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Mozilla Sets Out Its Proposed Principles For Content Blocking (mozilla.org)
Mark Wilson writes: With Apple embracing ad blocking and the likes of AdBlock Plus proving more popular than ever, content blocking is making the headlines at the moment. There are many sides to the debate about blocking ads — revenue for sites, privacy concerns for visitors, speeding up page loads times (Google even allows for the display of ads with its AMP Project), and so on — but there are no signs that it is going to go away. Getting in on the action, Mozilla has set out what it believes are some reasonable principles for content blocking that will benefit everyone involved. Three cornerstones have been devised with a view to ensuring that content providers and content consumers get a fair deal, and you can help to shape how they develop.
I'll block every single ad you force down my throat
The reason companies advertise is to generate name recognition and ultimately sales. And if advertisements did not increase sales or derivative income companies, both large and small, would not be spending billions of dollars a year placing ads. Google is an advertising firm not a technology firm. Their technology efforts are centered around increasing the number of users to feed advertisements to. Most of their attempts to generate revenue from other services or products do not even come close to the amount of money they generate by serving as a conduit for advertisements. There are already ways to block the majority of ads and unwanted content if that is your preference. However if Googles revenue starts declining don't be surprised when they start charging money for all of their current services which are currently offered for free to regular users. Every major browser and search engine also rely on advertising income to support their efforts.
What does "[c]ontent blocking software should focus on addressing potential user needs (such as on performance, security, and privacy) instead of blocking specific types of content (such as advertising)" mean? Most users *want* to block specific types of content, namely advertising (particularly obtrusive, bandwidth-heavy ads). People don't want to block something just because it's bandwidth-heavy, otherwise they'd be blocking videos and such that they do want to watch.
And how's this going to play with Firefox's mandatory extension signing that's scheduled to take effect with FF43? Will they refuse to sign extensions that don't follow these guidelines, thereby going beyond a model of simply ensuring that the extension isn't harmful? Will they get around that by defining extensions that don't follow these guidelines as "harmful", even if they're doing exactly what users want?
There's a really slippery slope Mozilla looks like it's heading down...
Sort of. Your summary misses a key point at the start of item #3:
"Regardless of source" is a weasely way of implying, "no public blocklists that block based on the source domains and such". A "level playing field" that isn't biased by source would be allowing you to block 320x200 video (because perhaps those are typically ads), but not "everything from doubleclick.net".
Extensions like AdBlock and Ghostery explicitly block based on the source of the content, and that violates principal #3.
Principle #1 might also vaguely be problematic, depending on interpretation. However, "blocking advertising" can be categorized under "a specific user need", even though it's specifically excluded in the example list (implying that users don't 'need' to block advertising).
Principle #1 is really a guideline for architecting the software, not for use of the software. As a programmer, it's perfectly reasonable to have that guideline in place for how you design the code in general. However, for the purpose of actually using the software, it's not valid. Not all content is equal, even when it's of exactly the same type (just wander through YouTube comments for examples). The entire point of content blocking is content discrimination — you are explicitly not being neutral.
Even in their examples of appropriate use (performance, security, and privacy), there is no 'neutral' value. I may be concerned about privacy with respect to Doubleclick, but not, say, Amazon (or whatever other sites of your choice). I may be concerned about performance on some sites, but willing to give it a pass on others. This explicitly goes against principle #3, of being agnostic to the source, when in fact the source explicitly informs my choice of action. I cannot ignore the source, and there is no "content neutrality".
Of course this can be turned around. If Verizon offered an adblocker that they developed, that blocked all the ads they didn't want you to see (ie: competition), but gave you plenty of their own ads, that would definitely fail both the principle, and user expectations. So they could point at an example like that and say that their principals mean 'that'.
However that's not all that that series of words means, and based on the behavior of Mozilla over the last couple of years, I don't expect them to change their wording based on user feedback, because they want to be ambiguous about this; it gives them an out. They'll "listen", and then dump all the feedback in the trash bin.