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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

"You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards."

It occurs to me that this could be a rough description of ad blocking extensions, although rather like the Aldous Huxley quote about means determining ends, ad blockers are the result of an adversarial relationship rather than a consensual one.

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Adversarial interoperability is all about rejecting the website's terms instead of the website itself.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n...

Not exactly in my opinion. My understanding of the passage is that he wants to block the entire website outright. So not, "Look at reddit, but block ads." Rather it would be, "Block reddit."

Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be like in a parallel timeline where that happened?

This already sort of happens with ad-blocker-blockers, except the other way around. You signal to the website you don’t want the privacy-invasive mess that are ads, the website tells you to sod off.

And then, you install an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker

I kinda recall there being some options in old browsers (>10 years ago) where websites could send their privacy policy as a blob in the http header and the browser would enable/disable content based on pre-defined user options. However I can't recall the name of this and a quick search isn't showing me anything that rings a bell.

Well, the visibility would have to be there. If my privacy settings blocked Reddit, would it know? If I said "Okaaaaaaayyy let me view this particular site this particular time" would Reddit also know? ("There's a customer that we likely won't see again because of our privacy settings.")

This is effectively what we should be doing: Either accept what the site is offering (content monetized by ads and data collection) or don't. But what happened instead is entitlement: People decided they had the right to view that content without paying it's cost, and went for ad blockers instead.

As much as I loathe ads, I am still surprised ad blockers work: That vastly more websites haven't simply made it impossible to view them without either seeing the ads or paying money/subscribing.

Lots of people who use ad blockers aren't opposed to ads themselves. If a site shoves an "Eat at Joe's" div in beside the content, that's fine, we'll look at it, because after all ad blockers won't block such an ad. What we oppose are ad networks with all the tracking and privacy violations those entail, and those are blocked by ad blockers.

What cost? Web sites don't charge anyone for the HTTP response. They distribute their pages free of charge.

Creating content has an inherent cost.

I mean the cost to me as a user. Why don't content creators charge me for the page view?

As individuals, right? Since according to the author nation-states blocking websites that don't comply with their law is "balkanization" which is bad, but please also we need governments to be more involved in regulating the internet (but how to do that without balkanization or control?)

I don't disagree with some of what the author is attempting to propose, but it's not thought out at all well or clearly, which is a let-down.

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