January 5, 2007

Adblock Plus Must Die

The first time I used Adblock Plus, a Firefox add-on that blocks ads from appearing on webpages, I thought, "This can't be legal." It was a telling reaction. Ads have become so ubiquitous in our culture that one unconsciously privileges the rights of advertisers over the rights of, well, everyone else.

Be that as it may, the web offers a remarkable degree of user control—control unthinkable in other media. This is how it was designed. The content of webpages can be resized, restyled, reformatted, and even, to a degree, repurposed. With Adblock Plus, webpage content can also be removed. (Another amazing Firefox add-on, CustomizeGoogle, allows users to not only restrict the content of Google search results—for example, by removing sponsored links—but also add content such as links to competing search engines.)

I've been using Adblock Plus for about two weeks now, and it still feels like I've slipped into a Hollywood movie in which an anarchist superhero comes from the future to rid humans of ads forever. Naturally, a brilliant and evil ad executive villain has come as well, and the two do battle. Because this is Hollywood, the superhero must triumph in the end, though perhaps in a manner that leaves open the door to a sequel.

But that's Hollywood. In real life, Adblock Plus is now the most popular Mozilla add-on (it was downloaded 146,901 times in the past week), and I can't help but think this makes certain people uncomfortable. Maybe I'm dreaming here, but if 10% of all Firefox users installed Adblock Plus, that would constitute 2% of all web users. How many billions of dollars in lost revenue is that?

In a sense the answer doesn't matter, because it will never get to that point. There's simply too much money at stake to allow it to happen. Sooner rather than later, Adblock Plus will stopped by a legal ruling, or a new law, or god knows what, but it will be stopped. It has to be.

Unless of course some anarchist superhero arrives from the future to save it, but so far as I know, things like that only happen in Hollywood.

Published in Browsers, WWW