> the court nevertheless preserved Axel Springer’s right to exclude users with an activated adblocker from accessing its content
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.
> But if content providers do not want to give me their stuff unless I watch their ads, I think that's fine.
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.
I mostly agree, but it seems wrong to me that the side serving up content even has the ability to tell how you choose to display it. It's like a magazine with embedded cameras that self-immolates if it sees you take out scissors to cut it up for scrapbooking. Feels like a gross violation already.
Agreed. As someone who could not use the web without an ad blocker, I wouldn't even be opposed to a `X-Blocks-Ads: true` request header or something, to just shut down the hue and cry between the two parties. Let's all be honest, then see where it gets us.
I think it doesn’t even need to be a “try to achieve” type thing. I’ll happily leave if a site doesn’t want to serve me without ads. I’m not interested in a technical back and forth.
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.
>But they've got a right to not give me content if they can figure out, technologically, that I'm blocking their ads.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> you lose any right to dictate how those bytes are processed or blackholed.
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.
If something is not sustainable without ads that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model.
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.
Yeah like I hate to say this, but do we need _that many_ sites about cameras, gadgets, games, cars, or <insert topic>?
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).
> If something is not sustainable without ads that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model.
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.
Well, ads are the business model. Ads make it possible to sell things that people don't want to pay for. Newspapers and magazines wouldn't be possible without ads. It's been that way for literally centuries. But internet ads are definitely a new level of crazy.
I'm conflicted about Youtube in particular because when you filter out all the social viral crap, Youtube is one of the greatest educational resources ever created by human beings. I can go search youtube for any subject imaginable and get broad and deep video instruction on the subject from dozens of different perspectives. In grad school when a professor did a terrible job of explaining a niche technical subject, I could go on Youtube and watch lectures from a variety of other professors. I can go to Youtube to learn how to cook, how to dance, how to build a wooden canoe with hand tools, so many amazing things. It's a shame we can't find a better way to fund and maintain the educational portions of it. I don't know of a better way.
> that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it.
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.
Things like newspapers and comic books and whatnot have had ads for over a hundred years. These types of things partly being sponsored by ads is hardly a new concept.
Ads are not going away.
I would argue that the internet has gone rather overboard with it, but that's a different thing.
> If something is not sustainable without ads that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model.
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.
> 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.
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.
> If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model.
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.
Why not just ignore sites that use ads? If people find value in ad supported product they can use them and if they don't they can just avoid them and use an alternative without ads or nothing.
Some services would go the subscription route and survive, but then they're limited to the users that are able and willing to pay. I can't imagine offering a search product or wiki product where payment is required. Donations may be a viable option but may not provide enough starting runway.
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.
Yeah it's pretty simple, the world doesn't owe anyone a business model (something that's forgotten way to often) but nor are we owed free content. My understanding of a transaction is that there needs to be a "meeting of the minds" - if I value what you want to give me more than the price you want, we have trade and everybody wins.
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.
There is one major aspect that I find troubling with companies blocking users with an activated adblocker. It removes the illusion that they are providing a service without any expectation for payment.
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.
There is a grey area though when a company becomes the defacto monopoly over a service. Google and Microsoft email both have history of blocking email from other providers and have created a landscape where trying to run your own email server is a nightmare. But should they be able to refuse service to you if you block ads?
"It may come in as a surprise to some but yes, you can have a life without the internet."
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 mostly agree with this in principle, but an important point is that, when you squint, the technology behind blocking ad blockers starts looking very similar to the technology behind blocking web scrapers. If you're capable of programmatically scraping content without a human user viewing ads, then you're capable of displaying the content to a user without the ads. So any solution for preventing ad blocking implies that the content can't be scraped programmatically.
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.
I agree, I don't even care about ads in specific. I primarily use the tor browser which doesn't block ads due to fingerprinting (it's ok for casual browsing, though some sites are actually obnoxious and slow down the browser). More generally, I care about web scraping and being able to control the presentation of content: for internet archival, using a featureful video/music player (mpv) or library like a local imageboard, utilities like user scripts to add features/programatically do stuff, content blocking (filter rules for specific posts/users), creating RSS feeds for notifications if the site doesn't offer one, simpler/faster frontends like invidious/nitter, etc.
> 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.
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.
I like it because it forces some decisions on various parties.
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.
>let me reassure you: you can. Everything on the internet is expendable.
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.
I’m pretty much with you on this almost word for word.
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.
> Heck, most of what you're in love with today wasn't even there 10 years ago.
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.
While I agree with you, I also am not sure what I should think about nearly every news article on here has a link that someone has posted that circumvents the paywall that has been put up prevent people from accessing the content without paying (either directly or via ads). Is it okay to use an adblocker and not pay for a subscription, but also circumvent walls so I can still access the content?
Christ, this is why I don't even browse the web on my phone. I email myself reminders to look things up when I get home to my laptop. The absence of adblockers makes it unbearable. Three different videos selling three different products unrelated to my query all trying to talk over each other? Kill me please.
There are ad blockers available for both Android and iOS. Both free and paid.
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.
I leave my phone connected via OpenVPN to my corporate network with a PiHole server to filter out most web ads, trackers, etc. What I do try to avoid is using any apps where I can use the website instead.
If you’re talking about iOS, ther is adblocking there. Adguard works well for me on Safari, and Orion browser even runs ublock origin. I honestly never see ads on mobile.
> 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.
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.
There is so much good content on the internet that people put out because they just love it and don't expect any money for it. All of that won't change. Lots of the ad-ridden blogs and stuff will go away but I'll echo the sentiment found largely around these comments: good riddance.
I'm actually very excited to get back to the point where services compete for my money rather than for my attention. Advertising has created an internet that has an enormous amount of content, most of which is just... bad. It's hard to find good content because almost all of it is engineered to get clicks.
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.
> We’re headed towards a paywalled Internet, I know first hand. And I hate it.
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.
Part of the problem is the terminology 'adblocker' is outdated and essentially incorrect.
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.
I'll add that on top of that the ads use so many resources in the browser, CPU/RAM, that it slows many otherwise great budget computers to a standstill. And if you're on a low-res screen like me (1280x720) the ads often overwrite half the content or make the site completely unnavigable.
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.
>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.
>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.
The magazine is given to you for free, you don't pay for it.
The magazine is able to detect that your butler is cutting out the ads.
The magazine decides it does not want to send you its issues any more.
Is that illegal?
To continue this strained analogy, what is happening now would be like the magazine trying to prevent your butler from doing what you told him.
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
They can refuse service for any reason (outside of protected class like race, gender, etc.). YouTube already does this, it refuses to play if you have an ad blocker. Of course people have developed further countermeasures to ad blocker detection.
The magazine is given to you for free, you don't pay for it.
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?
Yup. If you reverse the situation it gets even harder to define. Ie to say you're not allowed to automate your avoidance of ads seems to bundle your consumption of content with your attention to ads.
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
Not only are you expected to put up with the ad, you’re expected to put up with your personal data being sent to hundreds/thousands of third parties whenever someone wants to show you an ad.
That's a pretty charming analogy and it would be perfect some 15 years ago; nowadays adblocking extensions are more like a personal bodyguards that fend off all the leafleters and shady individuals in trentch coat and dark glasses who follow you.
At the end of the day, you have no "right" to a site's content. You have the right to use an adblocker, and a site that depends on its revenue has the right to refuse to serve you.
I’d happily put up with banner ads on websites, it’s the mechanism that serves that ad that I find contentious and is the reason I personally use an ad blocker.
> 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.
As long as malvertising(1) exists, adblockers are basic security hygiene. You wouldn’t click a random link, so why would you allow an ad server to execute arbitrary code on your computer?
I can't find the original source, but there are many articles that claim that FBI recommends ad blockers, the ad networks made the internet unsafe so we need to setup ad blockers on our and our family computers.
This piqued my interest and lo and behold they do!
"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."
Right to use Adblockers also means the remote server has the right to force you to download and display the ads as a condition of getting the content.
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.
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
That isn't true, DRM won in games thanks to dedicated DRM companies coming around. We still have DRM free games that you can download, but some games take forever to crack. The same thing will happen in the adblocker wars in the end, it is much easier to automate systems that takes too much work for volunteers to crack. Not every company will be able to afford that themselves, but if they can buy a proprietary system to do it they will.
When people make it clear to me the terms of visiting their property, I take care to abide by them or go elsewhere. It only escalates when one side decides they must visit yet not abide by the terms.
I disagree, because the 'processing' occurs on the local (my) machine.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Ads are not going away.
I would argue that the internet has gone rather overboard with it, but that's a different thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Dead Comment
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
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.
(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
That's trespassing but with a computer.
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.
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.