I am from germany. You shouldnt overestimate the warning. Some background information:
1. You have to know the context: The situation is very special in germany at the moment. Here is a big discussion about privacy and data security. There was a big scandal some weeks ago because a call center company sold some data from its customers and other companys abused these informations. Somehow the politicians and goverment agencys have a "bad conscience" now.
2. Im a lawyer and i think if the warning is really an official warning it is rather problematic (for the goverment agency, not for google). But one has to know that in germany some ministries understand themselves somehow as consumer protection agencies. It is a little bit different than in other countries i guess.
3. The warning is more directed to people who dont know much about the internet: mums and dads and aol-users and so on. The goverment agency didnt tell them anything different then that what every reader of this page here already knows.
> Furthermore it was said to be risky that user data is hoarded with a single vendor. With its search engine, email program and the new browser, Google now covers all important areas on the internet.
Good thing no other company offers this trifecta. Or if they do, they must be really small, for the German government not to have heard of them.
The thing I find most interesting about journalistic coverage of Chrome is that they haven't brought up the elephant in the room: Chrome will not and will never have an (official) ad blocker.
Sure, Google also wants to have a stable client side for their javascript-based software, but the reality is that those programs don't make them the kind of money that search advertisement does. With Microsoft controlling the browser, they could conceivably release an ad blocker in IE8 and turn it on by default. Google would be in serious trouble very fast.
I'm not trying to say that this will happen, just that Google's being smart and mitigating risk. Until they start making serious money from their office applications, however, creating their own browser seems to me to be a defensive move, not an offensive one.
Microsoft is trying to build a large ad business also. Why would they release an ad blocker?
I doubt we will ever see an ad blocker from any commercial entity. Unless, of course, ad blocking is the only motivator behind the entire business. Somehow, I don't really expect that either. Consumers of ad blocking software probably wouldn't be the kind of people who pay for things like that :-)
The fact that they are trying to build an ad business can be countered with the fact that they have not yet built an ad business _successfully_.
As such they don't really lose anything by taking away Google's core business in the form of an ad blocker. Microsoft has always been very worried about Google, and Balmer has compared Microsoft and Google as rivals in the software industry. If Microsoft can leverage their control over browsers in IE8 with an ad blocker, then they can potentially take a large chunk out of Google's bottom line, and make Google a much weaker 'rival'.
And what about the tens of thousands of ASP.net developers who depend on ad revenue to pay the bills for Visual Studio and Windows Servers?
Say what you will about Microsoft, but they depend on armies of developers who depend on ads. As such, do not expect them to produce an ad blocker. It would be nothing short of a developer relations disaster.
But is it legal for a 3rd party to scan in your newspaper, remove the ads, then print it out and sell it to you?
That is a more accurate analogy. It's stealing and depriving the publisher of their income.
In any event, getting past adblockers is really really simple. It always will be, and if you think an adblocker can block anywhere near all adverts, you should go read up on how things work.
Educate me - which adblocker is it that you know of that removes the adverts from websites and then sells the resulting ad-free site to the user?
To suggest that blocking an advert is stealing assumes that the author of the web page would make money off that advert in the first place. Furthermore, that logic suggests that anyone who chooses to ignore advertising rather than just blocking it is also guilty because they're depriving the publisher of a potential income too. Total rubbish.
Like I said, by that logic anyone who chooses not to click adverts are also stealing.
Do you click every advert you see just to make sure you're compensating for 'stolen' bandwidth, processing power, storage, electricity?
FYI: I redistribute scripts under GPL licensing. I don't ask for donations, nor do I litter my pages with advertising. I consider that pretty "giving" - and no, I don't have problems with people 'stealing' my bandwidth, processing power, storage or electricity.
No, I treat websites with the benefit of the doubt. If they provide advertising that is useful to me, I click on it.
By blocking all advertising on all websites you're sticking your fingers in your ears.
Personally, I find adverts useful. Websites that resort to crappy user experience adverts - popups/unders/flash etc usually aren't worth visiting in the first place.
Back in the olden days there were clipping services, pay a fee and each week/month a selection of xeroxed articles would arrive in a plain manila envelope.
Most people don't care. Most people see adverts as a good way to keep the internet free.
It's only a very small proportion of people who like to block adverts and leech pages.
"With Microsoft controlling the browser, they could conceivably release an ad blocker in IE8 and turn it on by default. Google would be in serious trouble very fast."
Any ad blocker is at best maybe 50% effective. Most ads get through. You just don't realize they are ads.
It might take google... an hour at most to get past the ad blocker if ms did such a thing.
> It's only a very small proportion of people who like to block adverts and leech pages.
If you want to talk about leeching, why not address the issue of massive flash and image based adverts that suck-up the bandwidth of those on limited/capped connections? Is that not leeching?
Yes it is, but to tar every website with the same brush is not very nice IMHO.
You are assuming that all websites are going to waste your bandwidth, show you irritating adverts, and piss you off.
I think it'd be a nicer world if you assumed websites were going to be nice and useful. If a website does have bandwidth wasting ads, just don't use that website.
And you are tarring every person who blocks adverts under the same brush - as a leecher.
You are assuming that those who block adverts by default don't contribute to websites in ways that more than makes up for the blocking of adverts - they're "stealing", don't forget.
I've been using the Internet for approximately 8 years. I have never seen a 'nice and useful' advertisement (and yes, I'm including the time before I started using ad-block plugins).
Given that about 14 hours of my average day is spent on the Internet - because I work with it, not because I have no social life... well, maybe that too - a hell of a lot of websites.
And how would I know if one of the adverts were what I was looking for, if I don't click them? I find the organic results always meet the criteria I've searched for.
TBH this is getting into a I do this/you do that debate on personal circumstance - not why I entered the discussion. I don't see the point in going 'round in circles all evening. I think we've made it pretty clear where we both stand on the subject.
1. You have to know the context: The situation is very special in germany at the moment. Here is a big discussion about privacy and data security. There was a big scandal some weeks ago because a call center company sold some data from its customers and other companys abused these informations. Somehow the politicians and goverment agencys have a "bad conscience" now.
2. Im a lawyer and i think if the warning is really an official warning it is rather problematic (for the goverment agency, not for google). But one has to know that in germany some ministries understand themselves somehow as consumer protection agencies. It is a little bit different than in other countries i guess.
3. The warning is more directed to people who dont know much about the internet: mums and dads and aol-users and so on. The goverment agency didnt tell them anything different then that what every reader of this page here already knows.