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Do you think that Microsoft could ship IE9 with an ad blocker installed and enabled by default? Do you think they could get away with blocking all ads except th
by briansmith 16y ago
Do you think that Microsoft could ship IE9 with an ad blocker installed and enabled by default? Do you think they could get away with blocking all ads except those they distribute? Or, do you think people would step in and demand regulation to stop them from doing those things?
I always thought that Microsoft could have killed Google's non-search business and other free "cloud"-based competitors by shipping an ad blocker in IE. It would have ruined Microsoft's own free online service business, but they could have thrived on software license revenue alone. But, I think the DoJ and the EU would never allow it.
- ugh 16y agoI think you are comparing things which are not the same. Ads on websites vs. ads in apps, iOS vs. Windows, Safari vs. Internet Explorer, Mobile Safari vs. Desktop Safari. All those kinds of details regulatory bodies tend to care about. To give you just one example, Safari (the non-mobile variant, the one with the Reader feature) has at the moment a market share of around five percent, Internet Explorer has twelve times that. Details like that matter in antitrust cases. Just because something looks superficially similar doesn’t mean it’s actually the same.
- masklinn 16y ago> Do you think that Microsoft could ship IE9 with an ad blocker installed and enabled by default? Reader is not an adblocker anymore than Readability or Instapaper are. You guys are completely insane and blowing this out of proportion. Reader is a manually triggered page reformatter, essentially Readability built in, you have to already be on the page and you have to have seen the ads before Reader is even available. The ars article is one of the few that got me to headdesk in years, it's unbelievably stupid.