The EU should Implement an Ad Blocker Blocker Blocker Law
this would thwart YouTube's anti-ad-blocker strategy
Recently Google’s YouTube has been experimenting with blocking ad blockers. So when you try to watch a video you might instead see this:
Google is trying to force you to turn off your ad blocker to watch the video.
(For me, simply reloading the web page works. And if Google does eventually force me to watch ads — fine, I’ll simply spend less time watching YouTube videos. There are plenty of other video platforms such as Twitch, Vimeo, Utreon, BitChute, DTube or PeerTube. Or I could just waste less time watching videos.)
Incidentally, YouTube might be breaking EU law:
Privacy campaigner Alexander Hanff claims that YouTube’s new ad blocker detection is illegal under European law, and he's taking the fight to the European Commission.
On November 6, German Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer addressed Hanff’s claim to the European Commission, formally requesting a legal position as to whether “protection of information stored on the device (Article 5(3) ePR) also cover information as to whether the user's device hides or blocks certain page elements, or whether ad-blocking software is used on the device” and—critically—if this kind of detection is “absolutely necessary to provide a service such as YouTube.”
YouTube began rolling out ad block detection to Europe earlier this year and is now preventing some European users from viewing its content if they have an ad blocker enabled. The EU’s ePrivacy Directive requires online service providers to get explicit permission to “gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user.”
The EU would make itself popular with its citizens if it implemented a law blocking websites from blocking ad blockers — an ad blocker blocker blocker law.
For this to work, it would have to have teeth: the EU could fine websites that break the law — I’m sure Google would take a €1bn fine seriously — and if they don’t pay the fine, forbid them from doing business in the EU.
But I can think of an even better idea: if a website breaks this law, make it legal for any EU-based website to scrape their content and re-use it. This would include any content the original website allows its users to put on the site; if those users didn’t want it scraped and copied they would have to take it down from the original site. It would benefit internet users and harm YouTube/Google if both:
new sites came into existence duplicating YouTube’s content, without ad blockers
lots of YouTube creators started taking their content down from that site