European Telecoms May Block Mobile Ads, Spelling Trouble For Google 198
Mark Wilson has news that may have a big impact on both advertisers and end-users who use their phones as portals to ad-supported websites. Several European telecom providers are apparently planning to use ad-blocking software at the data-center level, which would mean benefit for users (in the form of less obnoxious advertising, and less data being eaten by it) but quite a pickle for online advertisers, and sites that rely on advertising revenue. From BetaNews's article (based on this Financial Times article, paywalled):
Talking to the Financial Times, one wireless carrier said that the software had been installed at its data centers and could be enabled by the end of the year. With the potential to automatically block most ads on web pages and within apps, the repercussion of the ad boycott could be huge as mobile providers try to wrestle control from the likes of Google.
I just wish my mobile provider would start testing this out, too.
The customers will protest loud (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you annoyed by youtube videos that cannot be viewed from a mobile device? Expect more of that. Provides will simply not serve content to the ad-free devices. Why should they?
Vajk
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Provides will simply not serve content to the ad-free devices.
Good for them. Remember that thing about how someone who's only in it for the money does a worse job than someone who does it because they want to? This means it doubly filters spam.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's a gaping difference between people who do it just for the money, and people who want to do it, but only have time to because they can make it their living.
True but there's also much more content on the internet than anyone has the time to read, and the main constraint is in filtering out the gems from the crap.
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Sounds good (Score:3, Insightful)
until they start injecting their own adds. I'm sure such technology would never be used!
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This. Or do you think telcos would do something like that out of the good of their heart? Please. Where's the profit in doing something for your customer?
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But that's not what I came here to say. I came to say that I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I use ad block on my computers. I don't generally on my phone, but I also don't browse from my phone often. And I like the idea of blocking ads so they don't consume my data allowance.
On the other hand I don't like my ISP filtering through my content. There's nothing to stop them from playing MITM (looking
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Dammit people. Stop starting with "This.".
Like a toddler that isn't aware that his context may not be shared with others.
This. This is important.
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This. We all need to think about the toddlers a little bit more and throw some context in, instead of just starting our replies with This.
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Hic.
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Pardon? I don't know about your contract, or the contracts in your country, but pretty much anywhere I know you get this or that many MBs of "free" traffic with your couple bucks and for every byte beyond that you pay through your nose and then some.
I can hardly imagine them wanting you to use less traffic.
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I can hardly imagine them wanting you to use less traffic.
They're better off if you pay for much more traffic upfront than you use, like the average subscriber does --- the overages are just to catch the small number of "heavy eaters", so reducing traffic would be a win with most subscribers using a prepaid monthly expiring allowance they won't hit anyways.
Re:Sounds good (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds good? How is this remotely compatible with the spirit of network neutrality?
Bad good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks like a good idea (for end users anyway). But this is not. My operator should not decide what I want to see on not on a webpage. If I don't want adds, I use add-free versions of webistes or use an add blocker.
Next time, telco will decide that anti-telco articles in newspapers are not worth downloading either...
Re:Bad good idea (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like a good idea (for end users anyway). But this is not. My operator should not decide what I want to see on not on a webpage. If I don't want adds, I use add-free versions of webistes or use an add blocker.
Next time, telco will decide that anti-telco articles in newspapers are not worth downloading either...
Well, it IS opt-in. It is an extra service they offer. Still it is likely to cause trouble with content providers when they offer it generally, especially if they go through with trying to get money from ad-providers, but at this point that is only speculation.
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It only preserves their ads when they're coming from the same server or domain . . . of course, there would then be an arms race between the ad companies and blockers for obfuscation, a la 1980s copy protection . . .
hawk
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mobile browsers don't allow adblockers. Besides Advertising currently takes up between 30-90% of the data transmitted compared to actual content.
Re: Bad good idea (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually, APK is totally right on this count. Adblock Plus on Firefox mobile is a dog on older, or lower end, phones. A hostfile based adblocker makes for a much better experience in this context. Of course, your phone has to be rooted, which isn't the case with Firefox + adblock.
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Unlike the desktop version of Firefox, though, mobile Firefox downloads the ads and merely hides them, meaning that on a platform where you really don't want to waste unnecessary data, FF mobile's adblock is merely an exercise in aesthetics.
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I do own a mobile, use browsers, etc, and do manage servers. I do natively speak English. I do not understand the majority of the sentences in this post, or the parent or GP.
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I just disable JavaScript. Works beautifully at blocking ads on the sites I visit from my smartphone.
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I admin the proxies for a mid-size company (~1800 users). The "Advertising" category is always the highest bandwidth category, and about 50% of used bandwidth. We're considering blocking the category company-wide.
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There's a lot of foreign crap we Europeans do not need nor want. EU citizens should know and think exactly the way the EU Commission tells them to. We stand united in our beliefs and our will to impose the Europeischesweltannschauung over the whole world, for its own good. Heil Europa!
Seems tempting, but terrible. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems tempting, but then you realize that they actually plan on taking money from the advertising companies to start allowing ads again:
Also keep in mind that this almost requires them to play MITM with certs, inspect your traffic, etc. which can then further be monetized, and new content injected. Phorm comes to mind.
Add to that the slippery slope, and it should be evident to anybody that this is a bad idea - and one that has been struck down in the EU in the past already.
As much as people may dislike ads, having them blocked at the ISP level is a patently terrible idea. I, for one, am hoping the legal weasels haven't found loopholes that would make legislators nod in agreement that this would be a-ok.
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It could easily backfire - Google could just stop including sites using those ISPs.
With the result of the customers of those ISPs being unable to get any traffic.
Of course, the ISPs could then not block ads for their own sites again... which would then allow Google to provide ads again...
Re:Seems tempting, but terrible. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The next stage is for Google to provide an Apache plugin and some custom Javascript to detect if a client has been downloading certain pages without displaying the ads; if your IP address gets in the "Ad Blocker" blacklist, then all the content provider websites can just query the blacklist and refuse to serve content until you unblock the ads.
Re:Seems tempting, but terrible. (Score:4, Insightful)
The next stage is for users to download the ads, but don't show them on the screen.
Not a problem (Score:2)
Google will simply prioritize bandwidth of its services to IP blocks by **revenue**. When your ISP's revenue numbers plummet, so does the bandwidth / latency for your ISP's network. As ISPs are rated by customers for providing service, this will lead to competitors that are more neutral to be preferred among customers. Imagine the scenario of two strangers on a bus, one of which using ISP A seems to have an outage with Google Maps or News or Mail or YouTube because his service filters content and Google res
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The next stage is for users to download the ads, but don't show them on the screen.
Big data analysis will show when the number of legitimate clicks drops below expected levels for a /20 or more of IP space.
When it drops below acceptable tolerance; we'll replace content with a Captcha submission form that requires looking at an image or text shown in the Advert frame in order to successfully answer the Captcha.
If the Ad is not shown, then the user won't be able to complete the Captcha.
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> As much as people may dislike ads, having them blocked at the ISP level is a patented terrible idea
FTFY
Re:Seems tempting, but terrible. (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily. One fairly effective ad blocker on Android works entirely by using the hosts file to point ad sites to loopback. Requires root, though. But for an ISP to simply break DNS for ad sites would be pretty simple. No cert treachery or DPI required, and phones typically don't give the user any control over which DNS servers they use.
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Ah, yeah, got mangled in some editing around of my comment - that was supposed to come after the replacing of ads with other content :) Good catch, and good point as well :)
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Then the ad companies just stop using DNS. That would work for about 2 seconds.
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Re:Seems tempting, but terrible. (Score:5, Informative)
The headline is missing the point.
When you buy an app on Google Play, 30% automatically goes to the carrier, and only 2% goes to Google as a transaction fee (Google doesn't even take that extra 2% if carrier billing was used instead of Google Wallet).
Google's main cash cow is really advertising anyway. But even with advertising, Google also gives a revenue-share to carriers. Google has been giving them this money without even being asked. Google knew from the very beginning that if it was going to be allowed to do business and advertising on cell phone networks, it was going to need the willing cooperation of the cell phone carriers.
If this announcement is going to affect anyone, it's really going to affect Microsoft and Blackberry. These two do not share their spoils with carriers. In the case of the iPhone, Apple doesn't share revenues with carriers either, but at least Apple still has some decent leverage against carriers.
So what should expect from this announcement? Ad-blocking may become a reality soon on cell phone networks, but don't expect this opt-in feature to come to the consumer for free against Google ads. Whatever cost it will end up being, it will have to be more money than Google is already paying carriers.
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When you buy an app on Google Play, 30% automatically goes to the carrier, and only 2% goes to Google as a transaction fee
30% goes to Google, who splits it between "distribution partner" and "operation expenses", though the exact ratio is not published. Do you have actual inside information you just violated an NDA to share, or are you just guessing?
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30% goes to Google, who splits it between "distribution partner" and "operation expenses", though the exact ratio is not published. Do you have actual inside information you just violated an NDA to share, or are you just guessing?
I'm not guessing. I'm just repeating what I've heard.
If someone is violating an NDA, it's not me. I would never do that, even under a pseudonym. I've sourced this information from multiple people (granted, that information is several years old, so things may have changed, I don't know), but at the time even they didn't tell me this was private information (although in hindsight, it may make sense that it could be).
Thanks to me anyway, a television satellite network even abandoned its plans to develop its ow
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Here is the exact wording used from the Android Google Play developer console. The emphasis in bold is mine.
For applications and in-app products that you sell on Google Play, the transaction fee is equivalent to 30% of the price. You receive 70% of the payment. The remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees.
It doesn't say "goes to Google". You're the one who conjured up that wording.
In fact when carrier billing is involved, the full amount doesn't even go to Google first, it can first go to the carriers, which then return the 70% commission back to Google for the app developers.
In any case, please note that this text you selected was not the original source for my information. I'm just clarifying it beca
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Problem is verification though. The claim above could just as easily be something he pulled out of his ass. I find it very hard to believe that Google keeps 0% of their app store revenue when carrier billing is used.
I agree. It's a tough pill to swallow, but equally tough to swallow would be how Google convinced all the carriers (even the carriers at the lower end of the market) to give up on their super lucrative and purposefully crippled ringtone/wallpaper/J2ME app stores in favor of Android phones.
And by the way, this strategy from Google just didn't come out of thin air. There are online videos of Google executives talking about this problem with carriers very early on during the Barcelona GSMA World Mobile Congres
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When most of the world buys an app on Google play Google gets 30%, and the rest goes to the app author. The carrier gets nothing, 0%, nada. Just like if you bought an app from the Amazon app store, or physical goods for that matter.
Is it different in your country?
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I noticed there are a lot of incidents of "people providing carriage" these days looking for any possible revenue streams they can get, legitimate or not. Mafia-Like. The big near-Monopoly residential broadband providers in the world want to change their role from common carrier to Mafioso Middlemen.
Without Title II / Network neutrality regulation by the FCC.... the time has fast been approaching in the US, where if you want to go to http://www.amazon.com/ [amazon.com] in your web browser, you would not be
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Google gets 30% and then gives it to the carrier. I know that for a fact. This is happening in your country as well.
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This is just wrong. There is no carrier when I buy apps on Google play. I buy from the google web site. Most of us are not using contracts for mobile phones, my phone is unlocked, my phone provider varies with whatever SIM I use, they do not receive Play store money from Google.
This is true enough if you're using a wifi-only tablet. On Google Play, it says "No Carrier -" plus the model name of my tablet. That being said, I have many phones, many of them unlocked, I can tell you for a fact that Google Play (even the web version) knows what is the last carrier I was using with each phone. I can show you a screenshot if you want.
Also here is an old article [tested.com]. I say "old" because my carrier US T-Mobile no longer does this for any phone, even locked ones, but for a time, Google Play used
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...I'm quoting that paragraph only to prove the point that carriers, even GSM and prepaid carriers, do have more influence than you think over Google Play (it's just that they don't exercise that option as much as they could, simply because they're getting a cut from Google Play).
Also, I suppose that GSM carriers with mostly prepaid accounts don't have as much as an incentive to block apps on Google Play since it's so easy for consumers to leave them if they do.
But note that Google doesn't even take a stand on this. It will side with the carrier if it chooses to block apps on Google Play. And it will side with the consumer if the consumer decides to remove the sim card from their device.
One thing is clear however, it is that Google doesn't want to upset carriers (at least, that mus
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Seems tempting, but then you realize that they actually plan on taking money from the advertising companies to start allowing ads again:
Well, it could have been worse [youtube.com].
Also keep in mind that this almost requires them to play MITM with certs, inspect your traffic, etc. which can then further be monetized, and new content injected. Phorm comes to mind.
And "Phorm" it is!
Add to that the slippery slope, and it should be evident to anybody that this is a bad idea - and one that has been struck down in the EU in the past already.
We Europeans are very good with our bad ideas - and don't forget that what has been struck down in the past has a "right to be forgoten"...
As much as people may dislike ads, having them blocked at the ISP level is a patently terrible idea. I, for one, am hoping the legal weasels haven't found loopholes that would make legislators nod in agreement that this would be a-ok.
Since we are both Europeans as i understand, and since you seem to know enough about the subject, can you answer me this: I am pro-European, but... WHO DECIDES in our union my fellow European? Who is in charge? I am afraid that our (Con)-Federalism is going too fast and without citizens even knowing the basics about it.
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Extremely off-topic, but just to touch on the 'who decides' - those with deep pockets, of course. That's not me - it might be you, but I suspect not :)
Let's face it, we can ask the same thing about our national governments, regional governments, municipal governments and local pseudogovernments.
That's something that always strikes me as hilarious about U.S. politics. Case in point: same sex marriage. Several state legislators are arguing the case that the Federal Government should have no say in this and
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Ahhh you're Greek - Greece has been dealt an extremely raw deal and the EU knows they have Greece over a barrel. They can claim they didn't know that the Greek government wasn't being forthright with numbers - but they knew. Oh how they knew; I empathize with your situation.
As for waking up to European directives - that's already the reality that we live in. The UK had to change warranty laws around (the consumers did not necessarily win there), The Netherlands suddenly had to declare downloading (of inf
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No, the Greeks have been borrowing money from others on the good credit of the EU, pretending that they were using the money for infrastructure and development. Instead, they were simply out having a party with the money, and now that the creditors want to be paid back, they can't because the money is gone. Of course, painful as it is for the Greeks to hit the credit limit on their credit card, ultimately the peop
Do not want (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, what if I’m using TLS? Are they going to require me to install rogue certificates just to make their inspection more comfortable? No thanks. Telecom companies had better learn already that with the advent of the Internet, their trade is to sell dumb pipes, competing with the others over the price of that service; the good times when they could milk their customers for “value added services” is over.
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Telecom companies had better learn already that with the advent of the Internet, their trade is to sell dumb pipes, competing with the others over the price of that service; the good times when they could milk their customers for “value added services” is over.
They've never been in the dumb pipe business, and never will be, at least not as long as they can avoid that. They're in the business of making money off of whatever data flows through their pipe and will always look for ways to increase that revenue; wether it's charging for faster delivery of content or getting a cut of ad revenue. That becomes more critical as content companies seek to find ways to sell content to consumers beyond the traditional cable model and start competing more directly with cable s
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Network neutrality and the EU principle of free movement of goods and services comes to mind as counter arguments to the blocking of ads at the service provider level.
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It isn't necessary to decrypt TLS to block third party advertising networks like Google as the DNS names the certificates protect are passed in the clear during TLS negotiation.
ISP level blocking like this is a very bad idea and if it becomes widespread expect to see many of the ad supported free sites on the internet disappear & much of what's left end up behind paywalls. I use all of the relevant tools to block ads in general but whitelist the sites I want to support. That'd be nigh impossible for ISP
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as the DNS names the certificates protect are passed in the clear during TLS negotiation.
A privacy issue.... Hopefully, in the future, we'll add negotiation using DH of a shared secret between client and server, then exchange a Hash of the DNS name encrypted with a shared secret during TLS negotiation, instead of the actual name.
That way, a third party cannot passively snoop on the TLS negotiation and work out the proper certificate name being expected by the client, without causing the SSL ses
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I don't see your proposal gaining enough support to become standard. You seem to think that DNS names being exposed in TLS negotiation was an accident. It wasn't, it was compromise. There are legitimate reasons for some people being able to selectively block web traffic and your proposal would make things worse, not better. For example, there are laws in many countries that prohibit grade-school children from using the school's Internet to surf porn (though we all realise that they can do so on their home I
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You seem to think that DNS names being exposed in TLS negotiation was an accident.
The purpose of DNS names being exposed by the SNI extension is to facilitate name-based virtual hosting. It is not to expose additional information to 3rd parties sniffing the line; that part was clearly an accident. It can be fixed, and I see no reason why it won't be.
There are legitimate reasons for some people being able to selectively block web traffic
If someone's abusing SNI information for censorship purposes, the
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You seem to think that DNS names being exposed in TLS negotiation was an accident.
The purpose of DNS names being exposed by the SNI extension is to facilitate name-based virtual hosting. It is not to expose additional information to 3rd parties sniffing the line; that part was clearly an accident.
It can be fixed, and I see no reason why it won't be.
Other than from just about every firewall vendor... People like Cisco, Fortinet, PaloAlto, Checkpoint, etc and all the people who use their kit and who are currently widely "abusing" it.
There are legitimate reasons for some people being able to selectively block web traffic
If someone's abusing SNI information for censorship purposes, then that's yet another reason this needs to be fixed. No a 3rd party sniffing to identify names and tampering with or "blocking" SSL traffic is not legitimate, for any reason.
Ahhh, So it's just you that decides what is/isn't justified in common Internet implementations now. I'd always found the fact that there wasn't a central reference for all that to be sooo awkward. Good to know that you're on the job then.
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So they are going to peek inside my network packets, looking for ads? And modify them, in order to remove those ads?
Practically all advertising platforms push ads from their own servers not the website you are visiting for the simple reasons it is easy to do and more importantly ad networks don't trust site owners due to obvious direct conflict of interest. It is trivial to block most ads without inspecting traffic. A few ACLs in an ordinary router or blackholing several dozen domains in DNS would do the trick quite effectively. No exotic proxies or DPI required.
Sorry, but I don't need yet another big brother looking at my private stuff, whether itâ(TM)s for my own good, for maintaining the order of society or for the sake of whatever replaced the STASI nowadays.
The Interesting thing some types of filters are quite ef
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That would be true for the smaller sites, but not for Google, facebook etc.
Can't see it's a long term problem (Score:1)
There are equivalent laws in the EU to "common carrier", which means the ISP's are responsible for the content delivered, they just provide the pipe.
They start doing more than that and they become liable for that kiddy porn download as well.
(Not real smart)
Don't poke the bear! (Score:3)
Because he will crush you or buy you.
Great News (Score:2)
Obviously an epic fail by /., but presumably they dont care about the loss of custom.
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I use firefox with adblock on my mobile. I'm guessing your on iphone maybe?
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I've given up on reading /. on mobile for the same reason.
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Use classic mode, just like I have for years. I also tick the box that disables ads.
Proxied ads (Score:3)
BTW, how are they going to deal with https? Are they going to block the IPs of the ad networks?
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The workaround will be to proxy ads from the server. I bet that the ad networks will develop the technology for all the major frameworks. That will hurt servers' bandwidth, threads and CPU but it will make harder for ISPs to block ads because the URLs won't give away much.
Never going to happen. Site owners are not trustworthy.
Filthy business practices (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not a huge fan of Google and what SEO/advertising has done to the www, but I have to say that these guys are in the wrong. Sabotaging the competitor and demanding "protection money" is not fair competition IMHO. I want my ISP to be a carrier, not a curator or a gatekeeper. I have Adblock and I know how to use it, thank you very much.
Today ads (Score:2, Insightful)
Tomorrow, consumer rights, customer forums and competitors websites.
This net-neutrality business cuts both ways.
Good News (Score:1)
Carriers better beware (Score:5, Interesting)
If they start doing this they better beware, there's never been a better reason for Google/Apple etc to get into the carrier business themselves.
Hello (Score:1)
They can't stop google from doing that. (Score:5, Insightful)
they can try... but they'll fail.
First off, the only way they'll be able to tell one thing from another is by filtering ad domains. Well, if the ads all come from the same domain as the content then you can't filter out the ads without filtering out the content. So that's really easy to do... you can proxy stuff without any trouble. It means the ad companies need to trust google isn't inventing clicks but that shouldn't be a big problem.
Second off, as other people have said, google could just pop up a message saying "sorry, due to actions by your local ISP, we cannot deliver this content"... and the consumer base in Europe would get their torches and pitchforks so fast the ISPs couldn't even maniacly cackle by arc light before their little castles were stormed.
Third, the very nature of the internet is that information flows on it transparently. Forget net neutrality, what the european mobile ISPs are threatening here is more extreme. They're presuming to control web content. It isn't even a matter of speed or bandwidth... they want to literally control which ads show up. Their whole push is antithetical to the whole nature of the internet in the first place. Whomever is pushing this is doubtless someone that doesn't understand the internet at all. And that means they're incompetent to make these choices and shouldn't be in a position of power in the first place. Just boot those fools out and try again.
Re:They can't stop google from doing that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Their whole push is antithetical to the whole nature of the internet in the first place. Whomever is pushing this is doubtless someone that doesn't understand the internet at all. And that means they're incompetent to make these choices and shouldn't be in a position of power in the first place. Just boot those fools out and try again.
That internet died long ago. Just as with anything, the pioneers are pushed out once civilization arrives and starts paving streets, building stores and throwing up billboards.
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That's mindlessly bitter. First off, the internet has a frontier still... the deep web or dark web or whatever they want to call it is entirely unregulated... you can go to it right now and buy heroine with bitcoins or something if you want.
Second, how does something die because civilization arrives?
Your entire post makes no sense. I'm sitting here rereading it trying to find some redeemable thought you're trying to express and... there does not appear to be one. You're conflating concepts that don't mean t
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That's mindlessly bitter. First off, the internet has a frontier still... the deep web or dark web or whatever they want to call it is entirely unregulated... you can go to it right now and buy heroine with bitcoins or something if you want.
Certainly, as when civilization arrive she frontier gets pushed farther and farther away.
Also not when I say internet I don't mean it in the strict technical sense of the backbone that the web and other services use, but the vast ecosystem that has grown up around it.
Second, how does something die because civilization arrives?
I didn't say the internet died, I said That internet died - the one where companies weren't trying to get your information to market to you, where you could still advertising something for sale on USENET, send it off and actually get a check in
Seriously...what about net neutrality? (Score:3)
Whatever happened to the fight for net neutrality?
Timothy can't have thought about this story for top many milliseconds before adding his 'insight' there..
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Whatever happened to the fight for net neutrality?
Net neutrality is only good when it does what we want, not when it prevents someone from doing what we want, such as blocking ads. It's like copyright, bad when used to prevent freely copying copyrighted works, good when it forces someone to comply with the GPL.
Seriously, that is a common behavior. Just look at the small government Republicans that want the government to step in to force others to do things they view as right but to bug roff when someone wants it to stop them from dong what they want. Swap
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They have to buy bread for home (Score:1)
They will inject paid stories to news sites with a very little "advertorial" marking. They will do secret agreements to sell user data and no, there is no way to prove they did it. They will become biased for certain political parties, opinions. They will be sponsored by billionaire political activists like Koch brothers, George Soros.
EU started to act like a 14 year old Internet troll lately.
Net Neutrality (Score:3)
Doesn't this violate everything slashdotters hold dear regarding net neutrality?
The telecom providers are planning to put a filter on what they will transport, and then charge extra to let it through again.
Unworkable without man-in-the-middle attack (Score:1)
With HTTPS connections, which are now pretty much the norm everywhere, this just won't work without a man in the middle attack. If my telephone provider starts attempting this, I will just terminate my contract and take my business elsewhere. ISPs have no business interfering with the content of end users, even if it is advertising. If they are doing this to profit from providers, by trying to take a cut of profit from advertisers, that would be highly unethical. I am already paying for my bandwidth. What d
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Since much of the advertisement content comes from a large but trackable number of hosted web servers and "content delivery networks" such as Akamai. Many of these web services have well defined URL's used to access their traffic, so quite a lot of filtering can be done by thoughtfully configuring proxies at the ISP, which need to handle and to cache this content anyway. The content stored in the proxy can also, itself be analyzed: HTTPS encryption doesn't help with avoiding that particular man-in-the-middl
You block us, we block you (Score:2)
What's stopping google from blocking an ISP/telecom that adopts this practice? I mean, if the telecom can legally block google, then google should be able to legally block the telecom.
If the telecom's customers suddenly can't reach google search, gmail, g+ etc, they'd probably either switch telecom or ask for the ads back.
"Benefit customers" (Score:2)
which would mean benefit for users
No, it won't. I don't want my ISP mucking with my traffic. I want to get what I asked for, I'll filter the ads myself thank you very much. Today they're filtering ads, tomorrow they're filtering "unsuitable content", by the end of the week they're injecting their own ads and by the end of the month they've lost (the European equivalent of) common carrier status.
An opt in system wouldn't be so bad, but I'd still be concerned about the potential legal (common carrier) implications.
Finally! (Score:2)
Just what we needed to convince websites to switch to https!
So, their solution is.... (Score:2)
I love the long game thinking of the EU.... So, the solution to lower bandwidth usage is to eliminate most web content that end users want access to....nice! Ad revenue keeps those sites alive. This is stupid.
Random thoughts on ad blocking (Score:2)
At the moment the plan is to provide customers with the ability to opt in to an ad-free experience; it's not clear whether there would be a charge for this.
ISPs should only be screwing with customers packets if users ask them to. Don't see a problem with opt-in filtering services generally as long as they remain opt-in. The Internet is a hostile environment and people have the right of self defense.
*IF* ISPs actually intent to extort money from content companies the respective governments where such ISPs operate might have something to say about that.
Described as 'the bomb', a system-wide block on ads is designed to "specifically target Google, blocking advertising on its websites in an attempt to force the company into giving up a cut of its revenues," reports the Financial Times. There is a suggestion that ads could be blocked on an intermittent basis simply to get Google's attention and cut better deals for telecoms companies.
I don't know what to make of this. It sounds like carefully worded propaganda to lead people to make assumpt
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In the absence of net neutrality rules, it's an open question whether you could call it extortion.
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"We're going to block your revenue stream unless you give us a piece of the action."
Sounds like the Mafia protection racket of old.. "Nice shop you've got here. Would be a shame if something happened to it.."
Google wins? (Score:2)
So Google blocks you until you "opt in", and then the block has achieved nothing? I think users will opt in pretty quick if they can't access facebook.
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You seem to thhink we want that shit! Getting rid of the concept of "Ad funded Internet" would be a massive improvement.
The truth is, we dont really mind paying for well written, stable apps which work. We are prepared to try out "free shite". Once we find it is shite, we delete it. Blocking this could save us from wasting a lot of our tim
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