[lightspeed2398]

There's a report in the Financial Times (subscription only I'll link The Verge - http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/15/86...lock-ads-rumor) that European carriers are planning to block mobile ads at the network level using technology provided by an Israeli company. They are apparently at first planning to implement this as a premium option.

Personally I feel as though this is bad for website owners who rely on advertising income to make money and I also feel as though this is bad for Net Neutrality. I personally just want my operator to deliver the traffic not to arse around with it.

Anyone got any thoughts?

[jchamier]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lightspeed2398

Anyone got any thoughts?

Adverts use my bandwidth and are annoying and so blocking would be good. I would pay upto £2/month maximum for such a service.

[Gigabit]

This has to violate net neutrality rules. But wait, the EU is about to break that anyway.

[jchamier]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gigabit

This has to violate net neutrality rules. But wait, the EU is about to break that anyway.

Shouldn't violate the rules if its opt-in ? But net-neutrality is a USA thing at the moment, as you say the EU is about to screw it up

[Gigabit]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jchamier

Shouldn't violate the rules if its opt-in ? But net-neutrality is a USA thing at the moment, as you say the EU is about to screw it up

Oh I interpreted it as compulsory, in that case, yes that would be fine.

I cannot believe, that after the USA managed to keep it, the EU is considering not. Isn't the USA normally the country that bows done to big companies and the EU is more on the side of the people?

[MTUK1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jchamier

Adverts use my bandwidth and are annoying and so blocking would be good. I would pay upto £2/month maximum for such a service.

How do websites meet the costs of providing their services? By magic?

[jchamier]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MTUK1

How do websites meet the costs of providing their services? By magic?

Most adverts are fine, its those that overlay the whole site and interrupt the navigation, or those that force play video. (Digital Spy Mobile I'm thinking of here) that are most annoying and need filtering.

Small banners and those that are text are fine.

[Thine Wonk]

This is a slippery slope to big companies running main sites under pay terms. Ads are what fund sites.

Leave the web the way the creators want it to be, the carriers are just utilities, not controllers of the content.

[IvanIV]

I think it should be left to individual people what they do and networks should not provide it as a paid service. If a particular site provides a premium ad-free membership or a user installs some kind of an adblock then be it.

[Esot-eric]

Sites could just switch to https (which is increasingly happening anyway) to avoid the content being modified en route, and serve ads from the same servers as the content to avoid DNS-based blocking.

It might cause problems for smaller sites but for big players it'll be business as usual.

[moox]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gigabit

Oh I interpreted it as compulsory, in that case, yes that would be fine.

I cannot believe, that after the USA managed to keep it, the EU is considering not. Isn't the USA normally the country that bows done to big companies and the EU is more on the side of the people?

Because the real issue in the US is a lack of competition. If you can get two credible options for wired internet, you're fortunate. It also helps that the current FCC head has been one of the more consumer-friendly ones in recent years (despite his past as a telco lobbyist)

That isn't the case for most people in the EU because we have much better competition laws and a much more competitive industry.

So they need regulation to limit the bad things a monopoly can do, we don't, because competition does pretty well to prevent it.

IMO a network-level ad block should at the very least be free, up to the customer and not turned on by default.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jchamier

Most adverts are fine, its those that overlay the whole site and interrupt the navigation, or those that force play video. (Digital Spy Mobile I'm thinking of here) that are most annoying and need filtering.

Small banners and those that are text are fine.

Some ads are still resource intensive though. I use an ad blocker, because my modern system visibly struggles to render or play some of the ads on the internet. If they were simple links or GIFs it'd be fine, but Flash or video is a no-no - and any site with auto-playing videos with audio deserves to die in a fire. I can see the logic of banning such ads on a capped connection - why should people have their GBs eaten up with stuff they don't want?

There's also the issue of tracking cookies and other crap that I'd rather not deal with

[moox]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Esot-eric

Sites could just switch to https (which is increasingly happening anyway) to avoid the content being modified en route, and serve ads from the same servers as the content to avoid DNS-based blocking.

It might cause problems for smaller sites but for big players it'll be business as usual.

Not if they used HTTPS proxying, and installed the right root certificates on the phones they supply so that they can create their own certs for each website. I doubt mobile browsers support things like certificate pinning yet.

They'd get torn to bits in the media if they did it, but it wouldn't be impossible