I actually think this is fair, and I say that as someone who has been using adblockers since the dawn of time and couldn't imagine using a webbrowser without it.

I believe the court has decided absolutely sanely for one: it should be my choice as an internet user whether I want to be exposed ot ads or not. In my case: no way, Jose. And to those who make the argument that a lot of what the internet offers todays would be unsustainable without the ad revenue, I say that although you may think that you cannot live without this or that or the other on the internet, let me reassure you: you can. Everything on the internet is expendable. Trust me. Yes, even TikTok, son. Heck, most of what you're in love with today wasn't even there 10 years ago.

It may come in as a surprise to some but yes, you can have a life without the internet. And to be honest, I'd rather lose some conveniences if the alternative is this absolute insanity that is today's web without an adblocker.

But if content providers do not want to give me their stuff unless I watch their ads, I think that's fine. It's your right to do that. Just don't think that I am going to turn off the adblocker for you as a consequence. Much more likely, I'm just going to go somewhere else for my kick.

Exactly. I've got a right to block ads if I can figure out how to achieve that technologically. But they've got a right to not give me content if they can figure out, technologically, that I'm blocking their ads.

This all seems very fair to me.

If the server can run a script to analyze what plugins you're running, what else can it take? Exfiltration of arbitrary data is not something that is OK.

You can't force a server to serve, nor should you force a client to give more information than is necessary to serve the request. Anything else is no longer technology, it's adversarial and now we're in a Prisoner's Dilemma.

I hate billboards. I feel like they’re too intrusive and wouldn’t mind seeing a ban.

Especially the ones that are back lit. Can’t believe advertisers are given the right to attempt to distract drivers the most.

Broadcast static-media advertisements generally aren't engaged in a cat-and-mouse game where they increase surveillance to combat fraud.

The point is that web site owners should be able to easily implement ad/pay walls, and let the market decide whether users are OK with that. The current situation is that ad blocking is a luxury, afforded by people like us with a decent Internet connection for the constant updates, and understanding of technology, to enable ad blocking in the first place.

They should be easily able to make the attempt, they should not easily be effective because to do so is to allow authoritarianism.

I paid for my device, they should have no control over it, yet they do. The threat of having that ability is too high.

Let's not forget that people are (1) choosing to visit the site, and (2) choosing to run the server's code locally. This isn't authoritarianism.

If you want to watch YouTube, or Netflix, or whatever, you have to seek it out, and run their code. And of course, you should mutually agree to terms to see be distributed their content.

no they don't. Even with this theoretical header, they wouldn't have control unless it was an OS-level setting (even then, it'd be trivial to spoof).

they have data you desire, you send a request to connect, they use info in that request to give you a response. malicious services aside, the worst they can do is send nothing, or only undesirable data (a page full of nothing but ads, that you'd block. resulting in nothing). It doesn't control your ability to tab out, close the tab, switch the browser, nor change your OS.

And this isn't just about the browser, but about things such as certain cables being unable to display movies, etc.

>certain cables being unable to display movies, etc.

HDCP was indeed a mistake. A very flimsy one at that. There's so many ways to display content that trying to block it on some specific kind of cable protocol is silly. It just makes people think the device is broken.

Isn't paywalls (not ad walls) just bog standard subscription membership?

If so, the technical implementation part of that has been pretty well solved many times over.

Ad-walls though are a different kettle of fish.

I wish sites would stop with the nag pop-ups and all that junk.

Ideally, sites’ link generators would have a means of labeling their links as “ad-required” and our browsers could just be programmed to not render them. Link aggregation sites like Hackernews could just not show those sites to users that don’t want them. If a site requires a GDPR tracking pop-up, I just don’t want it to show up in my duck-duck-go searches.

It is annoying that it is a battle. We have two parties that just don’t want to do business with each other. I get that many sites are ad-supported and I wish they could be hidden so that I could more easily find the other ones.

Just go to the Filter Lists tab in your uBlock Origin settings and check these groups:

* AdGuard - Annoyances

* uBlock filters - Annoyances

If you still see nags anywhere after enabling these lists, please click on the extension button and use the report option (the speech bubble icon).

Not sure I understand that particular hill for dying on. If they aren't legally required to give you a choice, they're just going to be tracking you unconditionally.

Maybe for most sites, but not for most site visits, since people mostly visit just a few large sites that are too big to ignore the law.

GDPR is great, sites should be required to ask to track. But if they start asking, most sites, I’d rather just leave.

They'd rather filter sites that track in the first place.

Sure today, in a world that developed without that, that would remove most of the internet, but so what?

That just means their principle vs practical set point lands on a different part of the scale than you, but so does everyone's vs everyone else's.

It's a great idea to imagine, if that were somehow possible and the norm, would it still be most of the internet? Would good old unprincipled pragmatic market forces not result in most sites somehow finding a way to be in front of everyone's eyes?

If they can figure out how to do that technologically, it's their right (IMO). However, I believe they're fooling themselves if they think they can maintain this: the hackers are constantly figuring out how to defeat such protection measures, and it only takes one hacker to figure out how to bypass their ad-blocker-blocker and add it to the ad-blocker apps (or filter lists) for it to work for everyone who uses that ad-blocker.

To me, I think this is the more salient set of points. I accept that a company wants to show me ads to pay for the content they're serving. I accept that they may refuse to let me access content if I don't first view/consume the ads. And I also accept that if I am not happy with that specific arrangement, I am free to go elsewhere.

What I do refuse to accept is that once they have sent me the data that they have any right to control how I consume it. If you want to prevent me from accessing your site unless I view ads, you have a very simple way to do that -- have your webserver return an error code unless I have viewed the ads. But once you have sent me the bytes, in my eyes, you lose any right to dictate how those bytes are processed or blackholed.

This is my view as well and I argue the danger of any other policy is authoritarian abuse of humans. Mandating that these companies have rights on devices _we_ paid for is a stepping stone to more egregious things.

If you have a private copy of a printed newspaper, you're free to tear out a page, draw pen-mustaches, wrap a fish in it, make a paper airplane, solve the crossword puzzle incorrectly, wipe yourself, basically anything you like - for your own amusement.

I don't see how your private copy of the webpage bytes should be any different.

In both cases there are very clear boundaries: you can't redistribute derivative works without permission & attribution (copyright), you can't publicly broadcast, etc. Everything else should be fair game.

A newsstand may not give me a paper in the first place without me paying first, but if one is in my possession, then it's mine to use incorrectly.

The web site has the option to not put it's content out where the public can see it anonymously.

Stop running their code locally if you don't like what it's doing! You're choosing to let them dictate, and if it's not running on your machine, they didnt' "take back" the bytes.

Also, realistically, most places send javascript to check for ad-blocking, and if it's positive, they skip sending you the content. I can't imagine why anyone would send you the content so it's local THEN try to keep you from seeing it.

Regardless of the consequences I'd rather see an ad free internet. If that means Youtube can't exist and Facebook can't exist and Google can't exist then so be it.

Do all those sites need to be commercial enterprises with sales teams and large editorial teams? Or could they go back to being hobby passion projects?

Or maybe there's just a handful of them and they are subscription-based for people who _really_ want that kind of news, and the best writers and creators gravitate to those sites and they build a sustainable business that way?

The ad-supported business model has allowed perhaps _too many_ people per topic area to try their hand at garnering eyeball in exchange for what is ultimately the same repackaged content, because they don't need their users to pay for the content, they just need to draw them in to support the sales of ads or tracking data.

This incentivizes all kinds of user-hostile behaviours in the quest for profit (or even just sustainability).

So I don't begrudge people trying to build an audience by publishing online about things they know or love, but one of the downsides is that the Internet's "content is free" tradition - that comes from hobbyists working out of passion - has led to a whole industry of "how do we make money off people without taking money from them" and that's ads and tracking.

And then the game becomes "how many people can I draw in to my site by any means necessary" instead of "how can I create engaging content".

Most of the sites on cameras, gadgets, games, cars e.t.c. are dead or dying and have been replaced by youtube channels, many of them run by hobbyists.

SEO, content farms and content marketing are killing the open web and Google is enabling it, perhaps because they're ok with the web being replaced by 4 or 5 websites, Youtube being the biggest of them.

There's still plenty (too many?) commercial websites - most that include their own YouTube channel - trying to compete for eyeballs by repackaging the same preview/review/press materials that companies send out..

They're no longer the only game in town though, that's for sure. I don't disagree that many hobbyists (definition up for debate) can compete on merit for the audience, which is awesome of course.

useful content? which ones? average youtuber incentives (be it through YT or Patreon) tend to just be a community private server on Discord to talk to the creator with. Or cut content that they couldn't air on youtube anyway (e.g. extended commentary on a video that would be de-monitized otherwise. There's way too much competition to lock out signifigant part of a Youtube's channel's content.

> The ad-supported business model has allowed perhaps _too many_ people per topic area

"Too many" according to whom? You?

If no one "needs" them, then they won't get viewers and thus eventually won't get ads, either.

Demonstrably untrue; there are plenty of spam sites that hide themselves and play the SEO game well enough to (temporarily) get my eyeballs. These sites only satisfy a "need" insofar as my grandparents have a "need" to respond to emails from Nigerian scammers.

Sure, yes, according to me. That was implied when I posted my opinion on here, a discussion forum where we share opinions.

My opinion is that the ad-supported model itself, which doesn't rely on having paying readers/users, but rather on attracting said users to then be paid for showing them ads or collecting their data, has perhaps unintentionally created too low of a bar for entry (in hindsight) and as a result, the fierce competition for profit has led to user-hostile incentives in order to stay alive in such a crowded landscape.

I think the low barrier to entry for putting up websites or creating content online are a net positive, for the record. I love that anyone can just put their content online and compete for an audience on merit (more or less), rather than needing some large monetary investment up front.

But I also think the ad-supported monetize-the-shit-out-of-users model is a bad thing, and benefits from the same low barrier to entry.

But you take the good with the bad I suppose.

if you make an assertion about there being "too many" of something, it begs for someone to ask how you know this. Almost anyone on HN might ask that. However, you've now added some nuance to it.

I think in general a low barrier to entry is a good thing: most of the music on Bandcamp wouldn't have even been available to the public 50 years ago.

Most of the self-published books out there now also would never make it past the Mean Girl "agents" who populate literary agencies. Most of those books are crap, but then so are the books from major publishers in airport bookstores.

Ah yes, the old "must challenge every statement" gambit. You must be fun at parties.

…and if the hobbyists know that their sites aren’t going to get any visitors, there’s little reason to make them in the first place.

For all the negatives, a consistent stream is one of the biggest benefits from professional content creators, be it traditional news, Youtubers, streamers, or even bloggers.

These are not mutually exclusive things, sorry if I implied that.

My point was more about the race to the bottom with commercial content sites/networks/publications in what seems like a borderless space, with increasingly bad incentives to draw in users.

This only holds if you agree that humans are perfectly rational economic agents. I disagree with that and think that there are lots of little interactions where just introducing a financial transaction impacts how people interact.

Maybe If I tallied all of my internet usage, figured out how much I value my internet usage, and then gave each page visit a value I could find out that I value my hackernews usage at $0.02 per link click. But if clicking links directly led to me paying more, my usage pattern would change.

You can chose to only frequent ad-free sites and services. You wouldn't even have a use for an ad blocker.

It really seems like a win-win.

Hulu

I wouldn't characterize it as a "bad" business.

No, it's just often that the logistics make it too inconvenient.

For various impossible-coordination reasons, micropayments and monthly-subscription-to-all-news just haven't taken off, despite consumers being willing to pay.

Or in a worst case scenario, everyone who is willing to pay already is, and the business is indeed non-sustainable. But I doubt this.

People can be willing to pay, but corporations are unable to coordinate amongst themselves to receive the payment or make it frictionless enough. This is not an uncommon situation in economics. It's not a fictional concept.

E.g. you can look at Spotify as a success story of coordination. That wasn't inevitable though. If record labels had chosen to launch fragmented independent music streaming services, that wouldn't have changed people's willingness to pay for all music for $10–12/mo., even if it weren't available.

>you can look at Spotify as a success story of coordination.

By basically giving the record labels all the money and make the actual artists not really make money on their craft. I guess nothing can be perfect.

But music is realtively cheap to produce (but not cheap at the top, of course). There is also a reason Netflix has been price hiking and still bleeding content and customers as everyone rolls their own. You simply want more control when each episode of content is 7 figures.

Ads are not going away.

I would argue that the internet has gone rather overboard with it, but that's a different thing.

Just <img href="/ad.png"> would work, and has no tracking and is essential the same as print media ads (or those YouTube sponsors for that matter). While this would probably net in less income than e.g. the Google ad stuff, it's completely viable and I'm sure there are people and companies doing something like that.

But uBlock will block that, because it's an adblocker and not a trackblocker, and that's clearly an ad. That's perfectly fine, but what I want is a trackblocker

If I tell you jefftk.com has 10k daily active users so you should pay me $500 to put a banner on the top of my site, should you believe me?

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's not done.

Come to think of it, you're on a site with track-free ads right now: the ycombinator launches/hiring posts really are just ads.

And whatever the status-quo exactly is right now, what I responded to was "if something is not sustainable without ads then it's not a good business model", and tracking really doesn't come in to play in discussing to what degree the very concept of ads is or isn't desirable, as that's just an entirely separate issue.

The vast majority of ads are supported by and come with tracking. Sure, there exist sites that do ads in a way that isn't so intrusive, but they're an extreme minority. It's also hard-to-impossible to tell if a site is tracking you or not.

So long as more than a tiny number of sites use ads that involve tracking, it's necessary to treat all sites as doing so.

Which ones? All the non-tracking, supposedly-GDPR-compliant ads/analytics out there just use a convoluted and overcomplicated interpretation of the GDPR to claim their solution complies while it ultimately doesn't, or stretch the "legitimate interest" definition quite a bit.

For example, if it's able to reidentify a user coming back to a website, then it doesn't matter if they hash the IP address 20 times which is salted with the outcome of a crystal ball and all under the supervision of a magic unicorn, it's still processing personal data for non-essential purposes and should require explicit consent.

There is one "tracker" on DF, but it doesn't affect the ad you see. And if you read the RSS feed, you get the ad without the tracking.

Advertising can be a perfectly fine business model. Look at the radio, television, and newspaper industries. These have existed for decades and have brought much good to humanity even though they need advertising support to exist.

The vast majority of the web has been given away for free by being ad supported, that's never going to roll back, the expectation has been set.

Thankfully, the wider public might find ads irritating but they'd still prefer them over paying so ads aren't going away anytime soon.

There is usually a group of people advocating that using an adblocker is like stealing or killing businesses. My counter argument is that I'm fine with that. Don't offer something for free when I have complete control over how it is displayed on my end if you can't stay in business if I block some part of it. Everyone on the planet should use ad blockers for their own protection and to actively change the internet to a non-ad business model.

I will never stop using ad blockers and I don't feel bad about it in the slightest.

But you can already do that by not using Youtube and FB. You just want to deny opportunity to use them to other people who may like to have access to "free" (ad supported) internet services.

People literally can't pay a sane price for content. A blog post or warmed over press release isn't worth a penny let alone a dollar. Ads unfortunately are the only mechanism to pay the sub-cent value for content.

Even if you could reasonably conduct a penny transaction that's still an insane price to pay for a blog post or tweet.

So it's not about people being unwilling to pay it's about being unwilling to pay transactable amounts of money for content that's nowhere near worth those amounts.

depends on the content TBH. some (relatively few in the grand scheme of things, but "some" when focusig on otherwise helpful feeds) blogs are worth their weight in gold. some feel like they should pay me to even read it. I do wish a micropayment sort of system was feasible in general so we could test such models. But I'm guessing that's a logistics issue with payment vendors; they probably don't like small, disparate transactions anymore than a GPU.

Still, I've tried the closest thing for a few comic websites back then where you buy "coins" in bulk and purchase new releases a la carte (e.g. say, 2000 coins for $10, and each new chapter is 10 coins. so roughly 5 cents). Doesn't feel too bad.

As of now, any given random website is far more likely to have ads than not, and many of the drawbacks of getting served ads (tracking, data collection, and performance issues) arise before the page is even loaded enough for you to know they exist.

In one dimension. Maybe.

Influencers would still be a thing. So would SEO. The web would be like some medieval map with vast uncharted territories and "here be dragons" but also the few known sites where everyone in the known web lives.

Unless we dismantle media and tech monopolies, they will still dominate that web.

Maybe I've been drinking too much internet capitalism koolaid, but a completely ad-free internet would not have had the commercial lift we've enjoyed these past 20-plus years.

I completely agree that an ad-free internet would not have seen numbers get big as quickly as what we've experienced, but it doesn't necessarily follow that an internet that makes numbers get big quickly is also the internet offering the best user experience.

Usually, user experience gets sacrificed to make the numbers get bigger, faster.

Would that be a bad thing?

I'm sure that's true, and it would be a bad thing for those people. But for the world at large? It's not clear to me at all that it would be bad.

I recognize the double-edgedness of that, too, though.

I mean, we just called them Encyclopedias back in my day. They won't be as high quality, complete, nor peer reviewed, but there are plenty of fan wikis powered entirely by free labor. no money in nor out.

Search is much harder, but I've been keeing an eye on Unlimited Kagi which seems set to do this very thing. Hope it succeeds.

That said, these days more and more guides and tribal knowledge is stored in discord servers. I don't know if that's better or worse. At least there's no ads.

Unfortunately the ad economy is closer to begging. The consumer doesn't value what's being provided and the provider somehow tries to guilt or force users into "paying". And overall everyone loses - the content provider doesn't get the value they want for their content and the consumer doesn't get something they value. The only winner is advertising intermediaries. That unfortunately is the system we've set up.

Tax law, at least where I live, is very explicit on this. If a company provide goods or services with the expectation of payment, be that as a good or service, then that transaction trigger value added tax. Free samples and gratis products do not trigger this, including those that has advertisement, because those do not have an expectation of payment.

In general it is the company that is selling a product that must manage payment of value added tax to consumers within the country, and the government has soft blocked imports from companies when that tax has not been paid.

I don't know German law around value added tax so they might have different exemption rules. I do wonder however if the court acknowledged in the Axel Springer case that the viewing of advertisement is an payment for providing content.

Maybe even more of a life without it.

There is one fact that I learned immediately when I started using the internet in 1986 and then the www in 1993.

There will always be an endless supply of free "content" on the internet and www. With or without advertising. The ads did not even start until 1994 or so. There was an internet without ads. A non-commercial internet. That's what I signed up for.

That people today are paying for multiple "subscriptions" to view stuff on the internet is amazing but it will not make the free stuff disappear. It will not stop non-commercial use of the network.

The internet did not come into existence for the purpose of advertising. But the companies exerting oversized control over it, that is all they are interested in.

I know that web scrapers carry some negative connotations, but keep in mind that search engines like Google couldn't possibly exist without web scraping. A world where you can't block ads or scrape content for indexing is a world where only a few preordained companies have the ability to build search engines. Proposals like Web Environment Integrity (WEI) accomplish two goals for Google: they make ad blocking more difficult, and they kick down the ladder to prevent new innovative search engines from emerging. There are already many websites which only allow-list Google's IPs for indexing, and I think we should be very hesitant about anything that could further entrench their monopoly on search even if we support content creators being compensated through ads.

This is unfortunately patently not true anymore. As the internet has gotten more intertwined in our lives, so has into the gvmt, corporations, society, etc. For example banking, for using my bank I need an internet connection. I literally work on the internet, but even if I didn't I cannot imagine any of the main jobs I would be remotely qualified to do that doesn't need internet, so I'd be back to minimum-skill minimum-wage jobs. Which wouldn't afford me my current home, and from which I'd be kicked out of the country I live at since I wouldn't qualify for either the job type or minimum salary.

Note: I assume by "expendable" you mean "can be avoided without a huge impact in life", I _could_ live without internet but I'd also need to be working a minimum wage, wouldn't afford my home, and probably would even lose my visa.

Don't want to look at ads online? Block them but realize you yourself may be blocked from certain places.

Don't want to allow ad-blocked users? Okay, but you lose those users unless you engage with the reason they are blocking ads and either give them an alternative or convince them to greenlist you.

Every single thing on the internet is expendable. The internet as a whole is arguably not. I think that's where the rub lies.

>It may come in as a surprise to some but yes, you can have a life without the internet.

really depends on the person. I would not have my current career nor WFH role without the internet. It doesn't mean I can't "live", but it would cause a radical enough shift in my life that I'd essentially become a different person. I'll leave that answer to the philosophers.

I would go full Luddite and swear off YouTube, Twitch, etc if I absolutely had to watch ads to use their services. I already do this with twitch - once the unblockable ads start playing I close the tab and spend my time elsewhere, with nothing of value lost. There is literally no content that is worth being exposed to ads to access, from my point of view. I realise that many others don’t share such militant views on this, but for me it’s non negotiable.

In short protecting the users' right to run what they want on their computing device.

Now just apply this general principle to copyrighted content as well and we would approach a sane legal system (at least in this specific area).

I can’t have my cake and eat it too, and I’m fine with that.

Maybe if at a certain point everything is locked down with the help of device attestation/DRM I might change my tune, but even then I’m sure there will be alternatives for me, whether online or offline.

I wasn't in love with my girlfriend / kids / etc before I met her either but I wouldn't want to go without her just because there was once a time where it was true. That seems like weak argument.

Personally I’ve got a great experience for years now with Wipr on iOS, but at this rate I should start asking for a commission because I literally just suggested it to someone else here on HN.

You’ll be saving them money (less infrastructure costs, like bandwith) without giving a penny to their competitors (because you’re using an adblocker); actually now you’re probably a net loss for their competitors.

So they’re happy to lose you, I guess?

We’re headed towards a paywalled Internet, I know first hand. And I hate it.

Thing is, even with this ad-free model, the most motivated ones will be the ones on top. And They will just find other ways to monetize instead of ads, because they are motivated to capitalize on their audience. Donations (charitable or incentivized), merch, content paywalls, self-ads instead of sponsored ones. Same concept. Ads are a big problem, but not THE core issue.

A paywalled internet will mean I'll have to be choosier about what I consume, but what's available will hopefully be high quality because it's not competing for my attention when I'm at my weakest at the end of a long day, it's competing for my wallet when I rationally review the budget every month.

I'd be completely fine with that result. It would mean that commercial websites would be segregated off, leaving the rest of the web (the part I get real value from) more discoverable.

If that's the intersection of need/demand, okay so be it.

Like, I have preferences but I understand they might not be others'.

Ads aren't ads. They're trackers, viruses, malware, scams. Even video ads on Youtube, whilst not vectors of viruses or malware, they're advertising literal scams and YouTube are responding saying these ads are 'within' policy guidelines.

As I've said a few times before (in various ways), browsing the internet without an 'ad blocker' is like running Windows in the 90's / 00's without anti-virus software when you're a serial downloader of interesting programs / executables (like I was); it's negligent, you're asking for trouble.

The advertising industry, Google, Facebook, etc. are hiding behind the terminology "advertising" because it makes it sound a lot more palatable than what the reality is, as I said above: tracking, malware, viruses, scams.

If it was just advertising, then I'd be much less rabidly agressive in my defense of blocking it: Annoying is a long way separated from Dangerous.

Advertising, as it has evolved on the Internet, is Dangerous.

Additionally, the amount of bandwidth the ads use is enormous, especially when they include self-playing video, and people who have government-issued phones in the USA (poor people) only get 15GB of bandwidth on most plans, and that is burned up within a couple of days due to this.

>If it was just advertising, then I'd be much less rabidly agressive in my defense of blocking it: Annoying is a long way separated from Dangerous.

This really needs to be emphasized more, because the problem is that these so-called "ads" aren't just ads anymore as you said.

If they were just ads, sure they would be annoying (or hilarious if they are made well!) but ultimately not something that most of us would feel a religious desire to block out of our lives.

But no, they aren't just ads anymore. They are malicious in their intent and harmful in their contents. If it's not the "ads" trojan horsing malware onto our computers, it's their contents directing us towards scams and harmful activities. That dangerous bullshit deserves to be blocked out with extreme prejudice.

Adblocking is the anti-virus of the 2010s and '20s, it's a defensive measure to keep ourselves safe.

I subscribe to a magazine. It has ads. I pay my butler to cut out the ads. Is that illegal? Now I have a robot butler doing the exact same thing. Is that illegal?

The web server is serving you content. Your ad blocker is a robot butler cutting the ads out of the documents you're receiving.

Dropping the analogy, YouTube has every right to block me from using the site if I'm using an adblocker. They do not have the right to continuously try to circumvent my adblocker

Yes, I think that, say, Mc Donalds has all the rights to bombard me with ads when I enter their "restaurant". Even ads for, say, cars, if they get some deal with a car-factory.

So, yes, I think a company has the right to bombard me with ads when I visit their premises, even if I've taken actions to avoid seeing those ads. If I don't want that, I'm free to not enter their premises (i.e. visit their websites)

No, it doesn't. Maybe they'd like it to work that way, but in my experience it's never worked that way: it works just fine with my ad-blockers. (knock on wood)

I guess we'll see if they come up with more effective measures, but honestly I doubt it: anything they come up with can be countered, and there's a literal army of people happy to find ways around their ad-blocker-blocker measures.

If the tech companies stopped using regular HTTPS to serve webpages and set up a walled garden like Netflix, they really could stop the ad-blocking. They'd have to make their own browsers/clients to support their proprietary protocol, and use encryption, so for instance you'd have to download and install a new app just to watch YouTube videos, but it could be done. But this isn't going to go over well with users I think.

Sorry, but data allowances are NOT free. In the past I have had data allowances of 2GB per month which works out to just 60MB per day on average. It doesn't take many 5 MB advertisements to completely use up that small data allowance.

Now supposing you have to actually choose whether to download a movie or to download hundreds of unwanted ads, which choice will YOU make?

How much attention are we required to give these ads? How much annoyance in bypassing them is required? Are we only allowed to walk away from the TV to avoid ads? etc

From a similar era, it's also worth noting that some VCRs had automatic "adblocking" (pause recording, and resume once the ad breaks were over.)

Personally, I think it boils down to: my eyes, my brain. I shouldn't be compelled to effectively lose the right to close my eyes when I want to.

> While user freedom means that users are able to use the tools that they wish to when browsing the World Wide Web, the court nevertheless preserved Axel Springer’s right to exclude users with an activated adblocker from accessing its content. This can be understood as an approval on the use of adblock detection tools by companies like Axel Springer.

This sounds fine to me. If you want to put your content on the internet for all to see, great, but I'm not going to let my browser render the ads that you suggest that it render. If you want to put the content behind a paywall or otherwise block ad blockers, fine, I'll pay if it's worth my money or I won't if it's not. But I'm not going to turn my ad blocker off just because content publishers whine about it.

Certainly. But it's dumb on their behalf because you won't see any of their message at all. In practical terms, they might as well not exist.

And the next time, you won't even bother to follow a link to there.

(1) https://www.tomsguide.com/us/malvertising-what-it-is,news-19...

"Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others."

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221

Thus begins the arms race. The client can simulate all that happening, but ultimately not actually present the ads to the user (possibly including a blank screen with a timer for enforced video ads).

Then the server starts forcing client attestation to make sure their scripts run in a trusted environment.

Gets really messy really quick.

Except, the one side has to pay for the dev work on their own proprietary system, the other side is a horde of volunteers. At a certain point it isn't worthwhile, easier to just accept that some people aren't going to cooperate

A user is not "visiting" a website, they're not stepping onto their property, they are sending a request for data, and the website is replying to that request. A copy of their data is being willingly sent for display to the users machine.

In the case of DNS blocking, requests to advertising addresses aren't made, so no response is received. In the case of in-browser content blocking, the received reply is put through a filter to remove the elements of the reply that the user doesn't want.

The concept of trespass just doesn't fit here.

Not if you're telling their posted signage to go fuck itself and ignoring the terms under which it was provided.

I understand the point of view you're coming from but, from my point of view it goes against the idea behind having a web presence in the first place (which is likely because I'm stuck on that old romantic view of the web from 20 years ago when people shared information for reasons of passion rather than profit). It's also a bit like a EULA, it's not enforceable it's just game-theory-esque attempts at claiming more ground than that to which they're entitled.

If no one pushed back, they'd push further and harder.

https://www.startbase.com/news/adblock-plus-mutter-eyeo-waec...

I can understand defining a standard for acceptable ads.

I can understand allowing ads that meet that standard.

What I struggle with is allowing ads that meet that standard AND require payment.

Content is paid with your eyeballs or with money. If you're not willing to pay with your eyeballs, then you shouldn't get the content. I think that's fair.

In China where copyright laws aren't enforced, there's simply no economic incentive for producers to create content...let's not go there.

The advertiser only wins when they convince me to do something I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Often that thing is not in my best interest. Buying a new car is great for advertisers. It’s a terrible financial decision for me.

Advertisers succeed by manipulating consumer behavior in ways that harm the consumer. Protecting myself from harmful manipulation is not only my right but I’d be an idiot not to do it.

Companies that prevent me from protecting myself from manipulation earn my ire. Fighting against Adblock makes you a bad company, and people who do it are doing a bad thing. What do we call people who do bad things? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The website owner has the choice to allow me to see his website ad-free, or to refuse my access to his website altogether.

That's OK. I can survive if I don't see his website at all. OTOH, if he blocks out too many of us, there won't be sufficient eyes on his advertising anyway.

* pay for the ads I see? Yes. I have many times been in the situation where I had a small monthly quota of data such that my total data allowance per day was only 60 MB. It doesn't take many 5 MB advertisements to complete use up my meagre daily data allowance.

If this breaks websites’ business models, that’s their problem, not mine. I don’t have bareback sex with strangers and I don’t visit random websites without uBlock Origin.

If your site fails because I’ve blocked your analytics suite, you have a poorly developed site.

Wah, cry me a river. Some corporation making hundreds of millions of dollars thinks it has a right to run malware on people's computers, just so the executives can line their pockets with more money. Maybe they should spend some of those millions and figure out a less stupid monetization strategy instead of trying to dream up a bunch of laws that suit them

The reality is much of the web is ad funded, so some sort of ugly compromise is necessary. Allowing both sides to do as they please seems more fair than holding a gun to corporates head and telling them no.

That said I reckon news is an exception - it's way too centralized and way to crucial to democracy to let all the big news orgs move as a unit. The way they all moved as a unit & some lead the charge on paywalls knowingly taking a hit felt way too coordinated for my liking.

I ignore them as they aren't terribly targeting, and I'm not an impulse buyer based on some pic of an overly happy smiley person.

Inasmuch as I'm not obligated to fund the advertisers and companies I see in the streets, the same is true of the net.

I owe them nothing - especially as they try and track me. I leave my phone in the car when i go shopping so location isn't a thing they can utilise against me, which they would if possible.

Having said that, i am looking after a friends dog at the moment. I walked past a store that sells royal canine a few days ago... got an ad for dog food on amazon, and in my gmail.

Coincidence? Possibly. Am i nervous? Absolutely you should be too.

I've spent energy and time finding out how much my local govt got from these ads and learned three things. They don't want to tell, because it's embarrassing small amounts. They don't really know the exact numbers. Many ads on "public spaces" fund private or corporate coffers rather than municipality.

If I have some kind of legal obligation to permit their system to do stuff on my computer, then surely they must have have some level of liability for what that stuff does or enables.

Unfortunately... i don't know what we can do, even if the entire dev community gives google the finger.

Moreover, your right to not be spied on for you browser configuration is the same as your right to not have your irises tracked. This isn't even close.

all this shaming by content owners who tend to continue pushing more intrusive ads is being rather unfair. at the same time, i don't see any issues with them witholding access to content if we try to bypass their intended use.

today serving content at a reasonable level has never been this cheap. if you serve a 2MB webpage for 500 word piece, then it serves you right when you complain about how much it costs you to run it. using that argument to moral policing only goes so far.

We need better ad-blocking technologies. Let the arms race continue. Haven't had to deal with ads for years now, as a happy Firefox + uBlock user.

While you may prefer anarchy, in the real world courts will make these choices for you, and enforce the rules, putting your property and liberty at risk.

Rights are just commitments by a government to ensure certain things do/don't happen within its area of reach. A right is only as good as a government's ability to enforce it.

In this case we aren't talking about life or property or physical things in a single jurisdiction. We are talking about information exchanged over a distributed network, that spans nearly every jurisdiction on Earth. Unless you are expecting a single world government, monitoring every network link, and a ban on encryption in the near future, it's unreasonable to expect the "rights" being discussed to materially impact you.

Maybe you work in advertising, and this does actually affect some number in a quarterly report.

If a site doesn't like those terms, fine. I'll find my content elsewhere.

But. The end of this arms race is gonna be problematic because of the halting problem. Unlike some other issues, we possibly don’t want to push it too hard here until the society catches up, or we’ll end up with black box programs inside the browsers, handling all aspects of rendering. That would be a wasteful loss for everyone.

The web has been getting less useful, more irritating, and more problematic for years anyway. At this point, it wouldn't be a huge loss to me.

No, it's about fraud. With your proposal advertisers have to trust publishers really will show their ads, and unless the publisher is very large and has a reputation to protect advertisers pretty reasonably don't trust them.

(We do actually see what you're proposing, with YouTube, Facebook, Google Search, etc)

You could do this by having the ad networks serve the pages, reverse proxying to the publisher and inserting the ads. And then the publisher page can run its verification scripts, instead of the ads running verification scripts. But that gives us a web served by Google, Criteo, AppNexus, etc. which would be pretty sad.

I am not taking something they own by force on a ship.

I am not distributing their intellectual property to others without authorization.

Now, there are perpetually-changing EULAs you don't get to agree to that just change underneath you, and are rarely notified about.

Hence I block all ads,if a site has a nag screen about ad blocker, I block it from my searches with Kagi. I wish it already had a block list for that so I never see these sites at all. Sites who does that are typically of very low quality anyway.

You could be on a network paid for by your employer, one very frugally negotiated, or a redundant yet costly satellite link you have for vanity reasons.

It's like a buffet that requires you fill your plate only the way they want it filled. It's a buffet. It's not a prefix.

They're not. You just turned out to not actually want what you asked for.

>I have a tool that manages this for me and they're telling me I can't engage with some of their content because I won't engage with other of their content.

Yes, because they provided the former free of charge solely on the basis that you'd accept the latter as well.