Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us
- Reference: 1607938351
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/14/google_manifest_plugin_opinion/
- Source link:
No surprise, then, that the company is ambivalent about ad blocking. In its new [1]Manifest v3 plug-in architecture and its recent server-side tagging moves, it's taking control away from us and limiting what we can see – and therefore deny – of its ad delivery and analytics machinery.
It can't do this too quickly because it understands the political dangers, but you can bet that the giant's kitchens have pots full of frogs on a low heat.
Google Chrome's crackdown on ad blockers and browser extensions, Manifest v3, is now available in beta [2]READ MORE
To some extent, we're still winning the battle. You can get multiple complementary plug-ins that deny requests to known ad networks, spot and block tracking tags, and so on. The more ambitious can install software like PiHole, which sits on your home network and does the same for all traffic, if you're comfortable with setting up servers and tinkering with DNS. The more technical you are, the more options you get – although why no home router makers have put ad and track filtering in their products is slightly mystifying.
But this balance of power is changing. With server-side tagging, for example, Google effectively takes over all the ad and analytics traffic from your browser and runs it in the cloud, where you can't see it. That's great for Google because it improves the quality and speed of data acquisition, but leaves us getting what we're given. The safeguards against this being abused? "Don't be a dick," as [3]one developer put it to potential users of server-side tagging. Bad news, mate: ad tech companies pretty much own the rights to dickhood.
If you look at data analytics company websites where they discuss client-side versus server-side tracking, the number one con against client-side is "control rests with the user." You might think this is a good thing – it is literally their biggest fear.
We do have a working example of this fear realised. The very best advertising experience on the web is on Twitter. I've experienced many of the highs and lows of Twitter over the years, as well as the very complicated. There's nothing like getting a response, or even praise, from someone you very much admire, and having someone of renown pass on some expertise is journo catnip. Those are good things. Being on the end of a highly abusive troll army of bigots while fighting your corner is a bad thing. Having a tweet go viral and your timeline melt for a day – that's complicated.
But the best thing Twitter does is putting adverts in that timeline. The adverts themselves are as crass, unwelcome and intrusive as on any site, but the microburst of joy you get when you select Block User is unmatched anywhere else online. Not that I block all adverts, but a good 90 per cent of the companies who try to sell me stuff I see once and then never again.
Let's consider a world where this functionality wasn't just a good idea, but a legal requirement. What if all adverts on all platforms had a "never again" button? How often would you click it? Yeah, me too. "Control rests with the user" – say it with me.
The argument against this, like that against ad blockers, is that once denied advertising revenue, all sorts of good things will go away. But in reality, ad money goes into ad networks, into products designed to serve more ads and monetise your sweet bippy ever more efficiently. The rise of [4]Facebook and the slow death of journalism is due to online ads. Oddly, the economy and levels of innovation hold up pretty well when "free" doesn't translate to uncountable billions in someone else's bank account.
If a legally mandated ad-block technology was blessed with enough finesse to let the good ads through – and we're the only people who can make that judgement – then advertising revenue wouldn't fall to zero. Good advertising – the sort targeted at readerships by the reader's own actions – would prosper because the stuff that reaches only the right people is worth far more than the stuff that gets spaffed across all our screens. Platforms that could offer that targeting – we used to call them newspapers – would prosper too.
Bad advertising – the stuff that makes our lives hell and the ad-tech monsters rich – would suffer, but the crazification factor, that 35 per cent of people who seem certifiably and irretrievably permanent strangers to logic, would probably keep it going enough so the rest of us still enjoy some free stuff.
We know that legal controls on advertising works: the pirate radio ships of the 1960s were mostly taken off-air not through police action or prosecuting listeners under the Wireless Telegraphy Act, but by stopping UK companies from advertising on them. The fact that Lewis Hamilton's car doesn't look like a cigarette packet is part of the reason your uncle won't die of lung cancer. And we still have pop music radio and Formula 1.
Let's go for it. Let's use technology to put the fear of the Lord into those who would be the dickiest of dicks. It's another way we can get our internet – and a world where sanity is a bit more fashionable – back. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/googles_browser_extension_platform_rewrite/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/googles_browser_extension_platform_rewrite/
[3] https://twitter.com/SimoAhava/status/1222459714614841346?s=20
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/09/facebook_crushed_competitors_to_maintain/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Article» ...although why no home router makers have put ad and track filtering in their products is slightly mystifying.
Maybe, just maybe, the reason for this is as hinted by the investigations & law-suits from the US DoJ, namely that Google (and others) are leveraging their weight and fat checkbooks to ensure that said devices do not have these things built in.
Turris Omnia has a blocker
I've recently bought a Turris Omnia router, and that has an optional ad blocker.
I haven't turned the blocker on yet, as I boycott (rather unsystematically) anything I remember having seen advertised at me, so it's nice to let the ads have the opposite of the intended effect (and ad targetting, if effective, means the things I don't buy because I've seen them advertised are likelier to be ones that I otherwise would have bought).
I hate ads, never watch live TV, record and skip past the ads, ad blocker on my browser. I don't see that I am taking money from the advertisers as I never buy their tat anyway.
"the giant's kitchens have pots full of frogs on a low heat."
Can I just point out that frogs aren't stupid. They jump out of the pot sharpish when it gets too warm.
Nothing wrong with ads ...
The tracking giants like to say that we are trying to get things for free that we should be paying for, but that's not true. I think most people don't object to seeing ads as a way of paying for a service. I have quite a few apps on my phone that give me the alternative of free with ads or paid without, and quite often I accept the ads, even though the sums are usually quite small and I could afford to pay. On web sites, the fact that the ads render some sites very slow and hard to use is an annoyance, but if the site owner likes it like that, it should be up to them.
The real objection to ads on web sites and social media apps is not the ads but what goes along with them: the relentless tracking, the sale of information on our likes and habits to whoever wants to pay for it, and the risk of malware. These are the reasons I block ads on most sites by default.
Re: Nothing wrong with ads ...
I block ads on Facebook (and everywhere else), but in the ongoing war of adblocker vs adblocker-blocker, there are days when the ads get through. The vast majority of them are extremely poorly targeted. I wonder how many seventy year old men are likely to click on a big ad promoting Botox treatment for their lips or for the performance report for a school at the other end of the country? The ads are so irrelevant I just scroll past them all. Besides I've never bought anything from an ad on the internet and never will - I simply don't trust products and services hawked in this way. If I want to buy something I do my own research.
Keep on AdBlocking
Anything that can be done to take google down a few million pegs then great. Bring it on.
I'll carry on :-
- Not using Google for searches (google.com is blocked at my firewall)
- Not using Google services except where they are needed to make sites work
- Not using Chrome or any browser based on Chrome
- Blocking all ads no matter where they come from.
{I would pay a small amount to keep this site going}
Google is evil from end to end. Mind you Facebook is just as bad.
I hate all advertising and especially ads that are apparently targetted at me. I got fed up with ads for things that 20 somethings might want when I'm in my sixties. Target my ass and I'll do a Rudi 'leaking hair dye' Guilanni back at you. (he farted in a televised hearing)
Misses the point
You can't escape advertising. Certainly ad blocker might make you think you can, but you really can't. It's a dreadfully blunt tool and if its adoption ever grows into something significant - which doesn't appear likely - adverts will become something you can't block.
Legislating internet advertising is no easy task either. There are many diverse formats and channels in which to spend advertising money - not to mention the fact that the marketing money powers large swathes of the economy.
As with many things in life, technology won't save you. Only education will. When marketeers understand how the internet works and where their budgets really go, that's when advertising will improve.
Until then, how do you support the websites you rely on?
Re: Misses the point
Until then, how do you support the websites you rely on?
I have a 'premium' subscription to a national newspaper; this means I get the dead tree version and all the content of the web site.
The problem I have is that they still fling page upon page of ads at me even though I am paying hundreds of pounds a year for that subscription.
That website gets the Firefox + NoScript treatment (the only domains allowed are the ones that actually let me sign in).
I did an experiment to allow all the ads and scripts one day.
The result: the laptop (which is no slouch - dual core 2.4GHz 7th gen I7, 8GB RAM) got maxed out with almost 100% CPU utilisation- the fan started up almost immediately which is unusual unless I am running something such as a circuit simulation in LTSpice.
I took a look at all the domains running scripts and it was so long I had to scroll down three times to see all of them. It was also interesting to see that the scripts listed only on the home page is quite short (and virtually all blocked anyway now) so that means that a script from a third party domain is calling other scripts from other third party domains and so forth.
The other issue I have with this is quite simple: ads in the print edition are subject (quite reasonably) to some due diligence, but how do they do that with an ad flung from $DEITY knows where and scripts loaded on the fly from third party domains? My view is that it is impossible to effectively do.
An observation; running scripts directly from third party domains is stupid, in my view.
although why no home router makers have put ad and track filtering in their products is slightly mystifying.
The cynic in me would suggest that brown envelopes stuffed with $CURRENCY might be a factor.
Server-side tagging is about hiding tracking, not advertising
It aims to work around third-party cookie blocking by riding on the coat-tails of the publisher’s first-party domain. Ads can’t be hidden by definition, and will find their way onto blocklists anyway.
"...the stuff that reaches only the right people is worth far more..."
The problems with ads that "reach only the right people" is that the people would need to share even more of their personal data with the ad companies. Search online for, say, running shoes and you'll be bombarded with ads for running shoes for days or weeks afterwards. They don't know you've bought a pair - unless you give them access to more of your personal data so that they can find out - and I'm not willing to do this.
I understand that some sites can't be free without ads, but it cuts both ways. Sites that rely on advertising also need to understand that if they spaff dozens of intrusive, annoying ads at users, whether well-targeted or not, they will piss those users off and, ultimately, reduce ad revenue.
It's just corporate policy
Don't get caught be ing evil.
In a past far far away
I sold targeted advertising for probably the UK biggest print publication. It was literally nothing but ads, and the punters paid good money for it. The advertisers paid good money to place ads in it. What ads I can't block, I honestly never look at. What a waste of time and money, and I fully agree there must be a better way.
Ps Auto Trader, did what it said on the cover.