Support net neutrality and ad-blocking? You’re a hypocrite

The mobile web could soon be looking an awful lot emptier if reports of plans by two major networks are to be believed. On Monday, The Telegraph broke the story that the EE network was reviewing whether to enable ad-blocking across the whole phone network, and yesterday Business Insider broke the story that O2 is saying “me too”, and has even claimed to be in advanced stages of planning to introduce the technology.

Although it will no doubt sound appealing to customers, if ad-blocking becomes the new normal for EE, O2 and, inevitably, every other network on Earth, it could have profound and terrible unintended consequences.

Ad-blocking apps and browser plugins have been available for a number of years on both desktop and mobile. Most recently, the update to iOS 9 on iPhone and iPad enabled ad-blocking apps for the first time. But what is being proposed here is that, rather than having adverts screened out by an app on an individual’s phone, adverts would instead be cut out of web pages by the network before the data has downloaded to the user’s phone.

Everybody hurts

This is no doubt a terrifying proposition for any online entities with a business model that entails publishing content online and surrounding it by advertising. Like, umm, Alphr, for a start. As publications go digital, and our digital consumption goes increasingly mobile, this is terrible news if you want a sustainable business.

Even the largest digital players should be worried. Google controls a gigantic slice of the online advertising market. The reason it provides so many of its services (including the bandwidth-intensive YouTube) for free is because it can deliver eyeballs to adverts. If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see how Google responds to any ad-blocking – could it retaliate by de-ranking EE or O2 from its search listings?

Gatekeepers

Essentially, the problem is about who gets to be the gatekeeper to online content.

So far, both O2 and EE have said that their implementations of the technology will be to encourage “best practice”, with the implication that some adverts will be let through while other, more annoying, adverts won’t. But I’m not sure why we should grant phone networks the privilege of deciding what we get to see.

Everyone knows that picking between a phone network is like choosing an estate agent or booking a flight: there’s no way of winning and, as a consumer, you’re going to get screwed whoever you pick.

The reason for this is because it’s a relatively cosy oligopoly. To become a fully fledged phone network (not a virtual operator), there are high barriers to entry: you need to license spectrum from the government, and buy and maintain a network of transmitters. This makes it incredibly difficult for a new company to join in and provide a better service at a competitive price. Moreover, the barriers will increase even further in the not-too-distant future, with further consolidation creating even more powerful companies as EE is gobbled up by BT, and O2 consumed by Hutchison Whampoa, which owns Three.

Contrast this to, say, apps or publishing where there is much more of a free market – where apps and blogs can rise and fall more quickly, and where delivering a good service to the consumer is vital to survival. So it strikes me as weird that we might want to concentrate more power into the hands of companies that are not subjected to such intense pressures.

Continues on page 2

Just as in the Middle Ages, when there were literal gatekeepers who sat at customs posts on the outskirts of cities and extracted duties from anyone wishing to enter, allowing the networks to be in charge of which adverts are seen is effectively a tax on other stakeholders. The implication by talking of “best practice” is that the networks will setup a “whitelist” of approved adverts. It’s easy to imagine a hypothetical phone network that blocked ads offering to whitelist certain companies in exchange for a fee.

It’s within the interests of these fat, lazy networks to position themselves as “content” companies that can discriminate with pricing like this, as there’s more money in it. Ultimately, though, it’s far better for the consumer if the phone networks are treated more like utilities.

Imagine if electricity companies could discriminate on pricing based not on overall power consumption as measured in kilowatt hours, but instead on what appliance you were using. That would be a very strange situation to be in.

Net neutrality

If this argument sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because, in essence, it’s the same as the ongoing net neutrality debate. Net neutrality is the not dissimilar argument that internet service providers shouldn’t be able to discriminate on types of content. For example, imagine if an ISP used deliberate blocks to force Netflix to stream at lower bandwidth than Amazon Instant Video.

If we were debating net neutrality in these terms, most people would agree that it’s important to protect neutrality for the good of competition and freedom. If this neutrality was threatened, we would happily line up behind John Oliver and fight to the death to defend our digital Helm’s Deep.

So why should advertising be any different? Leaving aside the fact that separating out the difference between “advertising” and “editorial” (or other content) is increasingly difficult in the modern world, if you agree that net neutrality is desirable and go on to defend blocking adverts, you’re a hypocrite.

And yes, I know that advertising is often unpleasant. But just as having “free speech” in society means having to accept that racists or other deeply unpleasant people are allowed to speak, if we truly want to have net neutrality, we should be prepared to accept obnoxious adverts.

Unintended consequences

Given the teased plans of O2 and EE, it seems all but inevitable that ad-blocking will be standard in the not-too-distant future. But, like many seemingly beneficial moves, there can be profound unintended consequences.

Other than a rebalancing of the power relationship between different actors in the mobile industry, perhaps the scariest outcome from my own solipsism could be the further muzzling of the press. If adverts aren’t there to fund publications, then how can we expect the press to effectively hold the largest corporations to account? (Or indeed, write hot takes on the mobile industry.)

Arguably, it’s within the interests of the mobile networks to choke the press as much as possible: these are huge players with huge influence over our lives. And if the traditional role of the so-called Fourth Estate isn’t being fulfilled, who will keep these companies honest?

The mobile networks are already huge mega-corporations that have accrued a critical place at the centre of our digital lives – is it really wise to hand them even more power?

Technology companies are vying for control of the web, but what if we gave them control of our love lives? This is not a dystopian dream. Click here to read about Facebook’s plans to let you end a relationship with a click of a button.