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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

My go-to analogy:

I subscribe to a magazine. It has ads. I pay my butler to cut out the ads. Is that illegal? Now I have a robot butler doing the exact same thing. Is that illegal?

The web server is serving you content. Your ad blocker is a robot butler cutting the ads out of the documents you're receiving.

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The magazine is given to you for free, you don't pay for it. The magazine is able to detect that your butler is cutting out the ads. The magazine decides it does not want to send you its issues any more. Is that illegal?

To continue this strained analogy, what is happening now would be like the magazine trying to prevent your butler from doing what you told him.

Dropping the analogy, YouTube has every right to block me from using the site if I'm using an adblocker. They do not have the right to continuously try to circumvent my adblocker

I'd say they have that right to circumvent your blocker. And you have the right to circumvent that. Ad infinitum.

I agree: they have the right to try to detect on their end that I'm not watching the ads, and then refuse to send me more videos. And I have the right to try to evade this detection with software on my end. They don't have the right to use the legal system to force me to watch ads on my equipment (for instance, by banning ad-blockers).

Should a company have the right to constantly harass you IRL with ads, even after you take actions to avoid seeing those ads?

I think your description is unfair.

Yes, I think that, say, Mc Donalds has all the rights to bombard me with ads when I enter their "restaurant". Even ads for, say, cars, if they get some deal with a car-factory.

So, yes, I think a company has the right to bombard me with ads when I visit their premises, even if I've taken actions to avoid seeing those ads. If I don't want that, I'm free to not enter their premises (i.e. visit their websites)

Neither one should be illegal. Not every conflict needs the court system to resolve it.

They can refuse service for any reason (outside of protected class like race, gender, etc.). YouTube already does this, it refuses to play if you have an ad blocker. Of course people have developed further countermeasures to ad blocker detection.

>YouTube already does this, it refuses to play if you have an ad blocker.

No, it doesn't. Maybe they'd like it to work that way, but in my experience it's never worked that way: it works just fine with my ad-blockers. (knock on wood)

I guess we'll see if they come up with more effective measures, but honestly I doubt it: anything they come up with can be countered, and there's a literal army of people happy to find ways around their ad-blocker-blocker measures.

There was a period of time where uBlock origin wasn't cutting it, so I switched to Brave. But yeah, I agree that the whole ad-blocker is a big cat and mouse game that doesn't favor the tech companies.

Once in a while, the tech companies might figure out a way to block the ad-blockers, but it just won't last: the hackers will figure it out before long.

If the tech companies stopped using regular HTTPS to serve webpages and set up a walled garden like Netflix, they really could stop the ad-blocking. They'd have to make their own browsers/clients to support their proprietary protocol, and use encryption, so for instance you'd have to download and install a new app just to watch YouTube videos, but it could be done. But this isn't going to go over well with users I think.

The magazine is given to you for free, you don't pay for it.

Sorry, but data allowances are NOT free. In the past I have had data allowances of 2GB per month which works out to just 60MB per day on average. It doesn't take many 5 MB advertisements to completely use up that small data allowance.

Now supposing you have to actually choose whether to download a movie or to download hundreds of unwanted ads, which choice will YOU make?

Cosmo isn't free.

Yup. If you reverse the situation it gets even harder to define. Ie to say you're not allowed to automate your avoidance of ads seems to bundle your consumption of content with your attention to ads.

How much attention are we required to give these ads? How much annoyance in bypassing them is required? Are we only allowed to walk away from the TV to avoid ads? etc

Not only are you expected to put up with the ad, you’re expected to put up with your personal data being sent to hundreds/thousands of third parties whenever someone wants to show you an ad.

Indeed, either muting and doing something else or changing the channel was a common thing to do back when TV was an actual tube.

From a similar era, it's also worth noting that some VCRs had automatic "adblocking" (pause recording, and resume once the ad breaks were over.)

Personally, I think it boils down to: my eyes, my brain. I shouldn't be compelled to effectively lose the right to close my eyes when I want to.

That's a pretty charming analogy and it would be perfect some 15 years ago; nowadays adblocking extensions are more like a personal bodyguards that fend off all the leafleters and shady individuals in trentch coat and dark glasses who follow you.

Yes, and the magazine company has a right to stop sending you more magazines if they don't like that

Depends on where you live. In my country refusing to sell is illegal, unless the company has good reasons.

If it's free with ads is it really a sale?

Don't really know, I was responding to the analogical version. But I'd say that a EULA that requires you to watch/see ads is something different in nature than usual EULAs that just cover legal-and-good-relationships things.

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