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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/
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday May 17 2015, @07:33PM
It may come to that, and it isn't that technologically difficult.
These guys, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and friends have server farms. In fact they have farms, which have farms.
How hard would it be for Google to arrange with a content provider to proxy and cache their entire site so ads could be directly inserted, all from the same server.
Instead of the current practice of spewing a thin web page of text and images wrapped up a mountain or remote urls for the users browser to fetch, your browser sees exactly one url, and any resources needed by the page are fetched and embedded server side, or at least fetched from the same IP.
That's how things worked back in the day before the mountain of advertising companies started selling ads.
I distinctly remember one hosting company I worked with would give us a huge break on hosting fees to block out ad space on our pages for url's that were hosted on the same server. The content of those urls changed, weekly at first, then hourly, byt always had the same name, and all managed by them. We got paid by the impressions, not the clicks, until that whole number of impressions scam went away. Everything was dial-up back then, and huge ads were unheard of.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 17 2015, @07:53PM
Without MITM'ing stuff it would be hard for them to know which connections are fetching ads and which aren't.