
Apple’s content blocking is chemo for the cancer of adtech - cpeterso
https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/08/26/apples-content-blocking-is-chemo-for-the-cancer-of-adtech/
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tomlock
My theory is this is Apple's attempt to push people working in adtech towards
Apple's Google-Analytics analogues.

It is getting a bit ridiculous how bluntly Google (the incumbent), Apple (whoa
we track mobiles really well) and Facebook (wahey, we track _real_ people,
come over here) are all trying to push adtech people onto their platforms.
They are now truly going for the Enterprise market, and are looking to lock
them in.

~~~
hayksaakian
Do Facebook and Apple really have an analytics platform anywhere as good as
Google analytics? If one of them acquires kissmetrics or mixpanel of something
I'd believe you but having used facebook's business interface first hand it's
only good at analytics "on facebook" it tells you very little about your
actual site even if you have their pixels on every page. With Google I can see
my marketing funnel from on every platform.

~~~
tomlock
I totally agree, but having a bad platform hasn't stopped people trying to
sell theirs to enterprise, afaik.

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Animats
Can you block Apples iAd, too?

This looks like what Apple did with payments on IOS - only Apple's payment
system is allowed, and Apple takes a 30% cut.

~~~
liviu
We are talking here about Safari content blocking. iAd ads are not displayed
in Safari, they are for native applications and you can display ads from
whatever publisher you want in your native app.

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vacri
Is this really the right reference to go for? Chemo is universally hated,
makes you look like not yourself, makes you throw up and feel sick all the
time, steals all your energy, and, importantly, often does not work.

~~~
na85
While I agree with you, chemotherapy is the layperson's only term for most
cancer treatment. And make no mistake, advertising _is_ a cancer that needs to
be judiciously dealt with.

But this particular meme is derived from the bad old days of /b/ when most
threads were spammed with stuff like

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/

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hoodoof
I'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff. Apple wants to
kill all the free content so you only have the choice of paying Apple to do
anything.

Companies built around an advertising model should detect and reject Apple
browsers.

Individuals who value getting free stuff on the web should switch to non Apple
browsers to show support for advertising.

~~~
onion2k
_I 'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff._

But not magically with free money that just appears when a company decides to
buy an advert. Adverts are paid for by businesses that consequently charge a
little more for their goods and services, a cost passed directly to you and
me. We don't get free services, we get services that we pay for indirectly
through other things. Free is a myth.

~~~
hoodoof
Yes it's an ecosystem I want to be healthy.

Many, many software engineers have jobs and many startups exist because there
is an advertising ecosystem.

The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. In
whose interest is it to kill that?

Apple should stop advertising if it hates advertising so much.

~~~
lazyjones
> _The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy._

I doubt that; it distorts competition by making false / aggrandizing claims
about products and their prices and capitalist markets would work much better
with transparency instead of the smokescreens of advertising (i.e. more
comparison shopping).

> _In whose interest is it to kill that?_

Consumers and small businesses would profit greatly if advertising played a
smaller role (big businesses spend a lot of money in advertising to sell
inferior products, small companies find it difficult to compete even with
better or cheaper offers).

Also, page load times and traffic plans, obviously.

~~~
punee
Small companies sell better and cheaper products than big businesses, but
somehow people have never heard about them, and that's because of
"advertising". Sure, buddy. You keep telling yourself that.

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cbeach
Personally I don't care about tracking if it means advertisers show me adverts
I might want to click on (and thus the ecosystem I use can be funded). But I
do care about adverts that aren't targeted to my needs and wants. I'd block
those if I could, and leave the targeted ads alone.

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Asbostos
Is this really different from what AdBlock already does on every platform? It
looks like the key feature is that the adblocker app doesn't have to have
access to your browsing data. But people will still have to install it, just
like they already have to install existing adblockers.

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WalterGR

       How likely is it that these apps will be built? 100%. One of those is
       Crystal, by Dean Murphy. His pitches: ... Pages render more than 3.9x
       faster on average.
    

How is that measured?

Do ads delay the rendering of the important, non-ad content by nearly 4x? Or
does that content render before ads, and the ads take a long time to render?

Put another way: am I going to see the content I care about 3.9x faster?

~~~
eridius
Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing the content until
you've clicked through the ad, then I think it's safe to say that removing the
ad lets you see the content faster.

~~~
WalterGR

       Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing
       the content until you've clicked through the ad
    

In my experience, ads on mobile that don't block you from seeing content are
more common than those that do.

I wonder if anyone has any hard data on this.

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reustle
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Apple is (indirectly) going
after any ad that they themselves don't power with iAd. Is that even
considered "fair", in a legal sense? Seems pretty anti-competitive.

~~~
Zr40
It's a different domain. Content blocking only applies to Safari. iAd ads only
appear in third party apps if the developer chooses to use them. They could
also use a different ads provider. That's not affected by content blocking
because it's not a web page inside Safari.

~~~
gcb0
we don't know their plans for the future. as long as it is a webview, they own
it.

~~~
Zr40
The future doesn't apply today. Today, webviews don't implement content
blocking. GGP appeared to assume webviews did implement that.

------
iwwr
This isn't the end of tracking, just the platform owners angling in on the
market and setting up toll booths for advertisers. It does have the advantage
of potentially less tracking overall, but personal data is still valuable and
Apple just wants a piece of the pie on something they perceive they own.
Tracking will be allowed as long as it doesn't significantly impact the user's
experience or over-burden the data usage.

~~~
eridius
This is not true. Apple most emphatically does _not_ want a slice of the pie
that is personal data. They've made it clear time and time again that they do
not want your personal data, they do not monetize it, they do not collect
anything more than aggregate statistics necessary to improve their own
products[1], and Tim Cook has made it very clear that Apple's executive
leadership values privacy very highly.

Unlike a lot of other companies ( _cough_ Google _cough_ ), Apple makes money
by selling hardware and software. They do not make it by monetizing your data.
And they view this as a competitive advantage.

[1] For example, you can bet they collect aggregate statistics on Spotlight
searches that search the web, but they get rid of any personally-identifying
information, so they can't tell anything about any given user (i.e. no
tracking).

~~~
eropple
_> They've made it clear time and time again that they do not want your
personal data_

Until they do. Which may or may not happen, but remains an extant problem
regardless. Relying on the beneficence of a corporate entity is never a wise
decision.

~~~
eridius
This is a preposterous statement. This is not about relying on their
beneficence. This is about relying on the core values of the company, the
things that the company views as a competitive advantage, the things that the
company believes is one of the reasons why they've achieved unprecedented
success and made boatloads of money. So you're actually relying on capitalism.

The argument for why other companies (like Google) do want your personal data
is the exact same one for why Apple doesn't. Because that's how they make
money. You might as well claim that Google may one day decide to just throw
out all the personal data they have on everyone and become a charitable
organization that gives away its software out of the goodness of its heart.

There is literally no reason to think Apple will change course about this,
besides complete ignorance about how Apple works and what the core values that
Apple believes in are.

~~~
iwwr
>This is about relying on the core values of the company

I think you place too much emphasis on companies having moral values.
Companies don't have values other than profits. The people in charge may have
them, but they are relentlessly driven to produce value for the shareholders,
which is not necessarily an evil thing. It's not the purview of a company to
have moral values.

Apple have made themselves by becoming a platform rather than being strictly a
hardware company. Their hardware can be regarded as tools or tokens necessary
to access Apple's services, rather than products in and of themselves.

~~~
eridius
Not all companies are driven to maximize short-term profits. Or more
generally, there exist companies which believe shareholder value is about more
than short-term profits. Apple has demonstrated itself to be one of those
companies. As a particularly public example of this[1], at the company's
annual shareholder meeting in 2014, the National Center for Public Policy
Research (a conservative think-tank, climate-change denial group, and investor
in Apple) asked Tim Cook and the board to pledge that Apple wouldn't pursue
any more environmental initiatives unless it improved the bottom line. Tim
Cook's response:

> _We do things because they are right and just and that is who we are. That’s
> who we are as a company. I don’t…when I think about human rights, I don’t
> think about an ROI. When I think about making our products accessible for
> the people that can’t see or to help a kid with autism, I don’t think about
> a bloody ROI, and by the same token, I don’t think about helping our
> environment from an ROI point of view._

And then he told them to sell their shares:

> _If you only want me to make things, make decisions that have a clear ROI,
> then you should get out of the stock._

[1] [http://mashable.com/2014/02/28/apple-ceo-tim-cook-climate-
ch...](http://mashable.com/2014/02/28/apple-ceo-tim-cook-climate-change/)

