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French ISP Blocking Web Ads By Default
New submitter GavrocheLeGnou writes "The french ISP 'Free.fr' is now blocking ads from Adsense and other providers by default for all its subscribers. The option can be turned off globally, but there's no whitelist (Google translation of French original). From the article: 'Because the service doesn’t offer a whitelist (contrary to Adblock, a service I’ve used for years), this means that it is an all or nothing choice, activated by default to block everything. And since it is not only internet, but TV and phone lines running through the FreeBox, it’s possible that, if left unchecked, Free could beginning blocking TV ads, or phone calls from known spam hotlines. While this seems like a potentially beneficial service, there’s no doubt that it’s biting at the heels of several sectors who rely on advertisement to make money, let alone the advertisers themselves who pay to reach an audience, and are blocked at the door.'"
The ISP gets its money by selling Internet access to his paying customers, not by allowing all the ad crap to sneak through.
Blocking the crap is just value added to their clients service IMHO.
I certainly wish there was such a convenient ISP service near home.
While all the posts here so far are in favor of this move, it is a very bad thing, and not just for the publishers that depend on ad revenue. If my browser has requested data from the internet, by default the ISP's job is to faithfully forward those requests and the responses to me, not to selectively block, modify, or even inspect the packets I have sent. To do otherwise is a violation of network neutrality.
This is bad because it can be abused by the ISP to serve their goals, and not that of the user. For example, in this case the founder of Free, Xavier Niel, is also a partial owner of the newspaper Le Monde, and by some reports ads are not being blocked on that site, while they are on others. Other accounts give different results with ad blocking, so that may not be intentional, but regardless it is a good hypothetical example of why this can be a very bad idea. It is one thing if the ISP offers additional services that the user can opt-in to use, but very different if they require users to opt-out (many of whom may not even know/understand that the ISP is modifying their traffic).
Newsgroups in the early days were funded by institutions, not all of which were taxpayer funded. Corporations used the newsgroups too. Members essentially paid their own way.
Explain then why on pay cable television we're still subjected to ads? Every time there is an advertisement free medium the vultures swoop in to ruin it. If advertising is so great then why do the advertisers continually resort to dirty tricks? People are using ad blockers out of self defense against an active assault. Have a few small unobnoxious ads and people wouldn't mind. But fill up 2/3rds or more of a web page with junk ads that slows down your computer and internet then of course people are going to fight back.
What we have today is a bad thing. There is not the information future that was envisioned, instead if's lots of media being fed to a passive drooling audience.
We're still paying today, sometimes a significant amount of money just to get internet connections. We're actually paying much more money today than we did 10 or 20 years ago. The advertisers are not paying for their ads out of their own pockets, they've figured out that other people will pay for the bandwidth necessary to send the ads out.
We get spam clogging our email, we have popups annoying us, we have our computers and networks being slowed down. I have to pay money when they send me a text message to my phone, I don't even answer my home phone anymore even though it rings 4 or 5 times a day since it's all telemarketers despite being on the no-call list. These people are evil and we shouldn't be making excuses for them.
If the advertisers are leeching off of all of us then I have no qualms putting up ad blockers and leeching off of them.