Germany at it again: now trying to reopen the "adblockers are illegal" debate

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/15/german_court_ruling_ad_blocking/

by star-glider • 11 months ago

57 10 11 months ago

theregister.com

PaulHoule• 11 months ago

This is the same country where you have to have a permit to have an individual web site, right?

OKRainbowKid• 11 months ago

What are you talking about?

dkiebd• 11 months ago

No. You need to publish your name and full address somewhere in the page, which is even worse.

c0balt• 11 months ago

No, it isn't. You are bound by GDPR, Impressumspflicht [0], and common laws around speech but unless you are a big and/or social media site that's usually about it.

[0] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressumspflicht

roscas• 11 months ago

We should be awere that it is not just this one Springer. The amount of marketing associations is unreal. But they go nowhere if nobody uses ads on pages. Also companies like Google and Facebook that they exists only to put ads on peoples eyes, they should not exist. Always remember that a company pays them good money for them to put ads on your face. They get money to show you ads you don't want to make you buy crap that you don't need. Remember that.

ano-ther• 11 months ago

Adblock Plus which is the topic of this lawsuit is an ad-replacer rather than an ad-blocker -- and they make money from their own ads. I can see where that annoys publishers (and marvel that they manage to get any users).

From the article:

While it offers ad blocking software, the company generates revenue from ads through its Acceptable Ads program – advertisers pay to have ads that are "respectful, nonintrusive and relevant" exempted from filtering. Non-commercial open source projects like uBlock Origin rely on community support.

From https://eyeo.com/

Deliver more effective ads to a unique and valuable audience of 400 million ad-filtering users.

star-glider• 11 months ago

Agree--ABP is not the most sympathetic defendant here, but I don't see how good actors like uBlock Origin wouldn't also be caught up in this.

Granted, I don't know how they'd actually enforce an adblocker ban, but this is a country in which it is illegal to call politicians "idiots," and they will literally break down your door and arrest you if you do: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/man-s-home-raided-after...

So, while I don't think it's likely, it's certainly not outrageous to think that a publisher could detect that you're not downloading certain content (just like how various anti-adblock scripts function) and request that police go to your address, arrest you and check your computers for "illicit adblockers."

ChrisArchitect• 11 months ago

Is Germany on the brink of banning ad blockers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44912085

Ms-J• 11 months ago

Anytime a court bans something useful that the people want, there will always be a technical solution that works in complete parallel to the government narrative. Sometimes, entire markets pop up.

Use encryption, anonymity networks, cryptocurrencies, and no logs VPN's with endpoints in countries that have no authority over you. That should take care of the majority of users that require and enjoy human rights.

user3939382• 11 months ago

It’s not just ads guys. We have proprietary baseband blobs updatable OTA with DMA in our pockets. Telemetry is everywhere. Users have lost the battle for control of their computers, the entire stack is rotten.

Germany at it again: now trying to reopen the "adblockers are illegal" debate

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