> 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.
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).
do we "need" 50 brands of soda, or 300 varieties of cheese?
"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.
train your eyeballs better, then. Or theirs.
Why do the villagers keep complaining about the widespread bandit problem when they could simply improve their swordfighting or hire bodyguards?
I'm sure villagers wish they could adblock or PiHole the bandits. would be a win-win situation.
Someone's been watching The Seven Samurai.
Ok.. This feels needlessly confrontational?
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.
I think you're about 5ish years out of date.
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.
Hobbyists who are sponsored by NordVPN. ;)
They represent a small fraction of the hobbyists on the web. The majority that I see aren't wanting or accepting sponsors of any sort.
The same rhetorical question still applies for hobbyist YT channels, IMO. Especially since many of them lock the more useful content behind subscription walls.
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.
This is an interesting point in the SEO conversation.
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.
Ehh sure, that's a take.
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.
What's stopping people from creating these hobbyists sites now? Or you from using them?
Discoverability is a problem. The average hobbyist website has no chance of making it to the top of the pile of search-engine-optimized trash websites that are returned by search engines. For example: Quora often takes up half of my results these days.
…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.
If we just ban all advertising then there are no more SEO optimized sites trying to get that ad-revenue. So hobbyists should have no trouble with popularity if the ad-supported internet goes away.
hobbyists who may one day want to have a lifestyle out of this wouldn't benefit. And those would be the sites that have a reliable stream of content instead of maybe a burst of content for 2 months before getting bored or burned out and maybe making a piece of content every 5 months afterwards.
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.
Nothing! And I do use a lot of them personally. I pay for several creators on Patreon and subscribe to a few creator-owned website publications to encourage work I care about most...
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.
You shouldn't hate to say it--it's absolutely true. We don't need yet another listicle site choked with ads competing in a zero sum slugfest for some top organic search result spot. Nobody needs it. The only thing these sites serve is the greed of whoever is producing them. The Internet is worse off the more of these that exist. This shouldn't be a controversial opinion.
I guess I have a slightly more charitable take on this, in the sense that the Internet has an amazingly low barrier to entry for putting your content online and reaching an audience, and I think overall that's actually a great thing.
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".
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.
For me, the problem that internet ads have that older media ads didn't is all the spying that comes with them. It's the spying that elevates them from being incredibly annoying to being just plain evil.
That's not an ad problem, that's a tracking problem. I think it's important not to conflate the two concepts. But other than that, yes, I agree.
They are two different things, but you don't get ads without the spying. Often, you get the spying even if you block ads.
That's not true; there is nothing preventing anyone from serving ads without tracking, and I'm pretty sure there are solutions out there that do exactly that, even if they're not the most commonly used. Like I said, ads were viable in print, well before the internet.
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
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's not done.
How do you know? For starters there's a bunch of solutions out there that specifically market "non-tracking" as a feature. I assume they're being used.
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.
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.
What's the superlative of conflation? That's what bringing analytics into the discussion here is.
OK, let me be very precise, then.
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.
https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
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.
it's not done as often =/= no one does it. And I feel it is a good distinction to make.
It's pretty hard to do online ads without tracking because of how easy fraud is online. With newspaper, TV, and radio we put a bunch of effort into measuring the size of the audience, but those methods are far easier to subvert online.
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?
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.
Would that be a bad thing?
I’d wager a significant number of people posting here owe their careers to that commercialization - I hate listicles, too, but not so much that I would wish them away and gamble that I ended up with the same standard of living on an Internet reserved mostly for nerds (nerds said lovingly, of course)
I'd wager that the pandemic would have gone a bit different too if we hadn't had the internet growth preceding it.
I recognize the double-edgedness of that, too, though.
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 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.
And most of those wikis are now on Wikia, sorry, "Fandom", which runs some of the most aggressive ads I've seen. The flippant response is to strawman then as evil and greedy, but the less satisfying reality is that web hosting can actually get quite expensive for popular sites, especially with media. And there's the additional cost of defending against abuse, of the DDoS, spambot, or malicious human types
Yeah, if the users don't care enough to move to ad-free sort of content, there's not much you can do as a passive viewer. Fortunately, Wikis are in theory easy to migrate should such a motivated user comes along.
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.
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.
That would eliminate 99% of news. Including anyone on social media.
No, it would eliminate most news sites, and little value would be lost. Frankly, net value might be created that way. People will still write about things that happen, and people will still read that, and money just won't change hands. Or people will read paid news, and the quality will almost certainly improve as a result.
No, no they will not. News sites pay reporters. If news sites have no money reporters stop reporting. Journalism costs money.
I said "Or people will read paid news", by which I mean news sites supported by subscriptions rather than ads. I don't think that's a likely scenario, but it's another possible alternative world that could arise.
Good. 99% of news and almost everything on social media is garbage. Burn it all down.
ironically enough, it'd just mean that most news would end up being funded by the government where possible. Which is how the FSFE gets its funding.
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.
If there were no ads anywhere on the internet than everything would be on an even playing field. Currently a site that offers a paid service for something that someone else gives away for free is at a huge disadvantage.
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.
Even if the web was on an even playing field it has to worry about being disrupted by other platforms that allow ads. That could take the form of Web2 which is the web + ad supported sites with backwards compatibility with the original web or it could take the form of mobile apps where users can get useful ad supported apps.
If there were a way to filter sites that serve ads out of Google searches, that would be an interesting thought.
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.
I don’t use google but surely there is an extension to allow you to block a domain?
Some of us want an ad supported internet. And the ad / no ad Internets are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist.
You can chose to only frequent ad-free sites and services. You wouldn't even have a use for an ad blocker.
There are too many low-effort ad supported sites currently. I don’t think we should make ads illegal, but it would be preferable if all ad-supported sites would identify themselves as such and then link aggregators, search engines, or even web browsers could have an easy “don’t show links to ad supported sites” button.
It really seems like a win-win.
It would be very easy for link aggregators and search engines categorize sites as ad-supported or not: load the page in a browser (which these sites often already do) with an ad blocker extension and see if it identifies anything. But my guess is they're not interested in doing this, since it rules out a lot of valuable pages. For example, HN is ad-supported.
Or, some people are willing to pay for it, and some are willing to pay for it indirectly (via ads).
Hulu
I wouldn't characterize it as a "bad" business.
If past experience serves me right, usually it would rther be: Some people are willing to pay for it indirectly by ads and some are willing to pay and still get ads later.
Ads are creeping in to paud-for Hulu. That's the nature of ads (or maybe advertisers): they corrupt the medium they support.
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.
sounds like enough people weren't willing to pay. It's very easy to espouse demand, but in reality not everyone will put their money where their mouth is.
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.
No, I said precisely the opposite.
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.
Except that users are willing to pay for it, since a vast majority of them look at the ads and some of them even click on the ads.
I wouldn’t have a problem with ads if they weren’t so intrusive and obnoxious. Imagine trying to read a magazine that would jump itself to the page with the “Axe” ad, you go back to the page you were reading and 10 seconds later it jumps to the “Chevy colorado” ad. Or asking the bookkeeper for “a book of holiday recipes” and on you way home in every corner a guy knocks your car window to sell you “holiday food”.
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.
It's a well understood part of human nature that it's very difficult to charge for something you previously gave away for free.
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.
I know it will never happen. At least not anytime in the near future.
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.
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 crucial difference being that traditional advertising didn't enable mass surveillance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we could trust adtech to be honest we wouldn't have to vigorously block them. You and I both know X-Block-Ads would be nothing more than an extra wrinkle for your browser fingerprint.
It would be another bit for the fingerprinting, that's an important caveat.
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.
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.
I don't think you've read much on what's coming.
And this isn't just about the browser, but about things such as certain cables being unable to display movies, etc.
I've read about the chromium stuff. This is why 1) alternatives are important and why I switched to Firefox this year and 2) why being open source is important for competitors to fork and avoid this BS.
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.
You're choosing to run their javascript. If you turn off JS, they don't get any control, and you'll likely not get any content or ads.
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.
They paid to create the content, they decide whether you get to see it. Simple as that. No DRM or other shenanigans needed.
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.
Right, because the Do-Not-Track flag was respected oh so well. The only people that seem to care about flags are an invading colonizing system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTduy7Qkvk8
Yes. The adtech industry is a hive of scum and villainy. They'll use every bit of data they have access to in order to screw you.
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.
What do you think about advertisements played by broadcast radio stations? How about billboards?
I turn off broadcasts so I don’t have to listen. And if I record them I fast forward them.
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.
Agreed. Vermont, Maine, Alaska and Hawaii all ban billboards, and they're all nicer to drive in as a result.
Imagine if your radio wouldn't let you turn the volume back up for the next song set if you happened to turn the volume down during an ad break.
https://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you...
Broadcast static-media advertisements generally aren't engaged in a cat-and-mouse game where they increase surveillance to combat fraud.
Well presumably you paid for the magazine, since it has a significantly higher production cost.
I get all sorts of magazines through the mail for free that I don’t even want.
whereas you access websites
But that's not what's happening: what's happening is the server is asking for the properties of the client and making a decision to serve based on response. Similar to presenting credentials to be served. Surely the server is allow to set whatever conditions they are able to express technologically. You can't force a server to serve, or can you?
They can ask for the properties of the client, and the user can then make a informed decision to consent to that collection of personal information. In EU it is similar to asking for identification credentials.
Naturally this may make the process a bit cumbersome and websites that does not behave like this will gain a bit competitive advantage.
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.
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.
I believe their point is that only sites that are tracking you are legally required to give you a choice.
Plenty of sites ignore GDPR, some sites will GDPR just to CYA, some sites have cookie popups just to be polite, "Site with GDPR popup" in reality is a very poor analog for "site that wants to track me." Most sites that want to, especially for those not in the EU, just will, no questions asked.
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.
Who’s dying on a hill? They can have that hill if they want to die for it!
GDPR is great, sites should be required to ask to track. But if they start asking, most sites, I’d rather just leave.
I'm asking why because I don't understand and I would like to understand your perspective. With my current understanding, that seems like a strict downgrade.
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).
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.
In my view, this falls under fair use.
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.
One generally pays for the newspaper.
Not at all. There are many legal ways to receive free copies of newspapers. No one is going to come beat me up just because I didn’t read all the ads.
Denying access to a site is hardly like beating one up for not reading newspaper ads. It's more like they'd refuse to give you another edition of the paper on your next visit, or insisted you pay for the paper instead.
As genocidicbunny points out all the way up in the thread, if the server responds with 402 Payment Required, I'll honor it and either pay or go elsewhere. If it responds 200 OK and sends me the content - I'll use the content however I want, end of story.
What the sibling said, plus: There are plenty of free newspapers, and even magazines. All of this applies to them as well.
And websites are free to put up a paywall in front of the content to get me to pay for it.
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.
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.
But isn't this the case? Who's going after people to do whatever they want to data they already have?
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.
Maybe use android then? Then you can use newpipe, AdAway, FF with desktop add-ons. I use it and don't have the same problem
Firefox mobile can run an AdBlock addon just fine. Firefox focus even has it built in.
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.
and my favorite content creators only post once in a blue moon when the stars align, likely because they don't have a need to post more often. Which is why my most frequent content creators tend to be the consistent ones who try to get something out at least once a week or month.
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.
If that's the intersection of need/demand, okay so be it.
Like, I have preferences but I understand they might not be others'.
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.
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.
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.
They're getting paid by advertisers, not viewers.
Do you got any links to previous legal cases about that? Otherwise it is just baseless speculation.
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.
Maybe because that particular sentence wasn't an argument at all but rather an illustration?
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?
Unequivocally yes. If not, do you also think they should be required to serve all your requests while you dos them?
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.
I’m pretty with 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.
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.
Every single thing on the internet is expendable. The internet as a whole is arguably not. I think that's where the rub lies.
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.
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?
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.
This echoes my thought process, too.
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.
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.
Agreed. The server gets to decide whether to send data and what to send, and I get to decide how I use it when it is sent to me.
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).
"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.