Talk:Ad blocking/Archives/2018
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Historical context
The history of blocking web advertising is very poorly documented in the Internet, with email spam blocking being the best documented. Email spam blocking has long been related to subscribable IP block lists at the ISP router level. These IP block lists have always had to be documented (as it is a communal Denial of Service action) -- thus the history of this kind of filtering is better preserved.
As online web advertisers have always had to operate from the beginning within the global banking system and Interpol (and ITU) constraints -- the trade was at least modestly limited on the amount of non-socially acceptable content it could (in some sense) broadcast or transmit.
However, these intergovernmental constraints did not stop the profession from completely alienating the varied Internet user bases on a continental level.
Adblockers either as browser addons or as modular updatable internet router rulesets did not exist at all as a technology in the early years of the Internet. The early years of the modern Internet when people were using Mosaic and Netscape -- were simply devoid of web advertising.
The early 2000s saw the rise of web advertising companies (and email spam entities) as large scale industrial ventures. Their company back end technology was mostly closed source or only purchasable as a service.
"Industrial" or "Professional" Standards for advertising Banner Ads did not coalesce until the mid-2000s. Yet even after standardization (as much to reduce advertiser bandwidth as end user bandwidth) -- these graphical (mostly GIF format) adverts were fully taxing many 56kbs web connections by the late 2000s.
Some web browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer (as competitive measures against each other) started to offer the capability for Adons by the mid-2000s. It was only a matter of time until the technology for blocking web advertising would get going.
The early business model for browser addons was to pay for the addon as a service, and the filter company would update the proprietary filters at least monthly. Most browser addons were not well written and slowed down the browser experience substantially.
By the mid to late-2010s the proprietary filter business was failing. Its closed source corporate model was of no real help to most internet users. This was coupled with the coming of 3rd and 4th Generation browsers that allowed for addon scripts (aka addons) to modify web pages based on a privileges granting system that the user controlled.
The Open Source movement finally took over the filtering of advertising on most web browsers by not only open sourcing the source code of the addons but the advertising filtering lists. However, this open source takeover was slow. Most decade long internet users took a long time to develop a knee-jerk reaction of adding web advertising addons until the late 2010s.
Even to this day not all internet users add web advertising filter programs -- and not all browsers in common use support adding on web advertising filter programs.