The company Eyeo, the developer of the most popular ad blocker AdBlock Plus
won a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of Germany. For the past few years, this organization has had to regularly take part in court hearings as part of reviewing the application of one of the world's largest publishers, Axel Springer. The publisher believed that the ads displayed on the sites should not be blocked.
It all started in 2015, and there were several of the plaintiffs, not just Axel Spinger. All of them were dissatisfied not so much with the fact of blocking advertising materials, as with the program “Acceptable Ads”. It lies in the work of the white list of sites that do not impose advertising on the user, placing only the most relevant and “harmless”, so to speak, options.
And if for small resources and publications, getting into the list is just a matter of time, paying someone for it is not required, but for larger sites the service is not at all free. The same Axel Springer can not go to the white list without money, the company Eyeo asked to pay. The plaintiff considers this state of affairs a violation of competition law. By the way, the program "Admissible Advertising" itself is one of the main generators of income for AdBlock Plus developers.
The publisher and his lawsuit partners tried to challenge Eyeo’s right to ask for money for placing resources on the white list. But the court, as mentioned above,
confirmed this right , declaring Axel Spinger's claims unfounded.
According to representatives of Eyeo, the decision of the court is correct, it confirms the right of network users from Germany to block advertising. The court confirmed both the company's right to block advertising materials using its own plug-in and the right to skip non-aggressive advertising if developers or users see this as a necessity.
In general, the decision of the German court may be a precedent, as well as a revealing decision for those companies that believe that ad blockers are illegal. Actually, on the part of Axel Springer, it was not particularly reasonable to start this process at all, since ad blockers have long been an integral tool of Internet users. Currently, more than 615 million devices work with ad-blocking software.
In Google Chrome, by the way, a built-in blocker is currently working, which removes poor-quality ads that users simply cannot see. As far as can be judged, over time, ad blocking will become even more common. True, the built-in filter ads is valid only for 16.4% of all advertisements on the Internet. The system determines poor-quality advertising based on the requirements of the Coalition of Better Ads (CBA). The CBA divides advertising into 55 types, and only nine of them are low-quality enough to block them. Valid advertising, in particular, are videos with autoplay (without soundtrack), ads that can be hidden 12 minutes after the start of the show, flashing ads, ads, banners that can be closed or skipped.
AdBlockPlus uses stricter standards, these are Acceptable Ads Committee (AAC). That is why the Eyeo blocker copes with 93% of advertising. However, due to the prevalence of Google’s Chrome browser, the blocker built into this browser is one of AdBlock Plus’s biggest competitors.
And the opinion of users will play an important role, because users can now determine which ads they want to see and which ones they don’t. Advertising materials and advertisers are given a certain kind of reliability rating, and site visitors see "good" ads that AdBlock or other similar tools miss and do not see "bad" (aggressive, untruthful, etc.).
No one says that sites should be devoid of advertising - no, it is needed, because it provides the opportunity to receive money for their work. There will be no advertising - many sites that exist only due to cooperation with advertisers will not be able to work. Well, it will not be possible to make white lists of advertisers, for which they take money from large companies - the life of developers of ad blockers will become more complicated.