UK Gov't Launches Anti-Adblocking Initiative, Compares It To Piracy (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: UK culture secretary John Whittingdale has announced that the British government will set up a 'round-table' between online publishers and adblocking companies to discuss the 'problem' of adblocking. He described the practice of charging companies to be whitelisted as a 'modern day protection racket', and said: "Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist And that's as true for the latest piece of journalism as it is for the new album from Muse." The issue has largely been left to the market to self-regulate until now, although Germany's courts ruled adblocking legal in 2015.

Comments

Let's go one better ...

[BarbaraHudson]

If we don't pay politicians who come up with these stupid ideas, maybe they will no longer exist?

Re:Let's go one better ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone is paying them to come out with this. The Ad-industry has gone all out with its anti-adblocking initative in the last year or so.

We've seen the ab-block plus creator get co-opted, likely from a combination of legal pressure, social schoomizing(lobbying), and probably some kind of attempted bribery. We're seeing more websites (e.g. Wired) explicitly shut out browsers with ab-blockers. Google and Yahoo have likewise begun to openly complain about ad-blocking technology.

There is a major push against ad-blockers going on right now. It's obvious because, as their wares would suggest, ad-men simply lack any subtlety or political acumen. However, what this latest development does show is that they still have both money and the influence -- or ability to buy influence -- in government circles.

The push against ad-blocking is here. It's already difficult if not impossible to obtain ad-blockers for "walled-garden" mobile and tablet browsers. We'll see attempts by the likes of Google to remove them from Chrome and the Play store in time. Don't be surprised to see Ad-block removed from the list of official firefox extensions either.

This situation, probably precipitated by the death of Flash and its easy ads, in effect cuts to the heart of who your computer belongs to. You? Or the websites you choose to visit. Right now, we are witnessing the first steps towards literally using the power of the state to stop users blocking ads from displaying on their own computers. If they succeed, frankly the very notion of a "personal computer" connected to the world wide web will become an outdated concept.

This is gearing up to be one hell of a showdown.

Re:Let's go one better ...

[mikael]

It's the only way they can fund the cost of internet surveillance. Companies like Phorm would do deep packet inspection of internet traffic for keywords, web addresses in combination with a tracking cooking UID. They would sell advertising slots to advertisers and websites. When a website requested an banner advert, Phorm would check the IP address and keywords, then provide a suitable advert if possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It was only discovered when a businessman couldn't understand why his web pages were different on different computers.

Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

"then that content will eventually no longer exist" - for most content out there, this sounds like an excellent plan

Nooooooo

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a Govt who has a backbone to say No, the public do not want Ads. I bloddy hate ads on TV and we have gone from 3min ads 3 times and hour 10 years ago to ads 5 mins into programme start, then 8 mins later we 6min ads, then 8 mins later another 6mins etc etc.

When downloading 1 hour programmes off the SKY network the progrtames are now only 35 mins of content, then we have crappy TV producers who fill the tv programs with loads of "What's coming Up" and Recaps that the 35min of content is now actually 23mins of content.

The odds now of turning a TV and hitting an ad break is nearly 83%.

So no to TV ads and No to Ads on my broadband.

I used to not block ads

[jcochran]

But I now use an ad blocker for a very simple reason.

I was looking at a web site for some information that I was interested in and in the middle of my reading, the page suddenly scrolled to somewhere in the middle and started playing a video ad. I stopped the video and then spent a fair amount of time attempting to actually resume my reading at the place where I was interrupted (not extremely easy since it was a long page with lots of dense text and I had been involuntarily scrolled away from my place without warning).Just as I resumed reading, the damn ad once again scrolled me away from where I was and started playing the video again. After a few cycles of this bullshit, I decided to install an ad blocker and then went back to the page and actually managed to get the information I desired. And since it's quite frankly easier to block all ads instead of configuring the ad block to only block on certain pages, I by default block all ads. And I have no desire to go back to having ads again. My web pages load faster and I no longer have the damn ads attempting to vie for my attention.

"Invisible" adblock

[genka]

Is anyone making an adblock that would download all ad content and promptly send it to /dev/null instead of displaying it? Such adblock will be invisible to the server and the extra bandwidth doesn't matter much on a broadband connection.

Re:If your product has adverts...

[TheRaven64]

I like the Forbes model. Ad blocking is not a long-term sustainable model. Sites that produce original content need to be funded in some way. Forbes says 'if you're not willing to see the ads here, then please don't come to our site'. I don't consider their content worth disabling the tracking blocker that I use (note: I don't block ads, I block flash and I block known tracking JavaScript. If your ads rely on that, then you're collateral damage), so I don't get past the page with the warning.

Deciding that you do value their content, but you're not willing to accept their revenue model is hypocritical. I'd be quite happy with an ad blocker that applied the Forbes model globally - if a site is too annoying, just block the entire site. For one thing, it would encourage sites to pursue alternate revenue streams, rather than assuming that the advertising bubble will keep growing forever.

Nohow

[Archtech]

"Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist. And that's as true for the latest piece of journalism as it is for the new album from Muse."

Oh yeah? So is it true for Linux? Or LibreOffice?The other day, when I downloaded the latest version of LibreOffice, I made a voluntary donation. But that was MY choice - I could download their software from now untul Kingdom Come and I wouldn't have to pay a penny.

John Whittingdale is talking sheer nonsense. Try these:

"Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist. And that's as true for the latest piece of journalism as it is for the alphabet, the number system, the periodic table, the English language (and all other languages)..."

Frankly, these days I reckon that the more a piece of journalism costs to read, the less worth while reading it is.