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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.'"
They should advertise more on the internet.
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.
I would pay additional money for services like this, in the US. Maybe not for internet, since adblock does a fine job at preventing my consciousness from being polluted by bullshit. But for things like Hulu, or TV...
My wife watches Hulu when she wants to see something that I haven't set up to be auto-pirated with sickbeard/sabnzb/couchpotato. It amazes me the crap people will allow into their brains. "You could save fifteen percent on car..." "FUCK OFF, I'm already a Geico customer, WHY DO I HAVE TO HEAR THIS SHIT?!"
I won't pay for Cable TV but I probably would if I could get TV without advertising.
Yeah, yeah, the industry is driven by advertising, blah blah, guess what, I don't give a shit, totally not my problem, if they want my money, they can start by providing a service that I want. TV with ads? Do not want. I'll keep giving my money to a premium usenet provider, thanks.
The internet would still be a bunch of news groups if it wasn't for advertising: advertising spurred people to create and advance content and it's the #2 on how people make money off the internet... #1? Porn... which has tons more ads for more porn.
The problem isn't advertising, it's how some websites go about it in a less than straight forward manner and not so much anymore, but some used to be really annoying, like the recursive jscript ad pop-up.
I fail to see the downside.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The internet would still be a bunch of news groups if it wasn't for advertising.
I don't really know... are you arguing for or against ads? Your "threat" might be seen as a promise.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ad-supported content sites can start blocking requests from free.fr pretty easily. Not sure how long this will last.
Free is a major French ISP, also just breaking into the mobile phone market with rock-bottom prices. They've always been at the forefront of the price war, and without them we probably still wouldn't have $40 ADSL with unlimited phone, TV..., nor $27/month for mobile with unlimited data/voice/texts, and no restrictions on VOIP, tethering... full net neutrality in fact. So up to now, they've undoubtedly been Good Guys.
They have a long-standing dispute with Google though, about who should pay for bigger tubes between their servers and YouTube, which is unusable at peak time for Free subscribers. Free have been advising their clients to use Dailymotion instead, and don't want to pay for extra bandwidth. Free users are very dissatisfied, and this is becoming a *major* issue.
The ad-blocking move, which seems right now to target mainly Google, is probably mostly a bargaining chip to get Google to pay for better YouTube access for Free.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
This probably cuts the ISP's network traffic in half.
There will be screams from advertisers. Tough. Nobody is forcing you to run a web site supported by third-party ads. This doesn't affect web sites that sell their own products, from Amazon on down. It doesn't affect search much, although it may impact Google's AdSense business. Bing; not so much. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP, etc. don't run third party ads on their own sites. Facebook runs their own ads on their own site.
It might impact low-rent sites like Slashdot, bloggers who want to get paid for their blithering, and other minor annoyances. But the web can run just fine without third-party ads.
Even advertisers may benefit. About 80% of third-party ad clicks come from a small number of users, under 20%, who will click on anything and buy almost nothing. Many SEO experts advise their Google advertisers to opt out of the "Google content network" and just run ads that appear with search results. Search ads appear when someone is looking for the item of interest and likely to buy. AdSense ads are just noise.
Say goodbye to google, youtube, Twitter, Slashdot, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Gmail, Yahoo mail, drudge report, yahoo, bing, and probably a lot of others.
Im going to guess that sites in that list make up more than 50% of your web-usage by site-hit per day, and including youtube probably 80% of your web traffic.
But sure, they all have "bad business models", despite being some of the biggest sites on the internet.
The internet would still be a bunch of news groups if it wasn't for advertising: ...
Like Wikipedia, you mean?
advertising spurred people to create and advance content
Ah, yes, we wouldn't have FaeceBook without advertising.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Frankly this is a little ignorant. The internet is not for any one thing.
Yes, it is
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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).
I kinda miss the usenet. Those were the good old days. At least until the spammers arrived. And Scientology sporge in 2000.
An all-free no advertising internet might be a good thing. Kinda like a world with only FOSS computers, no Apple or Windows. Sure, the general public would miss their Twitter and Facebook but computer geeks would rejoice.
My town recently passed a law blocking people from defecating in peoples yards and spitting in their faces at random. One can opt out of the new law (and continue being spat at) completely, however there is no whitelist for white listing positive spitters and defecators that I do want to receive spit from. This means that its either an all or nothing choice, activated by default to block everything.
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 cleaning up shit and spit to make money, let alone the spitters and defecators themselves who try hard to eat and drink as much as possible to reach an audience, and are now blocked at the door.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
While they don't have ads, they often have huge "Give us money!!" banners, which are just as annoying, if not more annoying than normal ads.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I cannot help but feeling pissed of each time I buy one film and am forced to endure minutes of ads against pirating (But I even paid the bloody thing!) or for films I will not see or for violent films when the DVD contains a cartoon for the kids.
And have you noticed all those films on the walls for things you do not want nor ear about? They have been flourishing in Paris lately. They catch your eyes, because your eyes will look at moving things, however hard you try to ignore them. The ad industry has become a sheer nuisance.
Meanwhile, as a Free.fr subscriber, I am not so sure the move is smart, especially since it would be activated by default (one has to reboot the box to upgrade the firmware, and I do it twice a year or so, haven't done it yet).
I do accept some dose of advertisement on sites, but no flash by default, Flashblock is my friend. That suffices me up to now. Manwhile, I would appreciate Porn blocking, by default. All ads? Perhaps too bold a move.
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
Weird. When I search on Google the first three million results are usually ad farms that have no bearing on what I was searching for, and then about ten million results in I find someone's personal web page with the information I actually wanted.
When did Google 'get so much better at searching'? Everything they've done in the last few years seems to have been designed to give me more and more unrelated results ('I'm going to give you results for what you searched for and for any word I think is vaguely similar, because you obviously don't know what you really wanted to search for'), and not the ones I actually want.
I kinda miss the usenet. Those were the good old days. At least until the spammers arrived. And Scientology sporge in 2000.
An all-free no advertising internet might be a good thing. Kinda like a world with only FOSS computers, no Apple or Windows. Sure, the general public would miss their Twitter and Facebook but computer geeks would rejoice.
Assuming there was anyone around to keep running the servers for free, of course.
I'm pretty damn certain there's a not-insignificant amount of computer geeks who depend an awful lot on services which today are nearly entirely ad-supported, geeks who would be shocked — SHOCKED, mind you — at the prospect of having to pay for those services on a "supposedly all-free internet". And these are the sorts of services which are a bit too big for the platonic ideal from decades ago of "one nerd hacking away in his basement" to support.
I kinda miss the usenet.
Please add me to the list!
Me, too!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The internet would still be a bunch of news groups if it wasn't for advertising.
I don't really know... are you arguing for or against ads? Your "threat" might be seen as a promise.
Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but only a Luddite could possibly see the expansion of news groups into what we have today as a BadThing(TM). Seriously, "there is no such thing as a free lunch", news groups in the early days were funded mainly by the taxpayer, advertising pays for the banquet of free content we now enjoy. If you have a better funding model for providing free content on the same scale as radio/TV/internet combined, we'd all like to hear it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So you subscribe to all your content?
You can turn adblocking off. Versus a non-neutral net where you can't do a damn thing over how your ISP shapes your traffic. Big difference. Or would say Dish networks recent attempts to automatically remove ads is not neutral?
Like to confuse the issue, huh? I swear some of you people are just astroturfers with a brain. Half a brain though.
that was a real WTF comment. how is a polite plea showing up once in a blue moon more annoying than autoplaying videos, flashing banners and "you can skip this ad in 5 4 3 2 1" welcome pages?
Finding worthwhile information on the web was much, much easier before the rise of advertising.
I'm old enough that my son ran his own BBS in the late 80's, had access (via a university) to the internet before it was the internet, was studying for a CS degree when HTML was invented (didn't "get it" immediately, few people did). It's far from an exaggeration to say information has never been easier to find in the entire history of mankind, nor has there ever been so much information of both types, useful and useless. For people like me who used to loan from the non-fiction section of the library, the internet is like having the world's technical and scientific libraries at your fingertips. Sure it's not the jet pack I was promised, but it's a pretty good consolation prize.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Advertising should just be a side business, it's the overhead necessary to sell an actual product which is the core business. However it seems that too many advertisers want to treat it like the primary business. People talk about the advertising industry like it's a major manufacturing conglomerate.
The problem with ads on the net is that they don't behave. Advertising may be necessary for a product but they've gone out of their way to be obnoxious and rude. Animated picures and flash ads suck up noticeable amounts of processing time, the initial reason I went about blocking ads. They've abused windows pop ups. It bloats up the internet content without paying its way. Back with faxes ads used to tie up the lines and block actual information from arriving in a timely manner. Advertisers have essentially done everyone in the power to become hated. So of course customers want ad blocking in self defense. Sorry to all of you who make your living with advertising but war is hell and you're working for the enemy.
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.
And advertisement is essentially what killed off usenet. Even though it's still limping along inside Google there is no longer any information left. Because it's essentially free to churn out as many ads as wanted it was too easy to drown actual content.
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.
I kinda miss the usenet.
Please add me to the list!
Me, too!
Yup, agreed Usenet was one of the NO CARRIER
It takes up a significant portion of the screen, is present for months, and has a tiny 'x' to close it which is next to impossible to hit on a mobile device. That's as polite as a beggar jumping right in your way and holding his sign right in front of your face.
That said, I've given to Wikipedia before. Not lately though, I got too sick of their ads.
Of course, I use adblock, so I see very little of the normal kind of ads.
As for this article, I don't care if it hurts the people who are paying for ads to be put up. Simply spending money doesn't give you a right to be heard. I wouldn't be surprised if some sites started blocking Free.fr or accusing them of "stealing".
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Site operators will block content if ads aren't served. Today, some sites will deliberately not function when ad blocking is detected, but this is not yet wide-spread. That policy is going to become ubiquitous if ISPs start blocking ads for all users.
Right now the arms race between advertisers and ad blockers is low intensity because ad blocking is limited to a small fraction of content consumers. Now that ISPs are monkeying around with ad blocking the race will escalate. The advertisers are going to demand that sites withhold content to ad blockers. They are paying the bills so one guess how that's going to go.
Enjoy your advertising-enforced interwebs.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
They just did!
Remember good French Slashdot readers, it is the French ISP Free.fr that is doing this! What Free.fr is doing might be controversial! But never ever forget that Free.fr is innovating in the internet marketing space!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Ad networks should be considered hostile and blocked at all opportunitie. Why?
Take *one* look at any download service and the massive amounts of fake "Download" buttons you can press. Adware. Spyware. Malware. It's all there, unless you have the technical wherewithal to separate the good from the bad... Something most people don't.
So for the average user the choice comes down to this: Adblock or infection.
Clearly, the only responsible choice is to block ads.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
You are the product!: re side business vs. main business (You actually wrote "Advertising should just be a side business"
.
Sometimes, people forget the obvious because it is well hidden from us with shell games. (Q1) Why are google and its googlicious products free of cost to use? (Q2) If newspapers cost so much money to buy, then why do they tend to give them out for free just before Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays? (Q3) What do magazines really sell if not the content which is in them?
.
(a1) -- Google sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
(a2) -- Newspapers sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
(a3) -- Magazines sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
(a4) -- (not that you/I asked but also) Television sells an advertising service: their ability to connect your eyeballs to the advertisers selling their product.
;>)
All of these products exist in order to market things or services available for purchase to you who thinks you are the consumer. You are not the consumer in these equations for Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. You are the product (the eyeballs connected to desire and to a wallet to be emptied) that is sold to the advertisement makers who sell the advertisements to the merchants and makers of these things and services for sale.
Really? Give us a search phrase so we can verify this for ourselves at google.com. I dare you.
I see you have never been to the educational parts of the internet that are interdependently sourced. There are still plenty of sites out there that provided a wealth of knowledge that are funded (usually only partly) by the ads they have. A less independent example is youtube, there are a lot of shit content creators that rake in cash for making crap content BUT there are also a bunch of awesome people out there that make interesting educational and useful videos that are partly or fully funded by their ad revenue. Just because you go to shitty websites that serve shitty adds doesn't mean they should all be done away with. It means you need to stop surfing the braindead sections of the internet.
Look up Bill Beaty, Mike's Electric stuff, Jeri Elssworth, Ben Krasnow, Woodgears.ca, Smarter every day. They are all do what they do because they like it and to be educational but they earned every 1/10th of a penny for each page or video view. Blocking ads on an individual basis is fine, most people don't do it. Blocking ads as an ISP is fucking the hand that feeds you.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
The internet was always a lot more than just news groups before anyone advertised on it in the first place.
Advertising is a problem in that a large percentage of the people don't want the intrusive all pervasive advertising that advertisers keep pushing on us because we don't pay enough attention to them.
In the real world, a door to door salesman isn't allowed to keep pounding on your door and ringing the doorbell continuously and run around to all the windows in your house holding up pictures and peering in to see what you like until you finally buy something. Of course, if you do buy something, he'd just start the process all over again to sell you something again and again, ad infinitum.
Unfortunately that's what advertising on the internet is like. He's doing everything he can to intrude on whatever you are doing, and force you to look at his ads and buy his junk. All the while, he's trying to scrape up as much info about you and your likes as he can by any means, of which tracking cookies are just one.
You wouldn't put up with this crap in the real world, why do you think they should be allowed to do it on the internet?
I would actually lose track of plot lines because of 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. The show comes back on, and I have to think for a moment: who are these people? What was I watching? What was this week's episode about?
Of course I've found that many shows are geared around that, so when watching without ads you notice a lot of repeated information that could be removed to make the show even shorter without missing anything. Reality type shows are especially bad about that, the total "show" is often only half or so of the total air time after you factor in ad breaks and re-caps due to them.
I cannot help but feeling pissed of each time I buy one film and am forced to endure minutes of ads against pirating (But I even paid the bloody thing!) or for films I will not see or for violent films when the DVD contains a cartoon for the kids.
The obvious solution is to rip the DVD and reburn it to a blank DL disc. DVDFabDecrypter even has a preset specifically to rip just the movie portion, removing all previews and piracy warnings. Replace the original clamshell case for the DVD with a two-disc one and stick your original on one side for safe-keeping (and to prove you actually paid for the content if the MPAA ever gets those gestapo search squads they've always wanted), and put the new disc on the other side. Play only the burned disc.
Bonus: If your DVD gets scratched up by frequent use/kids you still have the original disc to make new copies from.
Alternatively, build an HTPC and rip the movie portion of the DVD to computer files and play as-is. You can retain the original VOBs for 100% DVD quality or encode to an MKV file and save lots of hard drive space by using a more efficient codec like XviD or h264. An MKV would allow you to keep all the audio tracks, subtitle tracks, and even the chapter markings from the original DVD.
Probably not a lot of people thought about it, but blocking adds like this is saving free.fr a lot of bandwidth. I'm sure it's quite significant.
Do them a favor. Since you're looking for that info, perhaps you have a related or semi-related (in some way) blog or site? Write an article with related content to that you found, incorporating and expanding on it in some way. Put links within that content, in meaningful contexts, with words showing for the link relevant to the linked content, within this post or essay of yours. Publish online, and making sure to link to from blogger or something, to get it fast-indexed by Google and raise the pagerank of the site that was useful to you...
And you're done. Yes, I do this for people and sites out there. And I agree, I often find what's needed on obscure non-corporate/farm/business/institutional pages.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Until badly implemented ad-blocking proxy messes up websites you browse... I'd say leave it to browser side plugins like Adblock Plus.
Yep. That information repetition is especially noticeable when watching certain shows on a service like Netflix.
Well, YouTube is something their customers want. Ads isn't.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.