William Gallagher
A consortium of publishers and ad companies in France have written to Tim Cook to ask him to ditch Distraction Control, undaunted by how he ignored them last time.
It was in May 2024 when members of French organizations including Alliance Digitale, and press organization Alliance de la Presse d'Information Generale, read AppleInsider and went wide-eyed. For AppleInsider had exclusively revealed Apple's Web Eraser, which would later be renamed on release as Distraction Control.
At the time, Web Eraser was expected to let Safari users remove any part of a website from view, and naturally target number one would be ads. So the consortium wrote to Tim Cook, asking that Apple abandon it.
It appears that neither Cook nor anyone else at Apple responded. However, when it was ultimately released, Apple did say that Distraction Control would not permanently remove ads.
Now according to Business Insider, the same French group has written again. The new letter does not appear to be entirely a copy-and-paste from May 2024, but it's close enough.
The letter says, presumably in French, that Distraction Control represents "an existential threat to the online advertising model, which underpins a significant portion of the internet's economy." The group wants Apple to suspend Distraction Control entirely.
What might make Apple pay more attention this time is that the group says they are "actively considering all available legal resources." Significantly, that includes having sent a copy of the letter to the European Commission, which doesn't seem overly fond of Apple at the moment.
Apple has not yet commented on the letter.
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7 Comments
Though not in use at the moment, in the past I have used a (Sophos) UTM to actively block the domains which host >90% of the web ad traffic. It makes browsing a far more pleasant experience, speeds up load times, and reduces total internet data usage.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Whole-heartedly.
I have always wanted someone, something, somewhere (not behind a paywall or subscription) to blow the lid off the truly useless and counter-productive internet-ad ecosystem that turns our websites into a morass of poorly-sourced, arbitrary, and distraction-zoos of mediocre products and services, many often fake or bait-switch-types, splashed onto otherwise content-rich news and entertainment sources.
I get it. I hear that more than 50% of websites have no real business model or self-sustaining source of revenue, relying on ads to keep their random assembly of content going. Many of the staff and workers and owners have no real job to support themselves entirely, just an endless string of gigs and fluffy content-mill situations driven by ad-brokers who push eye-ball numbers based on influencing-blaring content and half-truth and distraction. I suppose with television and hard-print industries collapsing, a huge gob of company promotional budgets had to be spent somewhere; obviously prized by the predators at Outbrain, etc. Are these companies who throw ad dollars at these rando ad-brokers not seeing the total lack of return for these shot-in-the-dark ad placements? Or Is the cost per ad placement so low, that they can afford to spam, deluge, smother, and distract the vast range of sites with its near-seizure-inducing garbage -- it brings up that famous scene in Ready Player Go with the CEO talking about 80% visual-area ad placement, just enough to avoid liability from creating seizure. I welcome Apple's attack on this monstrosity of eye-pollution and a start to hopefully implement a more sane web business model -- exposing the ad-brokers as simple charlatans, promising impossible returns to desperate businesses seeking any kind connection to the public.
Remember the initial promise of cable TV that we had to pay for? No advertising since you were paying for the service. Same with satellite radio. The ratio of add time to desired program is now 50 - 50 on most channels.
The reason apple is so successful has much to do with how they build their products to improve customer satisfaction.
My Safari is locked down like Fort Knox and now Apple has given me even more power to clean up the mess that is the World Wide Web.
"We're Not Going Back."
Hmm. That sounds familiar. ;)