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German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

arstechnica.com

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Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#221

Post by charonn0 »

fritzw wrote: post #8
muninn_ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer something like ublock as well, but I wouldn't call what AB+ is doing a morally ambiguous question. I think this is actually pretty straight forward all around. I can install or uninstall software on my computer. Websites can serve ads. Websites can block me from viewing their site if I have an ad blocker installed. AB+ can whitelist sites. A website can or can not pay AB+ to be whitelisted.

What you described isn't complex logic, it makes sense, but that's not where the moral ambiguity enters. Abp is basically a cop that allows some criminals to slip through as long as they pay on the side... that's the moral issue. Granting access for paying members simply means ABP has become a gatekeeper with its own power and it is now offering access at a price, unethically

90% of the whitelist doesn't pay, though. And all have to meet certain standards, like no video ads.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#222

Post by int_19h »

galfarragem wrote: post #17

System is funded by X. One day, some smart people fed up of paying X invent a way of evading. «It's not fair to pay X!» they say. Most people follow them, why wouldn't they? Next day, same smart people: «Humm, how about people paying X/? to us instead of paying X to the system? Let's make a compelling argument explaining the fairness of it as some people feel that evading is somehow immoral. They will bite.» -- Devil…

The reason why people feel that it's not fair to pay X, is because they don't perceive the value of what they're getting to be worth that. And the reason for that is that there are many other places they could go to, to get a similar thing (as far as value perception goes).

In other words, it is an oversupply issue.

If ad blockers do indeed make this business model unprofitable, the size of the market will shrink rapidly, and at some point supply will become lower than demand. And at that point, the remaining content suppliers will be able to charge X, and people will pay it, because they won't have anywhere else to get their fix from.

So this all is one case of the market working things out on its own. There's no reason to interfere here - it'll find a balance eventually. The only reason to complain is if you dislike what that balance will look like (e.g. if you'd prefer more sources of content than the market can actually bear). But the only way to maintain a different balance is by subsidies, direct or indirect. If ad blockers are banned, for example, that is, in effect, a government subsidy to the content creators.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#223

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jasonthevillain wrote: post #170
koolba wrote: post #90

> "The Claimant [Spiegel] argues that the Defendant’s [Eyeo's] business model endangers the Claimant’s existence," reads the judgment, which isn't final because it can be appealed by Spiegel. Because users aren't willing to pay for editorial content on the Web, "it is not economically viable for the Claimant to switch to this business model." In what situation is endangering someone's business model grounds for their…

> Also, I don't get why larger content owners don't self publish ads. You're right, it's about auditing. They need to be able to prove the quantity of ads were delivered as sold, which needs to go through a third party. Actually, Vox, NBC, Quartz, The Outline, and NYT have started building their own ad creatives in-house, which is an excellent idea because it gives the publisher control of what code runs. This gets s…

Could they use sampling [+ trust!] instead for audit purposes? Or indeed serve from their domain with a third-party server that sits inside (eg by VPN) the orgs network.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#224

Post by bigbugbag »

phpnode wrote: post #187
JoshTriplett wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want them to die either; I want them to adapt, or be replaced by sites that can adapt. There's no hard dichotomy between "sites that charge users" and "sites that run ads"; some sites do neither, and still manage to survive just fine by many other means.

Take something like Google Search, a service that is ad-supported but is free to use and produces an enormous amount of value for virtually everyone on the internet. What is their business model in a post-adwords world, where they've been forced to adapt ? Presumably they'd have to charge for it, which means that the poorest people on the internet would not have access to this amazing tool that we take utterly for gr…

Google search is not only ad-supported, it is also ad-supporting. it is carefully designed to collect and track your every click to feed their advertising business.

I suppose google search business model in a post-adwords world could also be "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead".

In the event of google search disappearing, affected people would use other search engines and it would make room for better search engines to emerge which is hardly possible right now as google owns the market.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#225

Post by mioelnir »

alkonaut wrote: post #92
mioelnir wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To serve the ads under the 1st party domain - without ending up in a situation where the entity reporting the number of ad impressions and the entity receiving money based on that number of ad impressions are the same - is often significant effort.

Spiegel can just say "we can show your banner on the top of every page for a week for X euros". We have approximately N page views per week and historically we see that Y% click the banner. Either someone buys it or they don't - at some price point someone will buy this (Hell I'd personally buy it at some price). This is what online advertising should be. No impression charging, no targeting, no tracking (and of cour…

I agree. These problems only exist for pay-per-impression and targeted ad models, and the return of dumb ads is a solution to this. I should have made that clearer.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#226

Post by bigbugbag »

morgante wrote: post #208
bigbugbag wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are not inherently evil, the omnipresent associated tracking and surveillance is. Problem is almost all ads come with tracking nowadays which in turn makes them evil. That's another reason ublock origins is far superior to ABP: it blocks tracking by default. Of you can configure each one to mimick the other but users seldom change the defaults hence the 75% of german users subscribed to ABP acceptable ads program…

> Ads are not inherently evil, the omnipresent associated tracking and surveillance is. Do you really not see how thinking "tracking" is evil is an inherently ideological statement? I do not care if Google tracks literally everything I do online. I don't consider it evil and in fact willingly opt-in to tracking.

I admit I have made a mistake in following your choice of wording. The good/evil dichotomy is rather inappropriate as it is an ideological statement itself.

Let me rephrase that differently: as a matter of fact privacy is a requirement for freedom. Tracking by definition destroys (or at the very least entails) privacy, thus effectively preventing freedom from emerging.

Then it is a matter of personal preferences. Personal preferences may differ on the desirability of freedom of self or others. It is said that those who care for freedom will act in a way providing freedom for everyone, the others others will act selfishly and enjoy the freedom provided by those who care.

Though it should be noted that ABP and UBO are two completely different things. ABP is an adblocker, it aims at making money filtering and selling ads. UBO is a general-purpose blocker, its main goal is to help users neutralize the privacy-invading apparatus of which the visible part is ads. That's why UBO features options to block webrtc, remote font, link prefetch, hyperlink auditing and beacon while ABP has none of this but features acceptable ads.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#227

Post by bigbugbag »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #62
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #15

Since this submission relates to blocking ads and trackers, I think it's worth bringing up that uBlock Origin [0] is better than Adblock Plus in (all?) ways (see the README for more details). I migrated to it a few years ago and overall I've been very happy with the outcome. I'm opposed to all tracking that isn't opt-in by default. I haven't thought about the topic at great lengths, so there may be cases which I'm fa…

Unfortunately there is no Ublock Origin for Safari.

There is wipr[1] though.

[1]: http://www.giorgiocalderolla.com/wipr.html

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#228

Post by vacri »

jlarocco wrote: post #167
skybrian wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the same. Advertisers can negotiate with AdBlock Plus about what reasonable advertising should be. If we all choose our own block lists there is nobody for them to negotiate with. The war between ad blockers and advertisers continues forever. That's not to say AdBlock Plus does a great job (I don't know) but some people think collective bargaining is a good thing. For more read about countervailing power. ht…

> It's not the same. Advertisers can negotiate with AdBlock Plus about what reasonable advertising should be. If we all choose our own block lists there is nobody for them to negotiate with. The war between ad blockers and advertisers continues forever. We have very different opinions, because I don't see it as a bargaining situation. The reasonable and acceptable level of spam, web advertising, malware, and user tra…

> The reasonable and acceptable level of spam, web advertising, malware, and user tracking is zero.

Given that you put advertising in there with the other items, I assume this means that you pay for all websites that you block ads on? Because it seems to me that your model is "I get free stuff, fuck everyone else".

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#229

Post by intrasight »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #163
intrasight wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the advertisers would rather have ads than not, so I'd argue just the opposite - this will work for advertisers. And you can't block arbitrary and tags, so I don't understand your second assertion.

Ad blocking in general is an AI-complete problem, but there are still lots of low-hanging fruits left to be picked - like blocking tags based on class names ("ad", "sponsor.*"), on content (basically spam filtering), etc., all backed by crowdsourced list of per-domain entries.

By "arbitrary" I really mean "tags without classes". A plain

or tag. But what I left unsaid is that I don't really mind such ads - they are like ads in a magazine. I use UBlock Origin to disable tracking not to disable ads.

Re: German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal

#230

Post by bigbugbag »

Jdam wrote: post #33
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #15

Since this submission relates to blocking ads and trackers, I think it's worth bringing up that uBlock Origin [0] is better than Adblock Plus in (all?) ways (see the README for more details). I migrated to it a few years ago and overall I've been very happy with the outcome. I'm opposed to all tracking that isn't opt-in by default. I haven't thought about the topic at great lengths, so there may be cases which I'm fa…

I tried to ditch ABP in favour of uBlock 1-or-so years ago and I found it way worse in terms of the amount of blocked ads.

Then you messed up somewhere, both use the same block lists. except uBlock enables much more block lists than ABP by default.
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