UPDATED 22:27 EST / JUNE 01 2017

APPS

Google confirms that future versions of Chrome will block ‘annoying’ ads

Future versions of Google Inc.’s Chrome web browser will have an ad blocker of sorts built in and turned on by default, the search giant announced on Thursday.

The built-in ad blocker in Chrome, which was first rumored in April, isn’t an ad blocker in a traditional sense in that it won’t block all ads, a move that would be suicide for a company whose revenue is still primarily from advertising. Instead, it will block advertising Google deems to be “annoying.”

Pitched as a way of “improving advertising on the web,” the new feature will block advertising based on criteria established by the Coalition for Better Ads called “Better Ads Standards.” That includes ads that are flashing, play unexpected sound, and full-page ad “interstitial” ads that play before a story will display.

“In dialog with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018,” Google Vice President of Product Management Rahul Roy-Chowdhury said in a blog post.

Conscious of the fact that blocking certain ads by default will not be received positively by all, Google is rolling out a service called the Ad Experience Report, a new tool which provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences Google has identified to make it easier for publishers to find and fix advertising issues.

Although Google claims that the new versions of Chrome will block “annoying” advertising, it appears that websites that deploy such ads, even if it’s one ad among many, will see Chrome blocking all ads on the given site. That’s a severe penalty, but it’s apparently an attempt to force publishers not to use forms of advertising that Google deems to be annoying and in theory diminish a user’s experience when visiting a given site.

Ad blockers have always been controversial among publishers that rely on advertising revenue to fund their existence. While multiple court cases have found that ad blocking is legal, there are still concerns that the implementation of ad blocking acts as a circumvention technology that is illegal in the European Union, if not in the United States.

There is also a valid moral and possibly legal argument against Google blocking ads: Most of the advertising blocked by the new version of Chrome will be from competitors of Google itself, raising not only anti-competition issues in the EU but in the U.S. as well.

Image: Maxpixel

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