It was completely optional for websites to support this. A few did at first.
A lot of people internally wanted it to be on-by-default, but the argument was that if it was, nobody would respect it – after all, what tracking platform would willingly only track the 0.1% of people who went into the settings to enable it? (Internet Explorer did eventually enable it by default, which got them good press but ultimately killed the feature since everyone stopped respecting it.)
Overall, I'm happy to see this sunsetted. I don't think it actually did anything – in fact, I think it implies that it did way more than it did, so it was just a faux feeling of security.
(All that being said, I would love if the cookie modals on each site became browser-level, but I'm sure there's many reasons that hasn't happened yet. And I suspect a bit reason starts with a G and ends with an Oogle.)
> I would love if the cookie modals on each site became browser-level
They are, in a roundabout way. Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banners and Annoyances filters. The modal gets silently nuked in the background and you can carry on with your browsing. Since you never consented, this ought to be functionally the same as Declining the banner.
As long as someone who does this is prepared to pay for every site they do it on (or forgo the site in the future), since targeted advertising often pays for the site they're visiting. Personally I would like to see ads improved, not removed, as I am unwilling to have 40 different subscriptions to 40 different websites all because every user disabled targeting.
I'm not responsible for making a web site owners business model work for them. I'm just filtering data that I downloaded from a publicly-available because I don't want advertisers tracking me around the web and profiling me.
Advertisers are welcome to treat me like a magazine from days gone by with lots of static images of their products and no code involved. If they don't like that, then I'm okay with going back to the pre-commercial web where people with passion built websites without trying to be the next big thing.
You're just following the FBI guidance and not allowing untrusted software to run on your computer. If that is a critical part of a business model, the business needs to change it's behavior, not me.
Does the same thing apply to every TV commercial? Are you robbing the producers if you go the bathroom? Or every ad sponsored newspaper or magazine?
I dunno, the website chose to monetize that way. Arguably we don't need so many low quality adspam sites on the web anyway and if most of them died, the signal to noise ratio would get better. Advertising and SEO is a scourge that doesn't need to be protected, IMO. Let them die...
I agree that 40 different subscriptions is unreasonable. I use adblockers because I think user-hostile advertising is also unreasonable.
I would happily pay a subscription that gets divided among whatever sites I visit. In the absence of that option, I pay for a subset of sites and freeload the rest. My solution seems ethical to me since if everybody picked a random subset, most sites would get their revenue.
I think your approach is reasonably ethical. I'm not all that concerned with ethics; rather the continued funding of the websites we like. One important element of your first hypothetical is that a donation model probably won't suffice, websites will need to be able to set their price based on their costs, so it can't be evenly split between the sites you visit.
So I think the experience would be like you add $5 to your browser, then as you visit sites it asks you either to pay a one time access fee or subscribe for continued access.
But this would be the case for every site, right, because they all cost money. I wonder how many distinct websites the average user visits and if they're willing to pay that many parties that much money.
I guess my conclusion here is that bad ads should be punished by some mechanism. Unfortunately making the most targeted, helpful (and they are helpful, by the way, when done right they show you something you like) ads often incentivizes bad ad production practices like data farming and data marketplaces. I think that has to be attacked legislatively or, in your example, by direct payment.
But I think the reality of an internet gated by payments is a bigger deal than people appreciate.
(PS Not that this is usually my line of argument, but it also has the unfortunate effect of tying someone's economic status to what they can access, leading to greater isolated groups and class hierarchies in content)
> websites will need to be able to set their price based on their costs
Most businesses don't really get to do that. They set their price based on what customers are willing to pay. Then they try to keep their variable costs low enough to be profitable, and get enough sales to cover their fixed costs.
> tying someone's economic status to what they can access
An option there is subscriptions for those willing to pay, ads for the rest. Youtube does that, for example (and it's one of the sites I pay).
I don't really want "helpful" ads. I just want to be left alone. I don't want corporations trying to manipulate me, and I don't want distractions from whatever I'm trying to read, because I'm distractible enough as it is. If I want to buy something, I can search for it, and when I do, I don't want to see it everywhere I go for the next month.
the problem with ads targeted to what I might like is they lead to more purchasing and spending, which is not without cost. something you won't buy without seeing an ad for it is probably an impulse purchase, and those are somewhat predatory.
it seems more reasonable to me to only advertise like that when a user signals they're interested in a particular type of product, not passively all the time.
Yeah people think of advertising as a "free" way to fund things, but companies wouldn't pay the advertisers if they weren't making a profit off of it, so in theory the customers are still paying for the website, but it's only some of them paying for the vast majority that don't pay a dime, and everyone else is just getting irritated by the ads for no benefit to the website.
My browser is happy to load images from a third-party site, i.e. advertising. My browser also blocks javascript from third-party sites, i.e. stalkerware. As long as you keep conflating ads and user profiling, you will never convince me with your arguments.
Commercial sites brought ad blocks upon themselves with malvertising an insanely obtrusive ads.
It blows my mind how people are so accepting of the status quo, especially on mobile, where many news sites will put a sticky ad banner on the top, throw a video ad on the corner (with a close button that's only 1/8" across, of course), and then every paragraph (which is only like 2-3 sentences) is separated by an ad. At any given moment, well over half my screen is ads, even after managing to close the video ad in the corner.
Browsing the web on a phone, I wonder how many bandwidth and battery is being used just to show ads.
though I do 90% of my mobile browsing in firefox, sometimes I end up using the pop-up browswer widget. Looking at my data use... the uBO-less widget has used more data than firefox, despite being used much less often. non-firefox mobile users must blow through their data plans...
I doubt it. In my experience those that block ads feel entitled to the content without payment of any kind. They see ads as an intrusion rather than a fair exchange. No, I don't see you turning it back on regardless of how things go.
The average user doesn't even recognize that running a website literally cost electricity that must be paid for. Who pays for it? Who will carry the boats?
I pay literally hundreds of dollars a month to various content creators (eg Ars Technica, several local news outlets, many creators on Patreon, YouTube Premium) so kindly bugger off with your moralizing, thanks. I want browsing the web to not suck, so I use the tools I need to do that. If they want me to stop using these tools, they can make browsing the web not suck without them.
I pay for a couple that I usually do visit, but I wouldn't be able to do the same for others.
Also, ads got ridiculous real fast, and started doing a lot more than just show a picture. This was really the breaking point for me. I happily pay for the couple mentuomed earlier, and donate to OSS projects even but more than that is unfeasible.
There are lists one can use for filtering out only the "bad" ads, mostly community driven. What we really need is a standard way of doing this, one that is enforced. But no ad company wants this, at least from what I gather.
Blaming ad blockers is the same as blaming video game piracy, you aren't tackling the real issue. The issue is that ad blockers provide a better service than not having one (i.e. not filling your screen and preventing you from seeing the content, not being a security nightmare, etc...), even if you need to go through the trouble of getting one. Alas, in this case it generates a perpetual cycle, which further puts people over their breaking point.
I guess what I'm really saying is that ad companies, and websites filling their pages with them, did this to themselves. The public tolerates it to a certain point, but I wouldn't see it it's their fault if normal web usage continues to deteriorate.
> The average user doesn't even recognize that running a website literally cost electricity that must be paid for. Who pays for it? Who will carry the boats?
Running a retail store also has costs associated with it, including, yes, electricity.
Yet if I walk into a store and leave without buying anything, do I feel like I owe the store owner anything?
No. That's not how that works, nor is that how it should work.
There’s a difference between browsing in a shop and reading content online. It’s much more like going in and sitting in a book shop, reading a book and leaving.
No, it's not. It's more like an online bookstore mailing you a copy of a book for free. The only catch is that they also sent a book full of ads and directions that say: after every page of the book, look at an ad. Then, when I receive these, I don't even take the ad book out of the package, read the actual book, and send them both back.
You can imagine why Amazon never decided to go with this business model.
If nobody wants to pay it is totally fine if they go out of business. A lot of the be things of today's internet are caused by sites being able to live off ads revenue.
The web has been plagued with ads for decades. Pop up blockers were the old thing, and everyone knows the screenshot of the internet explorer loaded with toolbars.
I run an adblocker. It’s not because I don’t want to pay, it’s because there are more ads than content.
I don’t want to dedicate 4.5 inches of screen space to ads including videos, banners, and often time inappropriate ads. If you want to do 3rd party banner ads, be my guest, but the minute there’s more of them then content I’m going to turn them off.
Hi adblock user here, who uses adblockers for 2 reasons: 1) Security, because ad networks can't be bothered to properly vet the stuff they shove down everyone's throats and 2) On mobile at least, its impossible to read most websites due to the sheer number of overlaid videos and other such BS.
That's it. That's not entitlement. I just want to actually read the stuff on a website. If websites could do ads that weren't trying to monopolize attention and/or trick me in to downloading malware, I'd definitely think twice about my use of a blocker on that website.
Sure there are some that feel like because its on the internet that's its free and they are entitled to it. But I'd wager most ad block users fall in to a similar camp as me.
Plus most adblocking extensions these days are also tracker blockers as well, so there's some element of privacy protection in play there as well.
I'm glad you are willing to pay hundreds for that, at least you're consistent. But I think you are out of touch with how most people who use ad blockers think. People want free stuff. They are entitled. And when they have successfully suppressed the much less painful ad experience (no sign up, no credit card, works across all sites) they will be upset when they encounter sign up blocks and ask "why does every website want a subscription?!" not realizing that they themselves did it.
Now there may be some upsides to this. Shock content, designed to garner page views, may become less common. Perhaps content will get longer.
But I do not relish the annoyance of having to pay for every site. I despise that tech help on medium, for example, is often behind a paywall. I'd rather watch an ad.
I think fewer people would block ads if they were less miserable. So if you achieve your goal of making ads suck less, fewer people would block ads. I support you in your endeavor! But in the meantime, I'm not going to put up with a garbage web experience just because you asked me to.
I have used adblock since forever and I am absolutely willing to pay for quality content. I do actively support content creators by buying merch or funding their Patreon/Github.
Subscriptions suck because it is another thing to keep track off and many business models rely on you forgetting about them.
I think micropayments would be great but the problem is that you need to consume the content before knowing if it was really worth paying for.
My dream would be some kind of general internet subscription network set up as a non-profit public service where I pay a fixed sum every month and where all kinds of content creators, news sites, basically anyone could be in. The network would pay their members a split of my monthly fee based on the sites I visited by default but offer me up and downvote buttons on every page. Downvotes means the site is excluded from getting payments from me, upvote means double payment. (Of course I can't downvote all of them, the sum I pay is always fixed.)
So I have only one single monthly payment, I don't have to think about it much while still having a way to encourage high-quality content.
iOS is great for subscriptions - there’s a list in the App Store and I trust apple to allow me to cancel them if I’m no longer using them. It’s clear whether I’m signing up to monthly or weekly.
That is almost certainly the opinion of only a tiny loud minority. Most people who run adblockers do so to protect themselves from abusive ad practices, not all ads out of some moral reason.
Have you considered why it's called an HTTP Request?
That's what it is. A request to get sent some bytes. It's up to the web server whether or not to send the bytes.
Once it decides to do so, what I choose to do with those bytes is, broadly speaking, up to me. Copyright sets some legal restrictions there, but none of those restrictions apply to deleting some of the bytes.
Perhaps the webmaster had some ambition to make some money by sticking some bytes on my computer and using them to track me without my consent. That's for them to decide, me? I'm deleting those bytes. That monetization plan is not in my interest. Perhaps they can come up with something which I'm willing to play along with, perhaps they can't.
Generally I've found that the websites which place onerous limits such as paywalls on byte access, are not worth spending my time on. Yet somehow, the Internet remains full of useful bytes and I spend many an hour productively browsing them. It's a magical place.
I'm going to keep blocking ads because its legal and it improves my life. If sites can't work around that with their business model that is not my problem and I don't feel the least bit guilty about it.
And the idea that the alternative to ads is 40 different subscriptions is laughable to me because there are not even 4 sites on the entire internet that I'd pay (even a small) subscription fee to use regularly, let alone 40.
The vast majority of sites I use on the internet are basically distractions of one form or another and I only ever use them because I can do so for free with a limited amount of annoyance. Any cost at all to them whether that's a subscription fee or obtrusive ads means I just stop using that site.
A Lot of us put our content/blogs up for free. I understand some people do this for a living but not everyone needs to go no the advertisement gravy-train
Or, how about the people who make websites go right ahead and fold business if they can't stop crying about others not being forced into tracking to fund them. Nobody asked for any given website to get built or to deliver content, and its owners having decided to do so does not at all in any way give me or anyone else the obligation to let ourselves be pervasively, almost parasitically be tracked in all our activity across the web.
Avoiding said tracking is not in the least bit "unethical" and digital media sources can find other ways to make money, or just disappear if they don't like being circumvented in their ad tracking efforts. Only a badly distorted SEO/ad bro mind would consider users avoiding tracking to be somehow immoral by the users. Should then it also be unethical to not view ads on video media too?
I was there in the era when hitting a website on the wrong day spawned so many pop-overs and pop-unders that it ground your browser to a halt. And that by trying to close any one of them, another 10 windows were launched with more ads. Eventually bogging down the computer so severely (single core FTW!) that your only option was to conduct a hard restart, your unsaved data be damned.
I feel for those businesses who try to build a revenue stream off of advertising, but that well has been permanently poisoned for me. If I cannot sanitize a website of its maliciously user-hostile behaviour, I will simply refuse to make use of it.
And I encourage everyone to join me. The sooner advertising of all kinds die, the better.
> As long as someone who does this is prepared to pay for every site they do it on
I've got not problem paying 1/10th of a 1 cent as a microtransaction to read the page and I'll happily do so when that sort of system is available.
> I am unwilling to have 40 different subscriptions to 40 different websites all because every user disabled targeting.
And that's a false dichotomy. The natural alternative to a system where publishers are paid per view by advertisers is a system where publishers are paid per view by users (either directly or via some intermediary), in the same amount as before.
I guess we can look forward to a new "unbundling" campaign like they tried with video streaming services, targeting a paid umbrella subscription that covers multiple sites.
Most of the websites I visit are selling something or sold me something. For the ones that aren't, I would consider a subscription service. If we're talking about something like an inexpensive web search or a subscription for a family of news websites or something. I'd totally pay for a good set of general/car/entertainment news sites. Definitely entertained that. But they'd have to nuke this nonsense about trying to get metrics and tracking and stuff.
> most stabbings are not done by malicious actors, they are simply law-abiding companies which will gladly stop stabbing you if you ask.
> The header has only one form, Do-Not-Stab: 1. This is because the lack of a header indicates a clear preference that the user wants to be stabbed.
> Exceptions to the Do-Not-Stab header are accepted when commercial interests outweigh safety concerns. These include: Stabbings requested by a government. Websites SHOULD NOT try to challenge the legality of any stabbings requested, the user probably deserved it.
I had been on the fence about turning this on or not since I wasn't sure if turning it on would block legitimate reasons for stabbing me. I mean, I probably have deserved it many times. Good to know those reasons won't be blockers! I'll definitely turn this on if it becomes a ratified standard!
I worked at one of the big adtech companies at the time. DNT was a carefully negotiated compromise between the ad industry (and by proxy, the sites that depended on it for their income), the browser vendors, and privacy advocates. We implemented DNT it in our edge infrastructure and were ready to deploy it.
But then Microsoft broke the agreement by enabling it by default, as part of their war with Google (and after their own adtech ambitions ended in a 6 billion dollar write down on their acquisition of aQuantive). This killed it for everyone.
The ad industry was never going to go for an opt-out version of DNT. It worked while only a minority that cared about it opted-in, but not when the (then) dominant web browser made that choice for all of its users.
I fully understand why people hate tracking and targeted advertising (which has if anything gotten more invasive in the past decade), but at least at the time it was essential to the commercial web.
The only way to stop tracking is via laws or regulations. Technical solutions are, arguably, a never-ending arms race - probably a losing one for end users.
DNT was a way to demonstrate consumer interest in not being tracked, and it put businesses in the position of ignoring explicit requests from consumers for privacy.
Unfortunately, nobody effectively capitalized on that.
> but ultimately killed the feature since everyone stopped respecting it
I genuinely doubt that anything could have caused them to respect it. Tracking without consent is the source of their money; they're not going to give that up just because you give a positive signal that you do not consent, rather than simply never asking you in the first place.
It's a failure because law makers haven't made it clear ignoring it is illegal.
You probably can build a case around DNT clearly communicating that a user doesn't want to be tracked and as such it should be treated like an if the user manually opt out of all tracking.
But as long as lawmakers or court don't pin it down legally to make it a clear cut case instead of some gray area thing with a lot of wiggle room.
There is very little you can do against modern tracking tech without crippling browser functionality, as such solutions have to be law based foremost and supplemented with technology and actually painful penalties if companies try to sneak by this.
We should make it both technically hard and illegal for the surveillance industry to track us. Corporations continue to reinvent de facto government from the bottom up, and if most Americans weren't too distracted freebasing the fallacy that corporations and government are opposing forces we might be able to preserve individual liberty.
But advertisers exist and will continue to exist, and have no incentive to follow this. I don't think either are at fault necessarily; I think it was a weak attempt all around.
The only thing that will get companies to comply are a/ laws (and so far all laws have done is annoy end users) b/ browsers doing more to block tracking (which is almost impossible; this will forever be a game of cat-and-mouse).
Isn't this the entire point of browsewrapped TOS "agreements"? There's a reason why specifically tracking via cookies had to be singled out by regulation to work at all (putting aside how well or not well this actually works).
That's a grim view of humanity, I think. The internet is arguably the most collaborative project in the history of mankind especially outside of extractive and invasive motives. Hopefully not all of us will die before seeing serious legislation protecting that kind of social investment.
> why specifically tracking via cookies had to be singled out by regulation
Well, it is not singled out by regulation. The GDPR doesn’t even mention cookies at all. They mention any way to track users. Fingerprinting is also banned, for example.
many of it's predecessor sadly are not and are still around
leading to absurdities of there being _both_ a GDPR dialog for tracking and a "cookie dialog" (which depending of the law might also apply to local storage and co) to get permission to "store" something on you computer. Like a hint to not track you :facepalm:
(And yes legally from GDPR storing a same origin cookie only accessible to the browser and you to remember the user doesn't want to be tracked is legal _iff_ you don't use it for tracking users which don't want to be tracked server side. It's one of the many examples where "what legally is good enough" and "what security wise is good enough" can diverge quite a bit.)
I have a friend that works in advertisement programming. Quiet ironically, "do not track" had the opposite of the intended effect. They didn't store any information about a user, except in the case of the do not track signifier in which case they had special tracking logic to make sure they didn't include that user in their datasets and future user models.
The legal situation has completely changed since then. By now, we have court cases punishing companies for ignoring the dnt signal. And with the gdpr there is a legal framework that makes this signal powerful anyway.
Removing this feature now is completely the wrong move. Instead Mozilla should have invested money to use the courts to make the signal be respected, where it isn't already.
For me, this signals that finally, Mozilla has completely crossed the line. I will look into forks now that retain the signal.
>I would love if the cookie modals on each site became browser-level,
if the EU regulators who wrote the cookie law had any competence, this is how it would have been implemented. browsers should have a cookie prompt in the UI, not websites.
It should be straight up illegal to share my data with third parties. That's not something I as an end user should be forced to opt in to.
A browser level opt-in would be even more useless than a website prompt. Demonstrably almost no end users understand what they opt in to, and that type of contract should therefore carry close to zero weight.
> Overall, I'm happy to see this sunsetted. I don't think it actually did anything – in fact, I think it implies that it did way more than it did, so it was just a faux feeling of security.
I'm sad to see this, as many sites actually used it.
Geizhals.de, a major european price comparison site, uses DNT as cookie opt out.
My personal sites, but also the official websites from a few companies I worked at used umami or plausible metrics, configured to obey the DNT header for opt out handling.
And only recently German courts have ruled that the DNT header is legally considered rejection of tracking (Az.: 16 O 420/19)
It's actively used across the web, and Mozilla just decides to kill it? What the heck?
I think a new browser could genuinely gain massive popularity if it was really good at this, and advertised the feature heavily, particularly in the EU.
Google will never touch it with a hundred-foot pole due to antitrust concerns, they're effectively banned from making any significant, user-experience-affecting changes to Chrome at this point.
Many people would immediately switch to a browser with 1) reliable Youtube ad blocking, 2) no cookie modals, and possibly 3) no other "distractors", like subscription pop-ups or "related articles" widgets.
Yes, ad blockers and reader mode can sort-of do all three, mostly, ish, but they're not easy to set up for non-techies, particularly on smartphones, even more particularly on iPhones, so a simple marketing pitch of "get this app, have these features" would probably work.
One would have to default to accepting cookies, though. Most users don't care either way, while website owners do. If you defaulted to refusing, they'd try to fight you and make their popups harder to auto dismiss, while auto-accepting would do the opposite.
I somewhat agree... but browsers aren't a profitable business. In 30 years of browsers being mainstream, nobody has built one that's sustainable –– only works if it's subsidized by a larger company.
There's been a few attempts (Brave wants to monetize via crypto, Arc is pivoting away), but it's really hard. People don't want to pray for a browser – 99% of people are apathetic, and the 1% that cares aren't known for paying for things.
After 30 years, isn’t it weird that the conversation is still about whether building a browser is profitable or if users are willing to pay for one? One would think that the technology would be so mature and ubiquitous that this is not a major issue 30 years later. If the core technology is still changing so fast that browsers need to be in constant development for the entire duration of their useful lifespan, maybe that is the problem, and the web is just doomed to be a shit show until corporations are distracted by enshittification of alternative platforms like VR.
It’s just weird that a few hobbyists can generally throw together a database in a weekend, fork kubernetes and probably run with it forever if they really wanted to, create a free operating system that takes over the world, etc. And yet for browsers, we’re shaking our heads and saying the situation is impossible, we kind of always have done this, and it looks like we always will.
I believe what you describe is something very close to Firefox. Enabling uBlock is down to a few clicks, but that does not seem to have helped Firefox gain massive popularity.
> Many people would immediately switch to a browser with 1) reliable Youtube ad blocking, 2) no cookie modals, and possibly 3) no other "distractors", like subscription pop-ups or "related articles" widgets.
Here's the thing. Do-Not-Track was an active signal of intent from the user to the backend. Violation therefore, could be proven by merely showing the signal was sent, and the provider ultimately ignored it.
Getting rid of it for being "ignored" is ignoring that it is a means for the User to signal to the rest of us they do not wish to take part in tracking. Which in our world, is the important bit. A provider not being challenged with this bit can argue that the user doesn't mind being tracked because they didn't explicitly say so.
It was completely optional for websites to support this. A few did at first.
A lot of people internally wanted it to be on-by-default, but the argument was that if it was, nobody would respect it – after all, what tracking platform would willingly only track the 0.1% of people who went into the settings to enable it? (Internet Explorer did eventually enable it by default, which got them good press but ultimately killed the feature since everyone stopped respecting it.)
Overall, I'm happy to see this sunsetted. I don't think it actually did anything – in fact, I think it implies that it did way more than it did, so it was just a faux feeling of security.
(All that being said, I would love if the cookie modals on each site became browser-level, but I'm sure there's many reasons that hasn't happened yet. And I suspect a bit reason starts with a G and ends with an Oogle.)