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EU Carriers Plan to Block Adverts, Demand Money from Google

posted by n1 on Sunday May 17 2015, @04:52PM   
from the corporate-warfare dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Multiple mobile operators in Europe plan to block advertising on their networks, with one of them planning to target Google's ad network to force the company to give up a cut of its ad revenue, according to a report yesterday in the Financial Times.

"An executive at a European carrier confirmed that it and several of its peers are planning to start blocking adverts this year," the newspaper reported. "The executive said that the carrier will initially launch an advertising-free service for customers on an opt-in basis. But it is also considering a more radical idea that it calls 'the bomb', which would apply across its entire network of millions of subscribers at once. The idea is to specifically target Google, blocking advertising on its websites in an attempt to force the company into giving up a cut of its revenues."

Blocking ads "just for an hour or a day" might be enough to bring Google to the negotiating table, the executive told the newspaper.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/05/eu-carriers-plan-to-block-ads-demand-money-from-google/

• Re:Network speed (Score: 3, Informative) by zocalo on Sunday May 17 2015, @06:42PM

  by zocalo (302) on Sunday May 17 2015, @06:42PM (#184135)

  That's pretty much unquantifiable, but what you could ask is "How much bandwidth would be saved?". It's been some time since I first used DNS to block a whole slew of major advertising and tracking domains wholesale for my then employer, and there were a *lot* of Flash ads around then (I have no idea about how then compares to now since I so rarely see ads), but the answer from our traffic shaper was about 50% of general web traffic - e.g. excluding major bandwidth hogs like FTP, VoIP, and video. In other words, pretty much a drop in the ocean, and likely an even smaller drop if including home users with even more media transfers than a typical business might have. The main tangible benefits are avoiding potential drive-bys from blackhats using the ad networks to push exploits and avoiding at least some of the ubiquitous tracking that goes on; saving bandwidth is incidental at best.

  --
  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

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