The case for ethical ad-blocking When is ad-blocking ethical? How about when the adtech industry is behaving so unethically it destroys people’s livelihoods? Musician and music rights campaigner David Lowery last year made the incendiary suggestion that musicians should encourage their fans to block the advertising running on music-streaming sites – even …
Depends how its done.
Nothing stopping the site using an inline script to obfuscate the page, then serve some code via an ad call to decrypt it. Block the ads, you block the code that lets you see the content. Works with all forms of ad blocking too, even at a firewall level, not just ABP/Ghostery etc (and with ABP you can pay to have your adverts whitelisted!).
Also, what's to stop them using reverse proxy rules that make the scripts appear if they are coming from the same domain as the site itself?
There are companies working on ways to serve ads, even with ad blockers enabled, right now.
And this is the way things are going. Ad agencies aren't going to give in easily. Subscriptions will never match advertising revenue.
As much as I hate them too, they aren't going anywhere for some time.
Indeed it is ethical for me to block unsolicited advertisements from appearing on the web pages I visit.
I do not wish to see them. Moreover, I have made a promise to myself NEVER to buy a product or service that I see in an unsolicited web advertisement.
Therefore,
1. ad-blocking is beneficial to me, because I do not wish to see them.
2. ad-blocking is beneficial to advertisers, since it is possible for me to buy their product or service only if I do not see their advertisement.
Everybody benefits.
People lose sight of how the internet actually works.
I turn on my computer and it accesses my ISP and requests a web page (which is essentially a data file download) from somebody else's computer. This transaction occurs for free, or more accurately, is paid for at my end within a monthly data access limit that I have negotiated with my ISP; and at the provider's end within the data upload limit they have negotiated with their ISP.
So somebody else prepares data to be consumed, and I nonchalantly walk along and instruct my computer to consume a copy of that data.
Now, when my computer receives the data from somebody else's computer, that data belongs to me. I have downloaded it and paid for access to it with my ISP. No matter what anybody may think, once the copy is in my computer's memory, I can do with it pretty much whatever I please.
If I choose to run a program that automatically strips out some of that data that I have already chosen I don't want to see, before it is rendered onto my web browser's screen, that's strictly my business. There is nothing ethical or non-ethical about it whatsoever.
If enough people cleanse their data of un-solicited ads that it causes the web page provider to go out of business, that's an awful shame, but that's the way the business world works. That's what you get for running a business where you spend money & resources to put together information for public consumption but then have no mechanism to charge cash directly for access to that information (probably because nobody, or a very tiny proportion of people, would ever agree to such a payment scheme anyway). Your business provides the information for free, and you throw in ads from other companies that pay for that access, but then the ads are filtered out before they are ever viewed. That sucks, but that's the way the cookie has crumbled baby.
Barring the ads that pop up in your face and block what you're trying to read, or the ones with flashing lights and noises, I don't really care about the ads all that much. I can ignore them. I don't understand why there's all this hoo-rah about ads all over the tech world, but no complaining about all the tracking that goes on. Sites everywhere scrape all kinds of information from you and about you and report that to every other site. This very page scrapes information and gives it to Digital Media, Google Analytics, and Google Ad Services, for example. Some pages have as many as 25 different web bugs and a myriad of other trackers on each page. At the same time many pages use scripts of one kind or another that pass information to yet more web sites. Why do folks complain not at all about all that, yet there's such a huge outcry about mere ads? I don't get it.
The internet is free to use or to ignore. As well, it is free to ban people from certain content.
I cannot look at anything on Facebook without an account, and guess what I don't have that account, and I don't even care!
There are sites that try to scold me for using ad-blocker, but all they do is block me from looking at their site, so I don't look at their site!
It's my computer screen and I can put whatever internet site on it, however I choose, and the owner of those sites can block me for whatever reason they deem fit, and it just doesn't make any difference.
I'll just look at something else, and they can go exclude others from whatever it is they put up on the net. Who cares, not me. Nobody should care. It's none of your business anyway!
Ads use MY CPU cycles, MY electricity, MY bandwidth to show me useless information on things I do not need or want and the ad networks are spying on me too, harvesting information and tracing my whereabouts.
There is NOTHING unethical in blocking ads, it is actually a right we have - it is the right to use OUR computers as WE like.
If the ads were simple text with small pictures (like an ad in a newspaper) people wouldn't block them but animated ads is like putting a running film into a newspaper. You can save 50% CPU just by blocking some ad servers... and with only ONE web page open, that is actually what I would call UNETHICAL - oh and think what all those useless ads do for the environment, we waste a lot of power on them.
"When is ad-blocking ethical?"
Er, that's easy. 100% of the time. I will decide - as far as is practical, when I do not wish to see an advert. If I can skip adverts on the PVR, then I will. Same principle for adverts on the web. If I am driving along and am advertised to on a billboard then there is not much I can do about that, but that's life.
To all marketing types out there: Suck it up and go get a proper job. Stop promoting consumerism, it is a fundamentally flawed proposition.
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