Block ads and trackers

@dsjoerg Interesting take. Can you show methe terms of, let's take a random example, chess24.com, that say you cannot use their website without loading their ads and trackers?

@thibault not sure it's a common practice yet but Spotify has it in their TOS: www.spotify.com/us/legal/end-user-agreement/ section 9, subsection 10 . "circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating or distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service;"

Skimming the chess24 TOS I don't see anything against using blockers. Maybe Spotify is the only one!

It looks like it's fair if it's in the TOS. But I expect it to be pretty rare.

Can the TOS really dictate what we must display on our screen? Where exactly do TOS become ridiculous? Can I write in my TOS that it's forbidden to wear pants while using my service?

Now THERE'S a mental image that will be hard to ignore!! lolol

I would guess that not wearing pants while using your service is probably unenforceable. But not being able to use a service because you are circumventing their process of making money may be enforceable. But this would need to be tested in court to be certain either way.

I agree with the above post. At some point, the free rider problem becomes too costly for the provider to not enforce these issues, but as of now, it seems that these sites are often frequented by those who don't mind ads. It will be interesting to see how sites respond to the increase in adblockers in the future.

For the record, I am not wearing pants.

The use or disuse of ad-blockers is more of a threat then reality.
If a web site tried to enforce pushing ads and tracking, people, would just go else where.
And most people don't read the TOS. What are they going to do,come to my home town and beat me up?.
As someone said I may pay later I might not also. In some countries what is on my computer screen is my bisness I use chess24 I use an ad-blocker and anti-tracker and my pants aint your bees wax

Ublock orgin iz da bst. I DID IT! Every one of those words are misspelled, so they all look red lol on my computer lol.

But srsly it is really good (:

Many news sites have an ad-blocker detection routine and will block the page content until you disable the ad-blocker. Its what I was alluding to earlier about content being found somewhere else. As far as "You have to let us inundate you with ads or you can't use our service" being in a TOS, the post about Spotify is the first I know of that has it written in the TOS itself. Generally speaking, they just block the content until you allow them to spam you to death with ads and malware.

All this makes me wonder how long the arms race will go on. First there were ads, then ad-blockers, then ad-block detectors.... will the next version of uBlock Origin somehow look like it's not an adblocker so that websites won't detect it and refuse to load content?