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Ask HN: Why not put onus on AdBlocker to prevent terms of service violations?
If, for example, the terms of service for using Facebook are that adblockers may not be used, the why not force the adblockers to enforce that policy?
i.e. if you are using an adblocker, then the adblocker not only blocks ads but blocks the entire site.
- viraptor 10y ago> why not force the adblockers How do you force a program to do anything? Or how does facebook force you to use an approved adblocker? An exercise: I say you can't use the internet with extensions I disapprove of. Do you comply?
- hoodoof 10y agoI seem to recall plenty of software being driven out of existence due to legal pressure. popcorn time, napster.
- viraptor 10y agoKind of... the tools themselves were never really illegal. It was primarily the distribution of copyright protected content instead. You can still download and run napster clients however. Just like torrent clients will still be alive, even if specific services like popcorn time go down. Adblockers do not distribute copyrighted software. It's a different issue. While blocking ads could be challenged legally, it has not happened yet.
- hoodoof 10y agoTrue. It seems likely to me that companies like Facebook will spend alot of money fighting adblockers. Not just in court but in Washington with lobbyists. The politicians know which side their bread is buttered on - laws will come into effect banning adblockers sooner or later.
- wtracy 10y agoFirst, I believe that some anti-ad-blocker tools do something similar--the hosting site refuses to load until ad blockers (or ad blocker-like behavior) is no longer detected. Second, exactly how would you force them? Do you really want a legal ban on the distribution of software that could permit the end user to violate a civil contract? That might fly in China and possibly the US, but probably not in the EU.
- nathanlied 10y agoBecause if you do that, someone will fork your codebase, and patch it out. Or, failing that, code a new adblocker from scratch, without said feature. If you're talking about giving legal power to websites' ToS to define what software may parse the data you download from their servers before/after rendering it to you, you're opening a gigantic can of worms, and I don't think most users would be particularly happy with that.
- hoodoof 10y agoIf a website excludes adblockers, then any commercial company associated with an adblocker is legally exposed is it not? Seems reasonable to me that the adblocker should act responsibly and block entire sites where the TOS prohibits its use. Not hard for sites to set something in robots.txt to say "no adblockers allowed"
- viraptor 10y ago> If a website excludes adblockers, then any commercial company associated with an adblocker is legally exposed is it not? This is not true in any country at the moment as far as I know. There's some initial stupidness in the US like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/12/9th-circuit-its-a-federal-crime-to-visit-a-website-after-being-told-not-to-visit-it/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... , but in practice that's going to be disputed in courts many times before they agree on some final version. Especially since there's a related recent ruling (can't find the article now) which basically said - if your ToS are too complex and people are unlikely to understand all the details, they're not bound by it.
- benologist 10y agoBecause you used to have a friend called Tom, if they make enough people resent using them you will used to have a creepy uncle called Zuck.
- krapp 10y agoBecause people using ad blockers don't want to see ads when if the terms of service demand them, they want not to see ads. If Facebook or any site wants to prevent people using ad blockers from viewing their content, that's their right. But an ad blocker that doesn't block all advertising, all the time, by default is just broken. Any exceptions should be explicitly made by the user, not the ad blocker or the site.