Slashdot Mirror
Ad Blocking – a Coming Legal Battleground?
An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld asks: What will happen if big advertisers declare AdBlock Plus a clear and present danger to online business models? Hint: it will probably involve lawyers. From the article: 'Could browser ad blocking one day become so prevalent that it jeopardises potentially billions of dollars of online ad revenue, and the primary business models of many online and new media businesses? If so, it will inevitably face legal attack.'"
No. People who block ads do not click ads anyway, and as long as adblock is opt-in, this will never, ever be a problem.
Internet -> Adblock -> Router -> Ad-free internet. These devices already exist, it's only a matter of time before a major router manufacturer builds in black/whitelist support for ad blocking. AdBlock Plus is great, but if they want to escalate, we are prepared to go full out.
A legal attack on what grounds? That "we're not getting the profits we have a God-given right to"?
Because legal attacks have worked really, really well against anything that happens on the Internet. Taking down MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay eliminated piracy altogether, never to resurface again. Gone, dead, finished. Burying ad blocking services under lawsuits will totally never make them even more resilient and hard to pin down. No way that'd happen.
I've run across a few sites here and there that won't display any content unless I disable ad-blocking. I'm surprised this isn't more prevalent. Surely it's cheaper to pay a programmer to write some code than paying lawyers to do their thing.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Robert A. Heinlein
I'd love.. well.. no. I'd tolerate more ads on sites if they were safe. Here in the Netherlands, we've recently had infections go via nu.nl and nrc.nl. Both very respectable news websites and perfectly safe. If it wasn't for the trojans served via the ads.
Nowadays all ads are the enemy. Flash, Java and Adobe reader seem perma-broken, coming with new 0-day attacks every time.
So adblockers aren't just a convenient way of stopping the more shady sites from popping a million blinking commercials in your face, they're part of regiment to keep your PC as healthy as possible.
(Certainly with the current trend of commercialized trojan kits, which means every noob can whip up something that nestles itself in your MBR, stays invisible and undetectable to everything you can through at, can steal your passwords and inject any banking site with redirecting iframes. No sir, the internet is a wild an dangerous place.)
Slashdot's anti-ad rhetoric aside, content creators or rights holders have a right to monetize if they want to -- just as content consumers have a right to bypass that content. Everyone has a choice and everyone has other options.
Right now, the easiest path for those who want to skip ads is also the best-of-both-worlds path: You can consume the content you want *and* avoid the ads. Eventually, some (maybe a few, maybe many) content creators will simply not serve content unless they have confirmation that their monetization vehicle was served as well. Some sites will die because it turns out there are other options -- and many will thrive because people need what they've got.
If it *does* become a legal battleground, it'll be less about the macro and more about the micro. No one gives a fuck if there's one less or one more eyeball on some half-baked 9gag clone serving up commoditized CPM advertising. But a social-media ad that's relevant to maybe 100 people in the whole country? Advertisers -- and their attorneys -- damned well care if they're losing significant percentages on those hyper-targeted buys, which often carry a premium.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Anyone can file a lawsuit over just about anything..... So could advertisers decide to sue developers who made tools like Ad-Block? Of course!
I think the reason you haven't seen this happen so far (and why it may not happen in the future) is the relatively poor odds of winning such a case. First of all, you have to ask if users normally have the legal right to avoid viewing advertising that's presented to them. Clearly, there's vast evidence that they do, including the ability to change the channel on the TV when commercials come on.
One would have to successfully argue that somehow, contrary to all advertising ever created in the past, advertisers placing their ads on web sites enjoy a special legal protection where they can force viewers to view their ads.
IMO, such a suggestion borders on insanity .....
...I'll be happy to look at whatever they send to me.
And vice versa.
They probably can kill AdBlock Plus (legally). As they tried to kill libdvbcss, at least. When this happens, people will find other ways to block. And advertisers will find new ways to attack blockers, and to pass their ads through. And so on.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
It does, its even happened to major sites like the NYT in the past.
The whole point of HTML's markup language is to separate structure from content so that client side devices can render the HTML (and XML/SGML) in a matter most appropriate for the user. It was planned from the onset that many different devices could render a page differently. For example, there used to be completely text based browsers and clearly they rendered pages differently than graphics based browsers. While I'm not sure if they were ever built, there were even discussions of audio based browsers for those who are sight impaired. The ability to modify how a page is displayed is central to the entire concept of HTML. Using an Adblock add-on is simply utilizing HTML in the way it was intended. If the publishers do not like it then there are many less flexible formats that render a page exactly how they want it -- most notably PDF files -- that they can use to publish their content.
No, I am a software developer from the EU, who happens to work on a somewhat popular web site, and I value both my work and the work of other people who create content which proves to be useful or at least entertaining for me. This is the reason for example why I never click on the disable ads checkbox here on Slashdot, buy all the games are rarely play nowdays, etc.
and im paying it not the advertiser
until they pay me then they can fuck off
Back in the old days there was lots of talk and more than a couple of companies working on micropayment systems. The idea was that you could pay something like half a cent for a webpage. Prices could be adjusted depending on things like demand and target audience. Quality web sites would prosper, crappy ones would die out. All the good stuff you get from a free market.
But somewhere along the line, advertising usurped that role and no micropayment system ever achieved viability. So now we get useless ad-farms filled with seo-bait, articles on web-sites broken down into one paragraph a page to maximize ad-impressions and worst of all a brain-drain focused on spending billions of dollars for tracking systems to (presumably) more effectively target advertisements (never mind the societal cost of using these tracking system for other purposes) rather than creating new and innovative technology that would benefit man-kind in general.
So I welcome a show-down between advertisers and ad-blockers. There will be casualities, maybe even bullshit where adblock authors see some jail-time. But if the end result is that advertising recedes and we come up with another more straight-forward, less socially-destructive way to fund the creation of high-quality content on the internet it will be a huge step forward for society.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Officially, we're not cattle. So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?
That's not just a figure of speech. As the (great?)grandparent comment says, it's about impressions. There's plenty of evidence (1, 2, 3, for instance) that ads have the most effect on behavior when you're not paying attention. So the only way for me to stop manipulation of my own mind is not to have those ads in the background in the first place.
But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions. Which is even weirder because, I'm told, the free market depends on informed consumers making free choices.
Let's face it. Advertisers are gunning for a world where our eyelids are propped open with matchsticks while we watch whatever we're told to watch.
But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions.
It's not some right of the advertisers that's at issue. It's about whether the author/publisher of the original work containing the link to the ads has the right to demand you view the ads that pay him if you view his work, or whether your right to cut out the ads and only view the remainder takes precedence.
Now if the advertisers and the authors really wanted to get you to see the ads, they could literally embed the text of the ad in the text of the work, rather than embedding an easy-to-filter link. (This could be done automagically at the server.) Then you'd need some serious A.I. to do the cutting. But that would also make it harder for the advertiser to track how often the ad was seen (he'd have to trust the server) and eliminate the obnoxious graphic and animated ads.
(And they ARE obnoxious. I just started a new contract and the customer's I.T. department deployed Chrome with substantially less ad protection than the firefox+adblock plus+flashblock I'm used to. Popups/overs/unders are supposedly blocked, but the animated garbage and the mouse-over stuff that pops out and covers the screen I'm trying to read are horribly annoying, and they HAVE to be sucking up a lot of network bandwidth. If advertisers had just stuck to still images scattered around the page it wouldn't have attracted so much work on countermeasures.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I have several websites which have been up for well over a decade and are highly rated. Last year I was laid off my job and for the first time, started putting Google ads on my pages. I'm making a few hundred dollars per month from them. Yes, people do click on ads that interest them. I use only ads which are related to the subject of the page. I try hard not to annoy my visitors, no pop ups, pop unders, no ads in the text, no flashing obnoxiousness. No tracking.
I am embarrassed to admit that I use an adblock myself. I felt hypocritical so I turned it off for awhile. OMG. I had forgotten how bad it could be out there. I certainly don't blame my visitors for using an adlocker. I try not to punish those who don't.
Generally, the webmaster decides where and what type of ads will display. Blaming the advertisers is off base as they make a variety of ad sizes and types available but the webmaster chooses how far he goes with them. Perhaps try writing an email to the webmaster telling them that you find their site too annoying to visit again.
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.