Ad Blocking Raises Alarm Among Firms Like Google
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I think outside of ISP issues like those discussed in the article, sites like Google are actually hastening the average users desire to ad block. I think it's possible that with the addition of things like the product ads for a product search and the fact that Google is the default jump off site for many people, they could be exacerbating the ad fatigue of their own users. I bet Google will have a tough time finding a sympathetic ear if Ad-Blocking goes more mainstream...
At the same time though, I despise the ISPs that take user money and then complain that Google should also pay before they deliver me what I paid for. That's just ridiculous, and I hope Net neutrality can get in place before it's more mainstream of a practice.
It your business model doesn't work anymore, you have to move on. That's what the music and movie industry should learn. Maybe Google will have to learn it too. The NYT paywall is working pretty well.
Maybe you're worrying that paywalls will be raised everywhere. I don't think so. There will always be free content. Also, maybe we need some P2P protocol instead of HTTP, so content can be delivered for cheap.
I do think though that people who adblock now do so cause it's relatively fringe and they feel like they are a drop in the bucket and not harmful to the site. If it was suddenly mainstream, I think a lot of folks would realize the old ads weren't so bad as the new paradigm and would opt for ads over paywalls.
When data is being sent to my device, I want to be allowed to decide if it is shown on the screen. If executable code is sent to the computer, I want to decide if it will run. If code design to track and monitor my is being sent to my computer, I want to decide if it will be running or blocked.
When people have ownership of their device with the option to block ads, people will block ads. The only way to enforce ad-viewing is to take away that ownership. In that world, I rather take paywalls.
Google can always ask the webmasters that lost everything after Google updates as Google's earnings skyrocket quarter after quarter.
Same as if I'm channel surfing - if an ad comes on, I change the channel. If I'm engrossed in a particular programme and ads come on, I generally don't change the channel.
I think ad-blocking software should encourage the use of white-listing more. Perhaps by 'packaging' domains that people may want to white-list during the install.
Then paywalls and interstitial-ad-walls would pop up everywhere. It wouldn't be very technically hard to force users through an interstitial ad before they could get to content. Quickly people would realize the previous way sites did ads was actually better.
What will really happen in the scenario you outline is either users will stop using the site (as much or at all) because of the escalation in the ad arms race, and/or wait until ad-blocking software stops those kinds of ads, too.
I think users are more forgiving of advertising that obeys the social contract (they get something out of allowing a marketer to have some of their precious time and attention).
Free includes the Freebox Server (for free), which features:
ADSL modem, router, WiFi
NAS (250GB)
External HDD support
DVR
Supports a lot of media formats, including mkv
IPTV to any computer on the network (including VLC on Linux is seems)
Time Machine and AirPlay compatible
BitTorrent (seriously, an ISP that includes BT on their router)
VoIP (SIP) server/proxy with support for:
Wired RJ11 phone
Built-in cordless base station (DECT)
Smartphone or computer VoIP
Free calling to phones in France, including mobile
Free SMS/MMS in France
Blu-ray/DVD player
VLC Player for playing nearly any media type
Plays media from Freebox Server, networked computer, or USB drive
Web and email on the TV
Games, with includes gamepad
RF remote, and phone/tablet control apps
Dare I say, maybe they should charge their customers more, and not blame Google.
BTW, the ad-blocking will be disabled on Monday (http://www.freebox-v6.fr/index.php). The ad-blocking is done by the Freebox Server (which is the home router). Open source code is here: http://floss.freebox.fr/
Or maybe they should have partnered with other (e.g. skype for video conferencing, google for apps, etc.).
Edit: also worth mentioning that Free makes a 40% margin (at least in the adsl business), so it's not like they are not already a very profitable business. The issue is that they might like Google-like revenue, getting payed for eyeball is one way.
To be honest, I normally pay them no mind in the first place, which might be overall more harmful.
But an ISP blocking ads is very dodgy... An ISP tampering with web pages at all is wrong - I think an their job is to deliver only, and exactly what the web server gives them to the person who requested it, who is then free to choose what part of the page they see. All the more reason for more web sites to use SSL/TLS.
When you block an ad on the web it's not being counted as an impression and the content provider is not being paid (if CPM).
They're very different in terms of money-flow. It doesn't mean devaluing an advertiser is better, but they're two different outcomes, even if it just means "no ads" to user/viewer.
it depends on how the ad is actually served, but i would assume that a smarter adblocking tool would "fake" the ad request, so that an ad provider would not be able to tell the difference between a user seeing the impression or not.
If there is any compelling argument for net neutrality it's this: don't let regional monopolies decide what sites their customers can access based on what kickbacks the ISP receives.
Widespread opt-out ad blocking will likely end in content producers blocking offending ISPs.
As for the particular case mentioned (YouTube bandwidth for Free) I would like to know if the take advantage of the edge caching available.
All in a this reads as a pro-ISP fluff piece.
My understanding is that when these things happen, the content provider is virtually always willing to make the link bigger (because congestion causes lag for their customers, which they don't want).
The problem is that ISPs have started leveraging the hard monopoly they have over the ability to send packets to their own customers. So instead of just paying to upgrade the link between the two networks, they want content providers to pay in effect to upgrade the ISP's own internal network -- which their own customers already paid them to do, but if they double dip then it's pure profit. And the content providers (or their own network provider) will have no choice but to pay whatever is asked or lose access to many thousands of customers.
The real problem with all of this is what it's going to do to the marketplace. Because the only way to push back against that sort of extortion is to have sufficiently compelling content that the ISP can't risk losing it, in effect having your own monopoly to counter the ISP's. So YouTube is fine, Netflix is probably fine (but see spat with Comcast a while back), and what happens to the little guy? Screwed.
Which is why the people saying this is about Google have it totally wrong. Did you catch the "no comment" from the article? You would think they might have something to say if it actually affected them, right? Condemn the ISPs acting unreasonably? But Google is fine. They're the ones with leverage -- they're the ones the ISPs are complaining about because they can't push them around.
The problem is the ISPs can and do push everybody else around. And that has to stop, or we'll be left with the core of the network owned exclusively by a tight cartel of the likes of Google and Amazon because they're the only ones with enough clout to push back against every regional monopoly ISP in the world.
It's likely that the government will like that argument (let's help french business over US companies who don't pay much taxes).
Most companies are already paying a premium to get content directly to users by way of CDNs. This already happens, has happened for years, and will continue to happen.
When someone pays Akamai, it's because Akamai has negotiated directly with every ISP in the world to put some boxes on their network so bits get to the ISPs users faster. I think people who think this doesn't already happen are kind of missing the point.
In the case of Youtube, this is a totally different issue, IMHO, because it's not really about content producers. It's about a shitload of bandwidth that an ISP has to build their network to handle. And that's their job right? Except Google runs ads on Youtube, and makes money from the end user this way. The ISP is just a "dumb pipe" to you and me, but they have serious outlay to provide a lag-free Youtube experience to their customers for which they get nothing back.
Now, I'm sure the smarter ISPs have negotiated some sort of revenue share with Google as part of peering agreements, but maybe the contract terms in this case weren't to Free's liking. How would we know? IMHO there's not enough information in the article to blame either party one way or the other, but I think that most people on HN are treating this more as a net neutrality thing and not as a contract dispute. :)
I don't recall objecting to that. If ISPs want to run a telco hotel at their central office and rent space for people to run a CDN, that's not a problem.
The problem comes when they subsequently leverage their monopoly over access to their own ISP customers to try to force content distributors to pay them for rack space, by refusing to accept free peering. If you don't actually need a presence at every ISP, the ISP shouldn't be able to force you to buy it from them just because they have a monopoly on those customers and can raise the price of peering so high that paying them for rack space becomes cheaper than buying it from anyone else.
If you're a network provider and you pay to bring your fiber to the demarc at another ISP's facility, that ISP should be required to accept the traffic. Because the alternative is blatant monopoly abuse.
>In the case of Youtube, this is a totally different issue, IMHO, because it's not really about content producers. It's about a shitload of bandwidth that an ISP has to build their network to handle.
How is that not about content producers? Content producers post content on YouTube. It has to get where it's going at a price that makes operating YouTube viable (and operating its smaller competitors viable, lest YouTube become an abusive monopoly too) or they won't be able to do that anymore. And the ISPs have big, bad reasons to try to make YouTube-like services unviable: It requires a lot of bandwidth and it competes for viewer attention with their own TV offerings.
>The ISP is just a "dumb pipe" to you and me, but they have serious outlay to provide a lag-free Youtube experience to their customers for which they get nothing back.
Where does "they get nothing back" come from? They get back the very substantial monthly fees that all of their end customers pay to have access to YouTube. That is what that money is for -- to bring packets from YouTube and all rest of the internet to and from those customers. And every video YouTube serves has been requested by one of those paying customers.
ISPs who expect customers to do nothing more than check their email are quite capable of offering a barebones plan that allows no more than 128kbps sustained download speeds and is incapable of streaming video. But they shouldn't be allowed to charge $60 and $100 a month for multi-megabit residential connections and then be heard to complain about it when the service they advertised is the one their customers want to use.
I should point out that these ISPs are a) massively profitable and b) have been dragging their feet over network upgrades for about as long as they've existed. I have little sympathy for complaints about network upgrades when I go outside and see the same piece of copper coming into my house that has been there for half a century instead of the shiny fiber they've been promising for what seems like decades.
>IMHO there's not enough information in the article to blame either party one way or the other, but I think that most people on HN are treating this more as a net neutrality thing and not as a contract dispute.
I think the mistake you're making is in assuming that those are two different things. What do you think network neutrality is about other than preventing ISPs from leveraging their monopolies into abusive contracts with other parties? Can you see how raising the price of reaching an ISP's customers for all of the entities that compete with the ISP's pay TV content, but not raising the price for the ISP's own content, is bad for everyone including the ISP's customers?
Customers paid for what exactly? Buffet prices are low because not everyone eats 14 dishes. I have downloaded over 100GB this past week but I pay a lot of money to my ISP. If I paid the equivalent of USD 10 and enough people did what I did, they'd have two options: increase prices for everyone or eat the extra bandwidth and network upgrades. Maybe someone can look at whether telcos have an extraordinary profit margin or not but I don't think so.
The telcos do not pay, their customers do and price /offering are always being adjusted either by a bandwidth cap, a higher price or both.
Buffet prices are low because bits are extraordinarily cheap. Come back the day AT&T posts an annual net loss and we can talk about raising prices.
>Maybe someone can look at whether telcos have an extraordinary profit margin or not but I don't think so.
http://ycharts.com/companies/T/profit_margin
The average looks to be in excess of 10%. That's pretty extraordinary. Certainly well in excess of the market average.
The average looks to be in excess of 10%. That's pretty extraordinary. Certainly well in excess of the market average.
Not good enough to be Google though at over 15%. You may also want to compare earnings and debt. T has http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=T+Key+Statistics over $60 BILLION in debt and relatively low earnings.
Moreover, when a corporation is simultaneously holding debt and issuing dividends, the reason it continues to hold the debt is not because it needs to remain "in debt" to continue its operations. Barring incompetence, it's almost always either because the rate it's paying on the debt is below the market rate of return and so paying the debt has a negative relative value, or because holding debt has some sort of tax or business advantage for the company.
And bringing in Google is just a complete non-sequitur. AT&T can't afford to pay for upgrades because Google has a lot of money? Nonsense.
Ah yes, only non-telcos should show a profit for shareholders. My point, that you go out of your way to miss, is that 1. both sides are for profit corps 2. Free.fr and other might have to increase prices to keep up with demand 3. if Free.fr, Verizon or At&t imposed usage caps the same crowd would go after them with as much vigor.
And bringing in Google is just a complete non-sequitur. AT&T can't afford to pay for upgrades because Google has a lot of money? Nonsense.
How about let Google (or Netflix or ...) chip in? They are making a killing relative to telcos.
None of those things are necessary. ISPs can make network improvements while posting stable profits without imposing usage caps or charging excessive prices. What they can't do is to do all of those things while making undeserved monopoly profits.
>How about let Google (or Netflix or ...) chip in? They are making a killing relative to telcos.
Heck, Walmart makes a lot of money too, why not have them pay for it?
If you want Google to pay for last mile improvements then move to Kansas City. I mean seriously, why should I pay AT&T if Google is the one paying to build the network? Why don't we just cut out the middle man and have Google run fiber to my house?
In this case, the ISP kicked things up a notch. If their users don't like it, they can always switch providers.
You also underestimate the amount of bandwidth Youtube "freeloads" off ISPs all over the world. This is a very common "problem".
this is often not an option, thanks to governmentshaving granted isps and telcos local monopolies in return for their laying the physical cable.
All of the "last-kilometer" connectivity is owned by the historical telephony operator France Telecom (also known as Orange after its privatization), which has the obligation to rent it to other providers. You can switch between all country-wide ISPs as you wish.
It's even easier than that. If this becomes a widespread practice, content providers just switch to HTTPS and then serve the ads from the same server as the content.
But the ISPs know that sort of thing doesn't happen everywhere overnight, and it isn't worth defending against like that until the practice is sufficiently widespread. So now the ISPs are abusing their regional monopolies in the short term for negotiating leverage to try to collect undue rents from content providers who want to reach their customers.
And if you're one of the paid content folks then I certainly wouldn't be getting out the champagne, because if ISPs can use this to extort a toll out of ad-supported content providers, all it's doing for you is setting a bad precedent, and you're next.
i dont think this would work for syndicated ads, because theres no way for the ad company to verify that the ad was actually displayed, or that the X impressions the webmaster claims is actually true.
then add that domain to the list to block! The only way to prevent adblocking is to serve the content and the ad from the same server, in which case you got the problem i mentioned in my reply above...
You're thinking about this the wrong way around. Google provides web hosting services, right? So now they can offer the feature that if you use their hosting services and use HTTPS, you can have the ads get served from the same place as the content. And if ISPs are blocking the ads that the person buying the hosting service wants their customers to see, that becomes a huge feature. Meanwhile because it's in their cloud, the ad provider / hosting provider can do any verification they need to.
In a few words, it's just business and they'd like Google to share the wealth. Google cares about net neutrality only when it's beneficial to their bottom line https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/google-verizon-netneut...
But where there is no meaningful competition the ISP does not get to pick winners and losers - they should be a dumb pipe that does not discriminate.
Of course there isn't meaningful competition in most of the US.
This would be one thing if you're talking about them charging their own customers for such things. Though the idea that any ISP that actually tried this in a competitive market would still have any customers left by the end of the week seems mighty suspicious.
But there is another point if we're talking about peering. Each consumer-level ISP has a hard monopoly over its own customers. There is no competition for access to those customers. If you want to reach them all, you (or your network provider) has got to come to terms with each and every one of those ISPs. And the only way you have any leverage is if you're a big fish whose services are too important for the ISP not to provide its customers high speed access to.
The little fish need network neutrality or they're screwed. Regional competition between ISPs wouldn't even fix it if we had any plausible way to bring it about.
I'm fine with letting them try because meaningful competition means consumers can go elsewhere. I hope there are some interesting business models to discover such as ISP side security filtering, ISP prioritisation of traffic, cheaper prices for consumer concessions, allowing content providers to pay for priority etc.
Second, you're still not solving the problem of ISPs having monopolies over their own customers. We don't want ISPs with customer block monopolies charging content providers for prioritization -- they'll charge monopoly prices and suck every ounce of margin they can out of the already-struggling content production business. Even if we had competition between ISPs at the regional level, they would each still have a monopoly over their customers from the perspective of content distributors.
The definition of Internet is essentially a globally connected network that passes generic Internet protocol traffic between endpoints; if IP payloads are being inspected and manipulated, it isn't really an Internet service that is being provided, and it is misleading to sell such a service as 'Internet'.
The government does have a legitimate role in regulating misleading trade practices - if someone is selling something that is not safe to eat as food, for example, then that is misleading, and it is the government's job to intervene and say they can't do that, rather than letting the market sort it out.
They don't have edge caching, but they have a (satured) private peering. I can't believe upgrading this peering would cost any significant amount of money to either of them, the issue is that Free would like to be paid for access to their customers.
If anything, users who use the network the most could be asked to pay more. It's not Google who "clogs the tubes", it's users!!
But in this case what's interesting is that we hear very little complaints from users or users-advocacy groups. Were I a Free customer I would be extremely upset to see that my ISP would decide to filter content without warning (I do hate ads and have installed an ad-blocking solution at the router level, but it's my decision, not my ISP's).
What would be cool would be for more users to use VPNs to hide their traffic from their ISP or the regulators; if this kind of incident repeats itself too often, it might become more common place...
Information has never been free, it has been over charged for, but its existence is the result of money flowing into the information producer. No money, no information. Not everyone 'gets' that yet, but things like the NYT Paywall are demonstrating that there are actual stable markets for information.
Of course there is no place you can sit down and talk to the whole world about this sort of thing, so we end up with these kinds of events, and their response, which shape the future. Fun times.
> Google, have based their entire business models on providing free content to consumers by festooning Web pages with paid advertisements
That's more than a little misleading.
It prevents the ISP from screwing around on their end.
I would explain to a non-technical person by analogy - imagine the telco needed you to use _their_ particular telephone when you make/recieve calls.
The Bell monopoly required you to not only use their handsets, you usually had to lease the phone from them.
Just because people don't generally like the ads, Free is deciding which content gets through its system. If it's going to do this, then why can't it decide not to allow particular news through because 'the news provider should pay for the bandwidth'?
Simply block their IP ranges in your firewall.
That is: users hate ads. But someone has to pay for all this stuff.
The obvious model -- user pays -- has never really worked. There's been lots of variations on micropayments but so far they've all sucked.
Naturally I am taking no account of the horrendous base rates in this area and am crawling ahead anyhow.
Curious if this is actually the case. I certainly don't hate ads, except when they are obnoxiously annoying but that is getting rare these days.
Display ads, less so. It's an arms race between advertisers and readers. Advertisers want a slice of a fixed supply of reader attention; readers presumably want to read/watch whatever they came to the site for. It's a zero sum game, so anything the advertiser gains is lost from the reader.
So readers develop countermeasures (ignoring ads in certain positions) and advertisers counter-countermeasures (sound, movement, popovers) and so on it goes in a continuous spiral.
The operator of Free can make the case that he is taking payment from users to enter the contest on their side. That it saves him a bunch of bandwidth is gravy.
interesting that you put it this way. Perhaps instead of ads that mimic television ads on the internet, there should be new forms of advertising. The internet is an interactive medium, and why should it copy TV?
If an advertiser made an addictive game that brands the product, people would come willingly to play that game, and in the process, be exposed to the branding message.
They could create ARG (altertnate reality game), which promotes word of mouth advertising (see how well this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees did).
I think there is no place for traditional "one way" advertising on the internet, because the internet isn't Tv.
It may not work for everyone, but I pay more attention to those side-ads too. Not flash ones, just still images or text, because my eyes sometimes wander. If I have an ad stuck in my face, I have a hostile reaction that makes me actively negative towards whatever the product is. When it accompanies content, I am more willing to meander towards it.
Reddit does a really good job with it. The side bar ads they have are not intrusive and don't block content, but I always end up seeing them when scrolling, and since they are non-intrusive they are about the only ads I do click.
I do hate ads and have installed ad-filtering software at the router level (with Tomato) -- it's a great solution because it filters ads on all mobile devices without any other action on each device.
But apparently there are people who don't mind ads, or who even enjoy some of them.
It seems difficult for one side to understand the other side. People who hate ads don't understand how one can tolerate them, while people who don't mind them don't see why anyone would have a problem with them...
What would be interesting to know is how many people there are in each camp; there are relatively few users of ad-blocking software, but I don't think this number is relevant. Many people who hate ads don't know how to install ad-blocking software or don't even know that it exists (my parents, for example). Once they discover it they wouldn't go back to how things were before, for the world.
Unfortunately the general public, and maybe even politicians, don't understand this and believe the lie that google is freeloading.