A rebuttal to a complaint about ad blockers
On Monday I posted on Ars Technica’s plaint about ad blockers. At TechDirt, Mike Masnick takes a very different view and concludes:
Claiming that ad blocking is harming sites is like the recording industry claiming that piracy (or home taping) is killing music. Or it’s like the newspaper industry claiming that aggregators are killing them. It’s passing the blame. If you run a company, it’s your responsibility to put together a business model that works. And if people are somehow figuring out ways to do what they want where you don’t get paid, then it means you’re doing something that needs to change. A good business model is one where everyone is happy with the transaction, not one where one party feels forced or coerced into accepting something they don’t want.
Added later: Plagiarism Today has some more about ad blocking:
There are no easy answer to the ad blocking puzzle. The ethics and legality of ad blocking are going to be debated for a long time to come. Where traditional piracy fits more neatly into existing copyright law and social norms are becoming somewhat more settled, ad blocking is still relatively new and untested both in courts and in society at large.
However, as the Ars Technica ordeal illustrates, it is starting to get to a level that impacts Web sites enough to take action. It will be interesting to see if, in five years or so, if we look back on Ars Technica’s play as something of a “Napster moment” in the war against ad blocking.
What is clear is that this issue is growing in importance and it is only going to get more divisive and more heated in the future. What we saw this weekend was, almost certainly, just a mere taste of what’s to come
This issue is about to blow up and in a very big way.
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