I have seen the future, and it's scary. Well, scary for some, anyway. I installed Adblock Plus from adblockplus.org. This is a plug-in - ie, a small program that adds some specified capability to an internet browser. Its purpose is to strip out all the ads that today litter many web pages. I installed the Firefox version and, believe me, it does what it says on the tin.
Right-click on a banner ad, and choose 'Adblock' from the contextual menu. That banner will never be downloaded again. Or you can subscribe to a filter list devised by someone else - though it should be someone who shares your culture and values. The effect is remarkable. 'It's like going back to the feel of the web in the early Nineties, before it was strip-malled,' wrote one prominent blogger, Nick Carr. Another was reminded of 'when a blizzard hits Times Square and, for a few hours, the streets are quiet and unhurried, until the snowploughs come to clear away all that white space'.
Using Adblock Plus gives one an eerie feeling. The last time I experienced anything like it was when I downloaded the Napster client seven years ago and signed up. There's the same sense of amazing -and terrifying - possibilities opening up. It was clear from the start, for example, that Napster offered the prospect of 'the celestial jukebox' - of every track that had ever been recorded being instantly available, forever. But it was also clear that this innovation spelled the end of the record industry as we had known it.
Adblock Plus has some of the same characteristics - but, unlike Napster, it doesn't enable illicit behaviour. It simply provides internet users who don't wish to view ads with the means to avoid them. Consider what that might mean. It would be an exaggeration to say that the entire internet economy is built around advertising, particularly the ability to deliver targeted ads to users. But advertising is nevertheless a lynchpin of the online industry. Google's entire business model is built around targeted advertising. Yahoo and Microsoft are scrambling to build their online operations around the same idea. Most of the aspirations of Web 2.0 ventures are based on providing services for free and earning revenues from the advertising opportunities that arise from usage of those services.
What if a simple browser plug-in put paid to all those revenues? It's a prospect fraught with ambiguity. Of course, it's blissful to encounter web pages as they used to be - stripped of hucksterism. It's refreshing to think of giants like Google being humbled by a piece of free software. In that sense, Adblock Plus is the ultimate antidote to corporate hubris.
But there is another side to it. The fact that targeted advertising turned out to be the first major revenue-generator after conventional e-commerce has also brought incalculable benefits in its wake. In particular, it has lowered the barriers for innovators. If you have a smart idea for a web service, then you can start a business with very little capital. You can build a user base by offering at least some services for free, and then earn revenue from advertising. Take away the ad revenues and you're left with subscription-only services - something that only large corporations are good at building.
So, in the end, the question of whether to use Adblock Plus may become one of principle. If lots of people begin to use it, then the prospects for Web-based innovation will grow dimmer. And then we'll be faced with a variation on the 'tragedy of the commons': what's good for any single individual may, in the end, be bad for us all.
A blow to the beast
Microsoft has been staggering around all week like a gorilla recovering from a right hook delivered by what it had hitherto regarded as a milk-toothed puppy. Nobody at Redmond really believed that the European Court of First Instance would so comprehensively endorse the European Commission's anti-competitive ruling and $613m fine.
Gates & Co have got used to the idea that anti-trust regulators chicken out when it comes to the crunch. That, after all, is what the US Department of Justice did when George Bush was elected, and the campaign to bring the company to heel was abandoned. A quote from Thomas Barnett, the DoJ's assistant attorney general for anti-trust, last week revealed the extent to which Microsoft had the US government in its pocket. 'We are concerned that the standard applied to unilateral conduct by the court, rather than helping consumers, may have the unfortunate consequence of harming consumers by chilling innovation and discouraging competition.' Translation: Hands off our companies, Europunks.