New Freebox update censors ads by default for 5.5M users | Hacker News Reader

New Freebox update censors ads by default for 5.5M users

rudebaguette.com

17 pointsmnml_15 comments

Good riddance though. I wish other ISPs would follow suit.

People do NOT like advertisements, the popularity of AdBlock shows that pretty clearly.

Well we (web developers) are trying to make the ad experience as best as we can. A lot of websites wouldn't even exist without ads (Google, Facebook etc...). If ads are annoying you, use Adblock, but do not remove ads from every user by default! I work for big startup in the US, and we wouldn't exist without ads.

I think they're just doing that to get good publicity (oh Free doesn't show ads on internet? I think I'll sign-up at that ISP!) and also to piss off youtube.

They will turn it off by default in a couple weeks/month for sure. Mark my words.

Without an option to disable this, or an option to white-list certain things, this is basically just highly targeted censorship.

Its possible to disable it but it's enabled by default. Lets see how long they last before Google strike back ! Free has always been in trouble with Google because they don't want to pay for the peering.

Knowing the reputation of Xavier Niel, he is gleefully waiting for Google's counter attack.

'Censorship' of spam emails is ubiquitous. How is this different from that for an end-user?

Spam email do not contain any content you want to read.

Webdevelopers/contentcreators create content but use ads to fund development of those works.

They seems to only want to block Google ads. Free and Google have had issues for a long time about 'who pays for bandwidth'. Google doesn't want to pay, so Free blocks their revenues.

The flip side of net neutrality issues.

Don't tamper with my Internet please.

Freebox Revolution = 2 M users only !!! 5.5 M users, but 3 M are using the Freebox V5 (the previous version is unable to block ads).

I'm sure that this would also reduce traffic on some of nosiest advertisements which would benefit an ISP greatly.

ads don't add up to a lot of traffic for an ISP, video and so on does.

This is huge news.

ISPs modifying the HTML served is a big issue. I'm not that much of a fan of ads, but disabling ads is crazy.

It's not working that well apparently.

First thing is: a lot of Google ads are served directly inside GMail (these are the ones I notice the most) and at the top of the result from Google search.

If that trafis is over HTTPS I've gat to wonder how Free plans to filter them out.

But in any way: Free already wanted to throttle YouTube, which is not OK.

If I'm paying Free that much of an amount each month I want my bandwith. I Free cannot provide me the bandwith I want, then I'll go to an ISP who can and who doesn't throttle me.

Free isn't modifying HTML, but filtering ads servers IPs.

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