern society so regulating them /in some ways/ seems warranted.
It sounds like you just like both services a lot and want the government to step in so you can have your cake and eat it too.
Something like a common carrier model might be better for society, where the bundling of some services is deemed to be too monopolistic in combination but not as separate entities. Sort of like Rockefeller owning both oil production and (almost) all the transportation facilities and used the transportation to squeeze out fellow producers.
Utilities are regulated the way they are because switching costs are enormous (pay for powerlines to some other generation source or pipes to a new water supply).
If you read again, you will see that I was making a combined argument about Google and Facebook. For Google mostly the network effect applies, peer pressure maybe not at all. (edit: Google search does get better the more people use it, though. This could be considered hidden peer pressure.)
> and have been asked to message someone on Facebook maybe twice.
So? Obviously it's not equally popular in all areas and demographics.
> It sounds like you just like both services a lot and want the government to step in so you can have your cake and eat it too.
I meant precisely what I said, not what you chose to hear.
Yes, companies paying their fair share of taxes is absurd.
We could reframe that argument to say that Google should provide a fair share of jobs to the unemployed. Billions of revenue but far fewer employees than some companies half the size. Clearly Google isn't hiring a 'fair share' of workers right?
We can ride this all the way into absurdity. We shouldn't be judging companies by opinion-based metrics like "fair share" but instead on their net economic contribution to the economy -- not their contribution to a government.
If Google paid zero tax, the economy is far better off with them than without them; look at the jobs it provides (and the economic activity those generate,) look at the return on investment to shareholders (which helps those shareholders earn money they can invest in other ventures.)
It isn't all about taxes. Google spends money far more effectively than government. Google should pay taxes at an amount commensurate with the public goods they consume -- not a cent more. Remember, taxes aren't ever paid by companies -- they are paid by individuals. You raise taxes on Google, you raise taxes on every person with any sort of relationship with Google.
If we are looking at the net economic contribution to the economy, a small one-person company shouldn't pay any taxes. All the revenue goes back to the economy in employment of that single person. The economy is far better off with that person than without them.
Taxing net-negative contributors would however be a bit weird. Taxing social security would be counter productive, and having people in the military paying for their own equipment would likely spell the end of having a military. Having politicians pay for the privilege of being a politician would be an interesting concept, but I never heard of such system ever existing.
Actually, you can take this argument to the end and arrive at the UBI model advocated by German economist Jörg Gastmann. His model has a sales tax (and no other taxes) that starts out absurdly high (e.g. at 200%), but well-paid employees are tax-deductible, to the point where you don't pay hardly any taxes at all if you employ about 7 employees per million € in revenue. Companies that don't need that much employees can instead pay a basic income to someone in order for them to count as employee. (There are some more rules, e.g. every person can only count as tax-deductible employee for one company, and a tax-deductible employee may not work more than 40 hours a week, but that's the basic gist.)
You are saying that a successful company should have a special exemption from the law while other companies are still to pay taxes.
> Remember, taxes aren't ever paid by companies -- they are paid by individuals
Strawman.
> As of August 2015, Adblock Plus was installed on approximately 9.55 million browsers with German IP addresses. That's about five percent of the computers in Germany used to access the Internet.
> About 3,500 websites are on the Adblock Plus "whitelisting" program that allows for "acceptable ads" to be viewed by default. About 90 percent of those sites don't pay, but the largest 10 percent make payments to Adblock Plus for the white-listing.
> While Adblock Plus users can easily turn off even those "acceptable ads," about 75 percent accept the default settings and allow the ads. Eyeo determines what is an "acceptable ad." It bars all moving images and many types of still images, allowing mostly for just static text ads.
I prefer something like ublock that doesn't ask money to let ads through. I'm puzzled by the morality of that.
Granting access for paying members simply means ABP has become a gatekeeper with its own power and it is now offering access at a price, unethically
Only if ABP states that they block ALL ads, full stop. But their website doesn't say that, it says "Surf the web without annoying ads!" which wouldn't exclude non-annoying ads.
Maybe that's not how the extension/service was initially introduced but at this point they're not lying to new users. The website even explicitly calls out that they do let some non-intrusive ads through. https://adblockplus.org/
If they didn't have the qualification language front and center on their site but rather had a bunch of asterisks to tiny, tiny footnotes hidden on a different page I might lean more towards agreeing with your assertion. But this information isn't hidden, it's readily available.
I use uBlock (and previously, ADP) because of the fact that parts of the Internet will give you ADHD, no matter if you started with it or not.
Parts of the Internet are quite literally unusable without ad blocks. This should be a much larger discussion than it is, given how shitty sites don't get lots of views, ergo, who's actually viewing the ads to begin with?
Large corporations wouldn't advertise online if they didn't have metrics that back up that claim. If advertising online in November meant a significant rise in sales, then apparently buying the ads worked. People are viewing them.
This doesn't mean that ads work equally well with every viewer, and it certainly does not imply that ads are beneficial to the viewer, but it does mean that ads do generate income.
I agree that ads can be part of a problem for a lot of folk, and I recommend anyone I see browsing without an ad-blocker to install one of course.
They can try, but it's fundamentally impossible.
What they are doing is akin to a racket protection. They place themselves in the position of deciding whether some ads are authorized or not, and of course some money can push them in the good direction.
The only ambiguity here is that they seem to at least respect a standard for the ads they accept. Beside that, this is racket and corruption.
Did you ever write one that endures?
From first-hand experience, I spent so much time working on uBO in the last 2.5 years that I would appreciate the task to not be trivialised with such sentence as "anyone can write an ad blocker". Such trivialisation prevent those who don't understand software development from valuing all the work done, up to being told "F you!" when refusing to spend more time on the project than I already do.
Anyway, thank you for your work. uBlock Origin is literally the first extension I install whenever I use a new browser/computer. It's lightweight yet powerful and your default lists remove a lot of the work involved in deciding what nonsense to block. Whenever I don't have it installed, I'm amazed at how user-hostile the web has become. We may have gotten rid of pop-ups but advertisers have reached new heights of annoyance with popovers and ads that push down the content you're currently reading. It's absurd that people actually endure 30 second video ads to watch a 1 minute YouTube clip.
cat /etc/hosts | wc -l
34003Works amazing.
It seeks to solve the issue of people blocking ads for safety/security reasons or for crossing some threshold of reasonable annoyance.
I don't use ABP so I can't speak to whether they are good owners of that role, or whether they are corrupt.
I think the idea of curation is good, but it is a brutish hack around (perceived or real) poor self policing by the advertising industry.
Springer bases its claims on two principles:
1) Ad blockers are damaging their business money-wise.
2) An article and an Ad are an indivisible entity. And from a copyright perspective, removing the Ad means violating the copyright of the article.
We lost 1 and won 2. Now we are on the second round. In Hamburg too, which relieves me. Hamburg is tough. If Eyeo won there we have a good chance to win as well. And now Eyeo decided to support us. Things are getting a bit better for our case.
Because of that I am truly grateful to them. If it was not from Eyeo Ad blockers would be now banned from Germany.
Our case was the typical one that I thought only happens in the movies: Big company crushes small company (and crushed us indeed they did) to build a case against a bigger company than us.
From what is worth I am very happy that Eyeo won the case. If they win they will have a legal precedent. And they will go for against all the others.
And what about our ad blocker? We had to take it out from the App Store.
I wrote an article a few months ago regarding this case would somebody be interested.
Seriously, if you don't want your content to be freely downloaded, viewed and processed, simply hide it behind a paywall or invent your own proprietary format, and leave the open Internet alone.
In what situation is endangering someone's business model grounds for their illegality?
Also, I don't get why larger content owners don't self publish ads. It should be possible to have an appliance running on your own infrastructure or cloud, that gets proxyed requests from your own domain. That way the content it indistinguishable from the ads (or at least heavily merged). If you randomize the placement of ads / content images and both come from opaque URLs (ex: http://media.example.com/:some-uuid) it wouldn't be apparent which should be filtered.
Biggest issue I can see if that ad buyers would have to either trust the publisher or control the appliance. I suppose the latter is possible as if the request is proxyed you can align the counts of "Requests I've sent you" with "Requests you've received" to reconcile if there's cheating / lying happening.
This may be too complicated for a smallish site, but well within the technical capabilities of Der Spiegel, NY Times, etc.
Spiegel can only track you across their own site which might not tell them much about you, making the ad space less valuable.
Sure if you're not clearing your cookies, obfuscating your User-Agent, and rotating your IP address regularly. All that aside, the real baseline of comparison isn't a targeted ad, it's no ad at all. It doesn't matter how great third party ad networks are at tracking users, if their third partyness is what makes them so easy to block then they're going to go the way of the dodo.
> Spiegel can only track you across their own site which might not tell them much about you, making the ad space less valuable.
I wonder if that even matters. They already know what article I'm reading and possibly what other articles I've read (again assuming logged in / tracking cookies / etc). Should be more than enough. I really think a steady income stream of un-blockable but not quite as effective ads will win out over blockable but hyper targeted ones.
I agree. I mean, I would react much better to ads relevant to what I'm actually reading just now than to random crap based on stuff pulled out of some tracking database.
I would be surprised if uBO didn't do that. (Can't check right now because I use uMatrix; I care more about the tracking part than about the ad part.)
You know, I keep hearing this as justification for tracking. It's been going on for about 20 years now and I still see terrible ads. I don't think the ads I see online are any better targeted than ones I see in People magazine at my doctor's office.
On the other hand this would allow the site to be more picky and set prices - which could really increase overhead.
I love the idea they use eg for wetransfer (a very minimalist file sharing site) - one huge, beautiful ad in the background . I'm sure those aren't cheap, but they are certainly visible and usually quite interesting. Everyone wins. But i doubt that would scale and seems unlikely to suit content-filled sites like news sites
The different is that I target the ads based on the content rather than the reader. In that way I try to treat it like a magazine where the content itself narrows down who will be reading without the need for dertermining them using adtech solutions.
No idea if the model would work on a general news site, but it does work and isn't terrible.
I can't speak to your point about a brand pressuring me for being critical though since that isn't really the nature of my site and publication.
You're right, it's about auditing. They need to be able to prove the quantity of ads were delivered as sold, which needs to go through a third party.
Actually, Vox, NBC, Quartz, The Outline, and NYT have started building their own ad creatives in-house, which is an excellent idea because it gives the publisher control of what code runs. This gets straight to what the readers want solved.
They're all technically capable of building their own delivery system too, but I'm not sure what the benefits would be?
There may be a middle ground--using a separate, unique domain (i.e., nytimes-adserver.com). I'm trying to think through the side effects, what breaks, etc.
Only in the case of government protectionism. And even then, there is no legitimate situation where it should be illegal to challenge an existing business model.
I'm glad the Internet exploded before the government cronies really understood it.
I don't think that's a good idea. Doing exactly that would mean: the ad auction has to be closed and content injected server-side into the HTML page before sending the first byte to clients. And even if you're just inserting a JS snippet at the bottom of your body, it also means that you're giving the advertiser control over your entire page/website and of the clients' browser. Given the cluster of shitty and deceptive content pipelined by ad networks, no wonder they're not going to do that.
Absolutely not. It would take some more time for your ad campaign fine tuning to apply, and to count clicks, that's all. Ad networks would install their boxes in datacenters and hosting providers' networks. Ads would cost a little more.
>content injected server-side into the HTML page before sending the first byte to clients
Injected, yes, but why before sending the first byte?
>it also means that you're giving the advertiser control over your entire page/website and of the clients' browser
I'm sure WhatWG will quickly find a technical solution to this problem too. Say, a special HTML tag attribute that tells the browser "treat content inside as third-party", which eventually will be exposed to ad blockers.
Spiegel is right, "it would not be a long-term solution"
I believe the tag you're looking for is <iframe sandbox>.
You're vastly over-simplifying the technological problems involved with site-serving ads. The bids don't come from "ad networks" - I also assume you mean ad exchanges not ad networks? - they come from a federated collections of bidders (generally called DSPs or other custom bidders, which there are hundreds or thousands of). They also rely on extensive client-side cookie matching in order to determine who the user is and how valuable they are. Not only that, but then the ad itself lives on a different server from the one doing the bidding, and is often generated dynamically based on that specific user as well.
You can't just dump these either; real-time bids from many sources, user-based advertising, and dynamic advertising, are some of the key contributors to the continuously increasing value of remnant ad placements over the last 5-10 years.
This alone was shutting down the conversation that adblock is threatening the market for long 10 years since industry people and sharehokders started raising the red flag.
Now, when everybody downstrean, including publishers, realised just how much money they loose to blocking and started talking openly about it, the genie is out of the bottle
Now with ABP taking money to pass certain ads, that something different, I myself don't feel it is ethical, so I uninstalled the software.
I prefer ads rather than high-cost paywalls, and then ideally a "use as-free" option for a small sum (think android apps). I want to read diverse sources and can't cough up €50-160 for 10-20 different sites that i use more or less frequently. I'd pay €5-10 for each good site that i use frequently to see it ad free and am happy to accept unobtrusive and non-malicious ads on all other sites.
We can't act as if everything must be free and painless - then we'll end up with a truly broken internet. The ad pendulum swung far too much to one extreme with horrendous intrusive and malicious ads across the web, but if we let it swing too far the other way we'll end up with a truly dead web where only exploitative (virus-spewing, manipulative (eg paid/planted "news" and propaganda a la RT & Xinhua) and commercial sites continue to exist.
My impression is that if i want the internet to remain valuable i will have to accept 'good' ads or start coughing up funds myself.
As for reading diverse sources - well, how many people subscribed to 10+ newspapers at once, in the heyday of paper? And why should it be any different in the age of the Internet, if the amount of human labor required to make one newspaper (or equivalent) remains the same?
That said, I do think that the current subscription models are also broken (which is also why they're unpopular). What we really need is a seamless micro-transaction protocol, so that I could pay, say, 5c to view one article that I'm interested in. And the browser should provide a consistent UX for the website to request payment, and for me to approve it or not; and also to clearly distinguish links to paywalled resources.
They could check over time if a user has seen as many ads as page views and block them then but users would just need to delete their cookies.
I guess as blockers stop ads downloading they just need to have something like an ad or an actual one and check if it's downloaded.
In my experience as an user, no website has ever beaten an ad blocker. It's like trying to secure a computer against an adversary with full physical access. The content has left the server and is on the user's machine. Nothing can stop a sufficiently determined user from consuming it, with or without ads.
I answered a question on User Experience.SE about this:
http://ux.stackexchange.com/a/96907/3437
I tried to express just how big the power disparity between the developer and the user is. Looking back now, I think I came off as too extreme.
I think the other answers are excellent; they address the UX aspects in a way I wasn't able to. Definitely learned from them.
For example, if you were watching a TV show, it would give you a playlist of video segments and ads, all having random urls (hulu.com/<uuid>). You couldn't tell which was an ad and which was the real video, so adblockers couldn't write rules to block them.
It is literally that, in fact.
A user requests a data stream, and receives it. That the user chooses not to execute or render a part of that stream is up to them - the data has already been delivered.
Interstitials, pop-ups and the like are simply contained within the stream, and aren't even guaranteed to run inside the browser. If the data connection is incomplete, modern browsers often discard data that is incomplete. Is that also illegal access?
The data stream is in the user's hands - and it is delivered before any Terms and Conditions are given.
It's similar to someone giving you a burger, saying it's free, waiting till you take the first bite, and then demanding that you eat the rest whilst they photograph you, and then use said photos to pay for making the burgers.
You could just walk away with your free burger.
They didn't save the music records, movies and video games industries. They're still actively fighting against the user, an adversary that has all the power. DVD content was successfully decrypted despite the DMCA; ironically, genuine games are often inferior to their pirated counterparts. A site without ads has better usability and is more secure.
Even if sites say you can't access content already transmitted to your computer unless you view ads, they're not in a position to enforce that. A bunch of laws saying people can't circumvent their protection won't suddenly change that fact.
https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=adaway&fdid=...
When it comes to the browser itself, another common method for adblocking was for the adblocker to function as a proxy server that you'd setup in chrome, and you didn't need root for this.
Also, you can just use Firefox for android, which lets you install same extensions as on the PC version, including adblockers.
¹ http://adage.com/article/digital/google-s-ad-boss-ad-blockin...
Yes, it's called AMP.
* https://plus.google.com/100667046318444095686/posts/brFPEa1j...
* https://plus.google.com/+SaschaEm/posts/K9Uvc6KCHKx
(TIL: Germans swear by saying "Fuck!!" in English)
There were studies about this on HN. Has something to do with foreign words being stored/associated at different points inside the brain and therefor being less offensive to foreign language speakers.
That's obviously bullshit, the actual reason is the omnipresence of the word fuck in the english language, and the omnipresence of the english language everywhere in the world. You just adopt it.
Speaks mountains of how conscious the newspapers are that they're producing stuff nobody wants to pay for. Perhaps they should put a bit more effort into producing things their audience values to read, and a lot less effort tracking users and fighting ad blockers.
Either someone buys it or they don't - at some price point someone will buy this (Hell I'd personally buy it at some price).
This is what online advertising should be. No impression charging, no targeting, no tracking (and of course no automated fraud prevention)
Today, when tracking and targeting is possible, obviously dumb online ads are hard to sell. Why would I pay $10k to show my shoe banner to everyone if I can pay $0.01 per impression to 20-30 year old shoe geeks only?
If only dumb ads are possible (as in print media) then they will be possible to sell again. Perhaps not for the smallest 95% of web sites, but perhaps for Der Spiegel.
Spiegel said those options "would not be a long-term solution but rather result in a sustained race to stay ahead of the technological curve."
I've been using it for a long while and I appreciate the Acceptable Ads program, nothing is free and I wish to support websites if I can. It's either that or a paywall.
I also use uMatrix, which I recommend to run in conjunction with adblock, it allows for a very finegrained permission control, much more finegrained than uBlock.
You can't negotiate with advertisers -- you can't make a bargain between ads or paywalls. Advertisers want it all.
Only technical restrictions will stop them. Even then they'll try to use lawsuits, government agencies, moral shaming and worse.
Well, seing how websites actually sign up for this and I've personally found it very pleasant, you can negotiate with some advertisers.
Just not the cancerous ones that would shove more malicious malware down your throat than not-malware.google.not-malware.ru using internet explorer 6 on an unpatched Windows XP without Service Pack.
Most news sites rely only on advertising for income. Real reporting and investigation costs money. Since their main money source is now drying up, news is starting to become hearsay, rumors, and things you see on Twitter (anything you can find from the comfort of an office chair). This quickly leads to a race to the most clicks, which may or may not be factual.
We also are now starting to see blogs and many other news sites switch from advertisements on the side or top (which can be blocked) to entirely sponsored articles written around a product or service. We've always had sponsored articles, but not as prevalent as it is now.
Real journalism costs money. When you remove the only way to fund it, we end up with what we have now: fake news passing as real journalism and fake articles which are actually advertisements.
"but that in no way incentivizes them to do "real journalism""
Sure it does. If you actually have the money to send a journalist out and get a better story than the next person, you will. This is how it worked before the advent of severely diminished returns in the news industry.
In fact, most popular news sites today are owned or funded by extremely wealthy individuals that use it to push their own political agendas. This is because it's almost impossible to run a news business without this sort of capital. If there was a way for anyone to potentially make a decent living with advertising, this would change.
"Bullshit has better ROI than truth, and that's why there's so much of it."
I won't argue with you there. However, real journalism should have a competitive advantage. It doesn't because it's too difficult to make enough to pay real journalists. Our news landscape now consists of wealthy individuals that spew politically biased news (Breitbart, Huffington post), fake news sites, and the already established big players that don't need the funding because they already have decades of momentum.
Adblocking didn't teach the ad industry anything. It is a ham fisted approach that now only hurts the businesses that don't pay up:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/over-300-businesses-...
These extortionist tactics don't give me any confidence that ad blocking is even being done for the right reasons. It's just a roadblock setup to make the Adblock companies money through force.
Nobody pays for news anymore, so sites are forced to get money through ads. The concept that everything needs to be free has also led to the abundance of advertisements.
"You only need facts and journalism to build trust with your customers so they might consider paying you directly."
In the past 5 years, many local, paid, newspapers have gone out of business. It nearly destroyed the entire industry. People don't pay for news anymore because of the Internet. It had the same shakeup the music industry had a decade ago.
I seriously doubt you would be happy paying a fee for every website you visit. This is what would need to happen if we get rid of advertising completely.
I feel like many people want it both ways: a quality product for $0 dollars and no advertisements of any kind. It's just not realistic.
One day, some smart people fed up of paying X invent a way of evading. «It's not fair to pay X!» they say. Most people follow them, why wouldn't they?
Next day, same smart people: «Humm, how about people paying X/? to us instead of paying X to the system? Let's make a compelling argument explaining the fairness of it as some people feel that evading is somehow immoral. They will bite.»
-- Devil's advocate
System is funded by X.
People evade X.
System gets progressively shittier.
In other words, it is an oversupply issue.
If ad blockers do indeed make this business model unprofitable, the size of the market will shrink rapidly, and at some point supply will become lower than demand. And at that point, the remaining content suppliers will be able to charge X, and people will pay it, because they won't have anywhere else to get their fix from.
So this all is one case of the market working things out on its own. There's no reason to interfere here - it'll find a balance eventually. The only reason to complain is if you dislike what that balance will look like (e.g. if you'd prefer more sources of content than the market can actually bear). But the only way to maintain a different balance is by subsidies, direct or indirect. If ad blockers are banned, for example, that is, in effect, a government subsidy to the content creators.