http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43838308
Germany's supreme court has rejected a legal case that sought to stop people using the popular Adblock Plus program that removes ads from websites.The lawsuit was started three years ago by German publishing giant Axel Springer.It alleged that the way Adblock Plus stopped people seeing adverts on its sites amounted to unfair competition. Axel Springer said it would continue its legal challenge by taking the issue to Germany's Constitutional Court.
Adblock Plus is widely used to stop intrusive pop-up adverts and limit tracking by websites of where people go online. Adblock Plus creator Eyeo, which is based in Cologne, claims the PC version of its software has been downloaded more than 400 million times.The German publishing firm first complained about Adblock Plus in 2015, alleging that it broke competition laws by letting firms pay to be on a "white list" to stop their ads being blocked. It took the case to the Supreme Court after losing the first round of legal action in 2015.
Other German media firms that also launched related legal action said the simple blocking of adverts was a violation of local laws designed to promote competition.
The Supreme Court disagreed with Springer's allegations and said no laws were being broken because it was up to individual users whether they used the software.
It also overturned a lower court ruling that forced Eyeo to white list some adverts for free. Eyeo welcomed the ruling and said in a statement that it was "excited that Germany's highest court upheld the right every internet citizen possesses to block unwanted advertising online".
After the verdict, Claas-Hendrick Soehring, Springer's head of media law, said the ruling was "an attack on the heart of the free media".
You old dusty fucktards need to stay away from the internet and stop trying to control every aspect of peoples lives
They had it coming. Sometimes website adds are very invasive.
Sometimes I'll just white list certain websites that I frequent that use minimal non invasive ads.
Sorry if I'm uninformed, but does AdBlock actually allow companies to pay to be whitelisted? Because that seems a little weird, and would technically allow for unfair competition.
I, for one, am not interested in seeing any form of advertising in any way, shape or form when I'm trying to just browse websites and have a good time online.
People who want to throw ads up on everything or complain about it when people provide a work around to not have to deal with their shit; can shove it up their asses and go get real jobs as far as I'm concerned.
Adblockers have unfortunately become a necessary evil. I'd be all for supporting the website that I'm using by generating them revenue, no matter how minuscule. But as it stands right now it's far too great a security risk to not have one. Cryptominers and other nasty shit like rootkits are able to be installed without a user's notice because of a single ad. It's become essentially impossible to use the internet without one.
I remember something about AB allowing certain ads through a few years ago, about the same time I dumped it in favour of UBlock.
FYI PLEASE STOP USING ADBLOCK PLUS
Use uBlock Origins which won't compromise on blocking ads due to bribes disguised as a "whitelisting initiative".
Well maybe if advertisers curated their shit we wouldn't be in this situation now would we Axel Springer?
FYI you can turn off the "Acceptable Ads" option, and then all of your ads are blocked again.
I never whitelist any pages. I'm spooked by internet ads since some tiny, not-monitored sites like FACEBOOK or YOUTUBE can have malware in their ads so I don't trust a picture-host #543165432 etc that begs me to disable adblock enough to actually disable it.
The fact that uBlock Origin doesn't have any financial ties to the ad industry should be reason enough to switch over.
They're quite open about this. Go ahead and read Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus.
It's a program aimed at improving ads across the board. All whitelisted ads are up for discussion on their forum.
On payment:
Is there payment involved?
We receive some donations from our users, but our main source of revenue comes as part of the Acceptable Ads initiative. Larger entities (as defined below) pay a licensing fee for the whitelisting services requested and provided to them (around 90 percent of the licences are granted for free). It should be noted that the Acceptable Ads criteria must be met independent of the consideration for payments. If the criteria are not met, whitelisting is impossible.
Regarding fees, only large entities (those with more than 10 million additional ad impressions per month due to participation in the Acceptable Ads initiative) have to pay. For these entities, our licensing fee normally represents 30 percent of the additional revenue created by whitelisting its acceptable ads.
You're presenting it in a way that makes it seem that there's some collusion going on. There's not. And it doesn't really matter anyway? You can turn off the option and enjoy the same ad-free experience as with other blockers.
Do Adblock Plus users really want this feature?
The results of our user survey say yes. According to the survey, only 25 percent of Adblock Plus users are strictly against all advertising. They can disable the feature and browse completely ad-free. The other 75 percent replied that they would accept some advertising to help support websites.
I'd rather go with the app that is explicitly non-profit rather than trust a corporation not to abuse its power of the ad industry because "trust us". I guarantee that most users are not gonna check what the "acceptable ads" option is and they'll leave it on by default because they don't know any better.
Why settle for "may or may not be any conflicts of interest" when you can get "literally impossible for there to be any conflict of interest".
You do you. I am just saying it's not as insidious as you pretend it is.
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