German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by hueving » Thu, Dec 15, 2016, 2:44 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #124

hueving wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never experienced peer pressure to use Google and have been asked to message someone on Facebook maybe twice. It sounds like you just like both services a lot and want the government to step in so you can have your cake and eat it too.

The same could be said about mobile phones and electricity though, they're not compulsory to use but pretty universal (and regulated). Certainly Whatsapp and Google Search have so much marketshare in my country (Netherlands) that they might as well be utilities. Something like a common carrier model might be better for society, where the bundling of some services is deemed to be too monopolistic in combination but no…

The Google search mention is ridiculous. The switching costs are negligible (type a different URL) and there are no network effects forcing you to use it.

Utilities are regulated the way they are because switching costs are enormous (pay for powerlines to some other generation source or pipes to a new water supply).

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

#272

Post by tripzilch » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 1:46 PM UTC

vacri wrote: post #253

jlarocco wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The internet does not belong to the users. It's an inter net - a large collection of networks that have decided to interoperate using common protocols. The internet belongs to the people who own the networks. Hence the whole "get your own internet" argument is begging the question. Right. And my network blocks advertisements. Deal with it. > We're all in this shit together, and we need to give content providers the…

> There's a moral obligation to spend 2 minutes trying to punch the monkey or whatever ridiculous thing they're doing now? Give me a break. Good thing that that isn't what I said. > People will pay straight away for quality content. No, no they won't. The fact that you had to say 'pre-internet' proves that the convenience factor is significant. People paid for movies because that was the only way to get movies . To c…

You conveniently ignored the most important part:

> There's a ton of shit on the internet these days funded via advertisements, and I won't mind if most of it dies.

Advertisement funds listicles and clickbait in a vicious cycle.

That is the kind of content that can only exist because of Internet advertising. That is the kind of content you "pay" for with your attention-span.

Investigative journalism is being actively replaced by clickbait, listicles and bullshit because Internet advertisements are so much more profitable. Because you don't need to be good any more, you just need to hack weak minds on scale.

THAT is the kind of Internet you're arguing I should support by not blocking advertising.

Actual quality content has so many ways of monetizing itself (online and offline) it's disingenuous to ignore. Just not this one. Real life dead tree newspapers also take a dive in quality when they go down the hole of cheap shitty advertising.

It will always lose against the low quality fire hose swamp of shit content because it's just as profitable (often more) and so much cheaper to produce. That is why people have been blocking Internet ads since forever. The ad-companies themselves are often shady, parasites come automatically with the territory.

I'm blocking ads until that shit goes out of business. Not because "fuck everyone else" but because "fuck everyone that supports it".

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

#273

Post by tripzilch » Fri, Dec 16, 2016, 2:26 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #189

phpnode wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly. There are also huge problems associated with paying for many of these free services. If it were a pay-per-search model then I'd have to make a mental decision every time I do a search. This would impose massive cognitive overhead and present a deadweight loss. If it were a subscription model, building a competitive search engine would suddenly become much harder. Right now, I can freely experiment between di…

People also spend a lot of time defending internet advertising without considering the deluge of trash it's unleashed on the web, how it smothered the troves of information people put up there for free, because it costs almost nothing to share and benefits all[0]. The first ones that said "fuck everybody else" were the advertisers.

> how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years

... wait are you trolling?

Ad-blockers grew out of a need. It's been "only" a few decades, and before that advertisement wasn't quite the same thing, was it?

Nobody felt they needed an always on filter to protect their focus and attention from a constant 24/7 barrage of shitinformation screaming at you. Because advertisement hasn't always been doing that. Yes it's been lying a lot, maybe a lot more, maybe it always has, and I hate it for that as well, but that's a different discussion. That's not the discussion we're having today. We could have had that discussion but advertisement decided it wanted everything and right now it is paying people to flood the web with clickbait, listicles and other bullshit.

[0] at some point (more than 10 years ago), you started to have to be clever and use smart queries to filter and step around the shit advertising. but for years now Google basically stopped returning anything as results that deep. the pages still exist but they won't let you dig deep into the index any more because the 99.9999% shit finally tipped over into rounding error. for a while they called you "robot" if you tried and give you a captcha because robots were mining the trash for different (less noble) purposes. you still get these captcha's some times but they seem to be stale filter triggers from threats long gone. most of the time you just get zero results for 2-3 word queries that used to return hundreds in an era the Internet was 1% of today's size. actually no most of the time you get results that have nothing to do with the query. you just get zero when you insist. and no verbatim mode doesn't help here.