Absolutely zero large web properties do anything based on what's best for users. If this gains traction, Google will simply deny adsense payments for impressions from an "untrusted" page, and thus all the large players that show ads for revenue will immediately implement WEI without giving a single flying shit about the users, as they always have and always will.
I don't know much about the online ad market. I assume advertisers will pay more for attested impressions than for unattested ones. But unattested impressions will still be worth something.
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.
It's very simple. Google has concerns of click/impression fraud. Unattested traffic would be more likely to be fraudulent. Not paying for unattested impressions/clicks is therefore an easy way to cut costs and combat fraud.
Chrome will happily block a Google ad if it uses too much resources, I experience this a lot with a few sites that do ad replacements in the background.
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.
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.
Except Google of course, the only allowed scrapper.
- 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
- etcThis 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
> 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.
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.
Granted, the difference between the tiers may be small engouh in some cases for this to be an acceptable compromise, but the principle is still the same.
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.
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.
tampering meaning running your code instead of theirs
Now if Google cares about real impressions it's still terrible no good very bad evil.
It's good for google to care, it's not good for them to do this.
Those sites that showed you the “disable ad blocker” pop up that prompted you to leaving won’t miss you.
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.
Because this is an incredible way of exerting their total control over the web across all browsers. If they don't like a feature, they get to downgrade the user's attestation or fail it. If it costs them some unattested traffic in order to create a permanently unassailable market position, it's worth the money.
It'll block all other search engines by preventing web scraping except those blessed by Google. For this reason alone many websites will adopt it. This will impact competition, research and freedom.
After this, all user choice is gone, and it'll only be governments who can break the racket.
If the CCP don't already do this, I expect they'll quickly implement something similar.
But hey, it's great that some people want to make the devices they own and holds extremely valuable days of their own person, something controlled by external entities.
Don't worry, those of us who know our tech and value our privacy, will continue not listening to the "just take it" crowd.
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.
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.
Many ad-supported sites rely on unpaid users for content.
I don't think Google has actually done anything. The bar for experimenting with new code in Chromium is pretty low. This Chicken Little reaction to a non-starter is just a result of developing in the open.
But you can "care" about something in good and bad ways, and the criticism is not "Google bad".