>Lets stop this, lets get rid of the ad blockers and lets force the advertising companies to be responsible with their technology, not drain our batteries, not sell our personal info and we will have a much better internet.
How about no?
How about we use as many ad-blocking methods as we want, and companies that depend on ad revenue either continue the cat and mouse games, find another way to make money or shrivel up and die?
Not because advertising on the web is inherently evil (I don't believe it is, although many people disagree) or because companies don't have a right to make money if they want to (sure, why not), but because the internet is structured in a way that gives the user direct control over what they see and what they don't see, which makes it by design an unreliable medium for advertisements.
The ability to block ads isn't a problem, it's inherent to the request-response nature of the web. It's not our problem that companies want ads on the internet to be as reliable as ads on television or the newspapers used to be. Doesn't work that way, and without fundamentally altering what the web is, or turning every browser into a dumb terminal, it can't be made to work that way reliably.
What companies are doing to undermine ad blockers makes sense, and it a rational response to the existence of ad blockers, but it's still a war of attrition that those companies are eventually going to lose, because the web was designed for serving documents in markup and giving the end user the ability to determine how that markup is displayed.
This aspect of the web is ignored 99% of the time but ad blocking is one example of it in action.
How about no?
How about we use as many ad-blocking methods as we want, and companies that depend on ad revenue either continue the cat and mouse games, find another way to make money or shrivel up and die?
Not because advertising on the web is inherently evil (I don't believe it is, although many people disagree) or because companies don't have a right to make money if they want to (sure, why not), but because the internet is structured in a way that gives the user direct control over what they see and what they don't see, which makes it by design an unreliable medium for advertisements.
The ability to block ads isn't a problem, it's inherent to the request-response nature of the web. It's not our problem that companies want ads on the internet to be as reliable as ads on television or the newspapers used to be. Doesn't work that way, and without fundamentally altering what the web is, or turning every browser into a dumb terminal, it can't be made to work that way reliably.
What companies are doing to undermine ad blockers makes sense, and it a rational response to the existence of ad blockers, but it's still a war of attrition that those companies are eventually going to lose, because the web was designed for serving documents in markup and giving the end user the ability to determine how that markup is displayed.
This aspect of the web is ignored 99% of the time but ad blocking is one example of it in action.