Microsoft, Google, Others Threaten to Sue Adblock Plus Creator

Coming next, Unilever sue makers of televisions that you can switch off / mute during ad breaks.

Mothers sued for giving birth to babies that can close their eyes or even leave the room.

Microsoft should sue itself for having a windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file.

And what about Privoxy ? That's the one I use.

And Facebook purity.

When I go onto other people's computers I am still always shocked by the reminder that the user experience without these products is just so incredibly eroded.

Still, I'm a guy that thinks billboards should be taken down. What an abomination we have allowed to happen to our habitat. If the school put a billboard in every classroom, there would be an outcry; yet I have sat through many a 5 second ad during class with the teacher waiting to press "skip" on youtube.

Adblock is the first extension I install and have done so for the last few years, even back before Chrome was on the market and everyone was using Firefox. I would like to point out that I DO disable Adblock for domains I want to support like blogs and sites I don't mind seeing advertisements on. However, I keep it on by default.

The problem for me is that I don't take too kindly to being tracked and targeted by advertisements. Even though Adblock isn't a completely mitigation of tracking, it does go a long way to try and make you less traceable by advertisers. I also am not a fan of distasteful advertisements either. Case in point: on The Pirate Bay I make sure I have Adblock installed before I go there so I don't get bombarded with Russian bride or pornography advertisements and popups.

Blocking advertisements is our right, this is ridiculous in my opinion. If users want to block advertisements, then, they can either detect Adblock (which can be easily done) and restrict access or find other ways to make money that doesn't involve spamming banner and sidebar advertisements. I don't install Adblock to deliberately take away money from websites that need ads for support, I install it because there is a lot of bad advertising out there.

I don't think such a case would go very far, but it will be interesting either way to see how far this goes and if the tactic of forcing the creator of Adblock to settle or go bankrupt is employed like it is elsewhere to eliminate threats like the copyright industry like to use.

OkCupid has (or had, at least, haven't visited in a while) a pretty decent approach to ad blockers. They detect that you block ads and (after explaining that ads are a big part of the revenue of their service, for which you currently pay nada ...) offer you an option to pay a small sum not to have to see ads (or you can turn ads back on).