7 ms·

I think this is a little reductive. WEI is likely what some people at Google felt was best for AdSense's customers, i.e. advertisers. It just so happens that Go

I think this is a little reductive. WEI is likely what some people at Google felt was best for AdSense's customers, i.e. advertisers. It just so happens that Google has a whole other set of customers who this is not best for, e.g. Chrome users, YouTube users. The problem is that it's all coming from one company, and AdSense is where the money is at, so I don't trust Google to make the best decisions for their secondary customers. I definitely agree that AdSense blocking clients that don't implement WEI seems likely. At that point, it will be up to websites that rely on AdSense revenue to decide what to do with customers they aren't monetizing. That's already a question they have from users with ad blockers, although that is a little bit more challenging to detect. My hope is that the majority of sites accept that they can't rely on ad revenue, and instead resort to directly monetizing users as a way to make ends meet. IMO that's a better relationship than indirectly selling their data and attention.

Xenoamorphous 3y ago
> At that point, it will be up to websites that rely on AdSense revenue to decide what to do with customers they aren't monetizing. Isn’t this a no brainer? Ad funded websites have zero incentive to serve pages to ad blocker users. Not only they don’t make any money from them, they cost them money.
- wbobeirne 3y ago
  I run an ad blocker on all of my devices (mix of uBlock or Brave browser) and I'm pretty surprised how infrequently sites ask me to disable it to access content. Not sure if your experience is different.
  - vbezhenar 3y ago
    Probably because ublock deletes those “disable Adblock“ screens.
    - wbobeirne 3y ago
      Any proper gate for a user to access content should be managed by a server, not on the client side. It would have to be the same for WEI. If they can detect that I'm using an adblocker, there's no reason they couldn't prevent me from accessing content by not even serving the content in the first place.
      - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
        Unless they can only detect it with client-side code?
      - omoikane 3y ago
        It's a cat and mouse game between the ad-blockers and ad-blocker-blockers. I imagine if WEI actually becomes a thing, WEI countermeasures will also emerge, and WEI counter-countermeasures soon after. A better plan might be for websites to find some a better way to sustain themselves, possibly by running ads that are more relevant and less obnoxious so that users wouldn't block them.
      - blibble 3y ago
        the point of remote attestation is the environment the client is running in can be measured by the server and any tampering detected tampering meaning running your code instead of theirs
        hellojesus 3y ago
        The conflict emerges because the device is mine, not theirs. I ask for content, they send it. It seems am unfair burden to collude with os and hardware manufactures to force the user to give up general computing in order to visit an otherwise unknown web page. It would be a much better experience to go dark with content like Twitter has done than to remove general computing from the web.
- bmacho 3y ago
  Users that use ad blockers and are served - cost mostly marginal money - continue to use your platform, potentially watch ads later - their usage can be sold to anyone: where are they at a given time and what are they doing - don't go to rival platforms - tell their friends about the website - etc
  - simbolit 3y ago
    I wish the people running adtech-reliant websites would agree with your (very fair) points.
    - kzhe 3y ago
      ...
- lnxg33k1 3y ago
  I visit a lot of websites that show blank pages upon seeing that I have an adblocker, so the technology to prevent serving those who have adblock is still there, I 100% of the time, saw the message to disable adblocker and just left the website. This tech is not to prevent serving content to people who adblock, this technology is to make sure that people don't have the ability to make that choice and force certain setups that prevent adblocking
  - Xenoamorphous 3y ago
    Showing some ads in an ad funded website is the admission fee. You’re not willing to pay it, which is completely fine, so just don’t go to that website. But if you keep coning back to an ad funded website because you enjoy their content, it’s only fair that you disable the ad blocker in that site. Those sites that showed you the “disable ad blocker” pop up that prompted you to leaving won’t miss you.
    - jalfresi 3y ago
      Its not an admission fee. The website is hosted on a publicly accessible web server. There is no admission fee. The browser I am using serves my purposes; if I wish to strip certain elements from the page, add new ones or reformat the page any way I see fit, I can and am allowed to. The point Google seem to be making quite clearly, is that the browser does not serve my needs, but the needs of Googles paying customers.
      - Xenoamorphous 3y ago
        We're talking about ethics here, not laws nor what's technically possible. You want to support the ad-funded website you keep coming to, yes or no? Yeah ideally every website would have a paid option for the HN crowd with cushy jobs, but that's not always feasible.
        account42 3y ago
        > We're talking about ethics here, not laws nor what's technically possible. In that case, ads, being psychological manipulation to get users to do things they would not otherwise do, are already highly unethical. The ethical think to do is to discourage their use, which includes blocking them for yourself thus making them less profitable overall.
- Cort3z 3y ago
  Figuring out and serving the site to display the “disable Adblock” is likely more costly than to serve the content (unless its video). That being said; creators needs money to keep making what they are making. Too bad ads is such an all encompassing method. The web is literally worse with it, but would not have been as big without it.
  - account42 3y ago
    > That being said; creators needs money to keep making what they are making. Many ad-supported sites rely on unpaid users for content.
fauigerzigerk 3y ago
>My hope is that the majority of sites accept that they can't rely on ad revenue, and instead resort to directly monetizing users as a way to make ends meet. How? You see, this is the problem I have with all these debates where advertising is declared the villain. "Directly monetising" usually means subscriptions and logins, which means you lose all anonymity, not just gradually like under an ad targeting regime, but definitively and completely. Now payment processors and banks also get a share of the surveillance cake. The greatest irony is that you may not even get rid of advertising. Advertising only becomes more valuable and more effective. All the newspaper subscriptions I have run ads. The second issue is that advertising is paid for by consumers in proportion to their spending power, because a certain share of every £$€ spent is used to buy ads. Therefore, rich people fund more of our free at the point of use online services than poor people do. If rich people move to subscriptions, this subsidy ends. Poor people will either be cut off from high quality services and relegated to their own low quality information and services (as is already the case with newspapers) or they will have to suffer through even more advertising.
- wbobeirne 3y ago
  Fair criticism that I used "ad revenue" as a generality, I was more specifically thinking of AdSense ads and the like. I think there are plenty of forms of advertising that are better for the relationship and less exploitative of users, such as corporate sponsorship or sponsored content ("featured" search results, brand collaborations etc.) As long as the relationship is clear when something is paid vs organic. > Now payment processors and banks also get a share of the surveillance cake. I agree this is a problem. I work on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, so that's my preferred solution to the problem, but there are other approaches to addressing the poor state of privacy and payments too. I don't think that that being a problem means that the relationship we have with advertising isn't as bad though. > If rich people move to subscriptions, this subsidy ends. There are plenty of examples where this is not the case. The freemium model exists in places where injected advertisements are not the norm, such as free to play games. Fortnite whales subsidize millions of low income players to get a high quality game for free. Whether or not you think the relationship between Epic and its players is another question, but it's a model that can continue to exist without advertisement. Especially when free users are necessary to provide content for paying users, like posts on Twitter or Reddit, or players in a game.
lxgr 3y ago
> Google has a whole other set of customers who this is not best for, e.g. Chrome users, YouTube users. Are Chrome users really Google's customers, though? Arguably, they're part of the product. Youtube used to be the same, although that's changing a bit with the current aggressive push for Youtube Premium.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  Using a term coined by RMS they're not users, they're useds.

Xenoamorphous 3y ago

> At that point, it will be up to websites that rely on AdSense revenue to decide what to do with customers they aren't monetizing. Isn’t this a no brainer? Ad funded websites have zero incentive to serve pages to ad blocker users. Not only they don’t make any money from them, they cost them money.

wbobeirne 3y ago
I run an ad blocker on all of my devices (mix of uBlock or Brave browser) and I'm pretty surprised how infrequently sites ask me to disable it to access content. Not sure if your experience is different.
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  Probably because ublock deletes those “disable Adblock“ screens.
  - wbobeirne 3y ago
    Any proper gate for a user to access content should be managed by a server, not on the client side. It would have to be the same for WEI. If they can detect that I'm using an adblocker, there's no reason they couldn't prevent me from accessing content by not even serving the content in the first place.
    - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
      Unless they can only detect it with client-side code?
    - omoikane 3y ago
      It's a cat and mouse game between the ad-blockers and ad-blocker-blockers. I imagine if WEI actually becomes a thing, WEI countermeasures will also emerge, and WEI counter-countermeasures soon after. A better plan might be for websites to find some a better way to sustain themselves, possibly by running ads that are more relevant and less obnoxious so that users wouldn't block them.
    - blibble 3y ago
      the point of remote attestation is the environment the client is running in can be measured by the server and any tampering detected tampering meaning running your code instead of theirs
      - hellojesus 3y ago
        The conflict emerges because the device is mine, not theirs. I ask for content, they send it. It seems am unfair burden to collude with os and hardware manufactures to force the user to give up general computing in order to visit an otherwise unknown web page. It would be a much better experience to go dark with content like Twitter has done than to remove general computing from the web.
bmacho 3y ago
Users that use ad blockers and are served - cost mostly marginal money - continue to use your platform, potentially watch ads later - their usage can be sold to anyone: where are they at a given time and what are they doing - don't go to rival platforms - tell their friends about the website - etc
- simbolit 3y ago
  I wish the people running adtech-reliant websites would agree with your (very fair) points.
  - kzhe 3y ago
    ...
lnxg33k1 3y ago
I visit a lot of websites that show blank pages upon seeing that I have an adblocker, so the technology to prevent serving those who have adblock is still there, I 100% of the time, saw the message to disable adblocker and just left the website. This tech is not to prevent serving content to people who adblock, this technology is to make sure that people don't have the ability to make that choice and force certain setups that prevent adblocking
- Xenoamorphous 3y ago
  Showing some ads in an ad funded website is the admission fee. You’re not willing to pay it, which is completely fine, so just don’t go to that website. But if you keep coning back to an ad funded website because you enjoy their content, it’s only fair that you disable the ad blocker in that site. Those sites that showed you the “disable ad blocker” pop up that prompted you to leaving won’t miss you.
  - jalfresi 3y ago
    Its not an admission fee. The website is hosted on a publicly accessible web server. There is no admission fee. The browser I am using serves my purposes; if I wish to strip certain elements from the page, add new ones or reformat the page any way I see fit, I can and am allowed to. The point Google seem to be making quite clearly, is that the browser does not serve my needs, but the needs of Googles paying customers.
    - Xenoamorphous 3y ago
      We're talking about ethics here, not laws nor what's technically possible. You want to support the ad-funded website you keep coming to, yes or no? Yeah ideally every website would have a paid option for the HN crowd with cushy jobs, but that's not always feasible.
      - account42 3y ago
        > We're talking about ethics here, not laws nor what's technically possible. In that case, ads, being psychological manipulation to get users to do things they would not otherwise do, are already highly unethical. The ethical think to do is to discourage their use, which includes blocking them for yourself thus making them less profitable overall.
Cort3z 3y ago
Figuring out and serving the site to display the “disable Adblock” is likely more costly than to serve the content (unless its video). That being said; creators needs money to keep making what they are making. Too bad ads is such an all encompassing method. The web is literally worse with it, but would not have been as big without it.
- account42 3y ago
  > That being said; creators needs money to keep making what they are making. Many ad-supported sites rely on unpaid users for content.

fauigerzigerk 3y ago

>My hope is that the majority of sites accept that they can't rely on ad revenue, and instead resort to directly monetizing users as a way to make ends meet. How? You see, this is the problem I have with all these debates where advertising is declared the villain. "Directly monetising" usually means subscriptions and logins, which means you lose all anonymity, not just gradually like under an ad targeting regime, but definitively and completely. Now payment processors and banks also get a share of the surveillance cake. The greatest irony is that you may not even get rid of advertising. Advertising only becomes more valuable and more effective. All the newspaper subscriptions I have run ads. The second issue is that advertising is paid for by consumers in proportion to their spending power, because a certain share of every £$€ spent is used to buy ads. Therefore, rich people fund more of our free at the point of use online services than poor people do. If rich people move to subscriptions, this subsidy ends. Poor people will either be cut off from high quality services and relegated to their own low quality information and services (as is already the case with newspapers) or they will have to suffer through even more advertising.

wbobeirne 3y ago
Fair criticism that I used "ad revenue" as a generality, I was more specifically thinking of AdSense ads and the like. I think there are plenty of forms of advertising that are better for the relationship and less exploitative of users, such as corporate sponsorship or sponsored content ("featured" search results, brand collaborations etc.) As long as the relationship is clear when something is paid vs organic. > Now payment processors and banks also get a share of the surveillance cake. I agree this is a problem. I work on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, so that's my preferred solution to the problem, but there are other approaches to addressing the poor state of privacy and payments too. I don't think that that being a problem means that the relationship we have with advertising isn't as bad though. > If rich people move to subscriptions, this subsidy ends. There are plenty of examples where this is not the case. The freemium model exists in places where injected advertisements are not the norm, such as free to play games. Fortnite whales subsidize millions of low income players to get a high quality game for free. Whether or not you think the relationship between Epic and its players is another question, but it's a model that can continue to exist without advertisement. Especially when free users are necessary to provide content for paying users, like posts on Twitter or Reddit, or players in a game.

lxgr 3y ago

> Google has a whole other set of customers who this is not best for, e.g. Chrome users, YouTube users. Are Chrome users really Google's customers, though? Arguably, they're part of the product. Youtube used to be the same, although that's changing a bit with the current aggressive push for Youtube Premium.

tjpnz 3y ago
Using a term coined by RMS they're not users, they're useds.