UK government launches initiative against online adblocking, compares it to piracy
Found on The tack on Thursday, 03 March 2016
Today the UK’s culture secretary John Whittingdale has announced that the British government intends to ‘do something’ on the issue, describing the practice as a ‘modern day protection racket’, and comparing it to piracy.
Last month the president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Randall Rothenburg, described adblocking companies as a freedom-hating ‘Mafia’.
Now the companies complain and whine, but for years they tried to bury users under blinking gifs, pop-ups, pop-unders and animated flash ads with sound which all eat up resources such as bandwidth and CPU usage; and sometimes ads also delivered drive-by installs, exploits and other malware. Not to mention the increased tracking of visitors over different websites with (flash-)cookies. At some point users were fed up because all their complains were ignored and thus fixed the problem by rigorously blocking ads. You reap what you sow.