Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? So today I thought we would talk a bit about ad blocking. It's no secret that lots of folks out there aren't crazy about ads, and it's totally understandable whether those ads are on television or on the web, or on a streaming video platform which is kind of an offshoot of the web, or yes, in podcasts. Folks can get fed up with ads, and I get it. Trust me, I get it when the ads are for stuff that doesn't relate to you at all. For example, you know, if I hear an ad that has anything to do with sports, it's probably not gonna be very effective on me. I'm just not a sports person. Not that I begrudge anyone who loves sports that's awesome, It's just not in my interests. But I also understand the negative reaction people can have for ads that relate to you, perhaps a bit too much, because targeted ads that you might encounter on things like social network platforms, for example, can get downright creepy, like I go back and forth. As an example of my own life. Just recently, I was checking in on Facebook to see what my friends were up to, and I saw an ad for a band performing here in Atlanta. The band being Southern Culture on the Skids. They've been around forever, and it's a band I really like. So this was a very targeted ad. It was a band I liked, specifically performing in a venue that's not far from where I live. In fact, it's right next to where I used to work. And yeah, that can feel a little creepy on the flo. If I hadn't seen that ad, I wouldn't know to get me a ticket so that I can listen to them play songs like Banana Pudden and camel Walk. But I'm sure all of you know I mean, it's it's very clear. It's very much at the very center of ads. Ads are a way to generate revenue, and in turn, revenue can be used to fund stuff like creating content. And if you didn't have the ads in place, you would have to have some other means of generating revenue to not only cover the costs that you encounter when you're doing stuff like creating content because you know, just to create stuff does cost money, and then you want to have some money left over, right, You don't want to just be able to cover your costs. You want to have a little profit so that you can do things like, I don't know, pay for rent and food and that kind of thing. But there's no question that the history of ads online has also It's been a history of developers and advertisers and platforms making decisions that have at times frustrated or other times caused actual harm to people who are browsing the web. There are examples of ads that have contained malware or ads that were peddling various scams. I see a lot of those on social networks as well, So like when I do go to Facebook, I don't just see ads that are targeted to me. I see ads that are highly suspicious, and then by looking into them, I find out, oh, this is one of four hundred different variations of this same ad, all of them purporting to be from slightly different businesses at different locations, and all of them being a scam. There are examples of ads that auto play video and audio, which should be illegal in my opinion. I mean, if you're like me, and I think a lot of you are. When you're using perhaps a desktop or laptop computer browser like a web browser, you might have lots of tabs open, Like I could have a dozen or more tabs open at a time, And if audio starts playing in one of those tabs and I don't immediately know which one it is, then I'm looking for that little speaker icon in the tabs so I can find out which one I need to mute. It is really irritating, right, So, Like, there are lots of ways that ADS have been intrusive and not great from a user experience. So I would argue that there are at least some cases where there is a very forgivable tendency to want to block or skip ADS entirely. And that's before we even get into the privacy side of things. Right now, before I go any further, I do have to acknowledge. I mean, there's no denying it. This podcast is ADS supported. You all know that I know that there's no denying that. Without ADS, I would not have a show. I would not have my current job. If it weren't for ADS, I would be doing something else, and I would probably be really unhappy about it. Generally speaking, I am against ad blocking because of how it can impact creators and companies that make the stuff I want to see and experience. I'm also against it because it pushes some platforms to lock things behind a paywall that makes it harder for other folks to access it without breaking the bank. Some of us can afford to pay those subscription fees to access content, others can't. I mean, obviously that also fuels development of workarounds and loopholes to try and get access to content without paying the paywall. It just creates more problems. But again, creating stuff isn't free. These companies and creators do need to generate revenue somehow, and if folks are going to block ads, that only leaves a few other options as far as revenue generation. On the privacy side of things, it is much harder to fight the practice of ad blocking. I see that as being really important. I think users do deserve to be able to protect their privacy, and for that job of ad blocking, I don't think I can put up an argument like I don't think I can argue against it. So while I think the ads are important in order to help support the content you love. I also think that, you know, the practice of collecting user information and the practice of buying and selling that in large amounts across the web, that's disturbing and I cannot really, you know, put up a good argument for it. So I feel very complicated about the whole subject. But in the grand scheme of things, if we boil it down, I guess I would say I'm against ad blocking. I do not use an AD blocker on the computer I'm recording on, for example, because I think it's important that when I'm researching stuff that the various sources I'm pulling from are also getting some AD revenue in the process. However, I do understand why people use ad blockers. So let's go over the history of online ad blockers. Now, obviously that history is somewhat tied to the history of web ads and the web. Right. Web ads were not always a guaranteed outcome, by the way. That's because of how the Internet evolved and the entities that contributed to the creation of the Internet. So you have to remember the Internet was a sort of an evolutionary step of the earlier arpenet. There are two different things, but you could say the Internet was kind of spawned by the development of Arpenet. Arpenet was a US government funded project that would create the technologies necessary to allow different computer systems in different locations to interc connect with one another and interoperate with one another. This required a metric buttload of work, according to my calculations. Researchers had to figure out how to make very different computers talk to each other. Right, they weren't all working on the same operating system. That in itself was already a complicated part of the puzzle. But they also had to figure out how to create the actual mechanisms for sending information over different kinds of connections. Those connections could be through things like telephone lines, or through radio waves, or beaming information up to satellite, which is still you know, radio waves, but much further away. I guess the entities that made up arpinnet and later the early Internet involved a lot of public organizations and private organizations, but not commercial organizations, So I'm talking about things like colleges and universities and government offices. Military installations were a big part of it. Research facilities that sort of thing, And in those early days there really weren't a whole lot of attempts to commercialize networking. You know, there were some attempts to commercialize within a specific location, right to network all the machines within a business, for example, Yes, but between businesses or between businesses and the world in general, not so much. In fact, most people weren't even aware that anything was going on at all. They just thought of computers as being kind of independent silos. Like you would have a personal computer, but it didn't connect to anything unless maybe you were dialing into a bulletin board system back in the day. Now, by the time we get to the transition of arpanet into the Internet, which again it wasn't like an evolutionary step. It was two things that, you know, one developed after the other, but they we had a lot of overlap. Well, one of the major organizations that would contribute to Internet infrastructure was the National Science Foundation or NSF. The NSF worked with various organizations, both public and private, to build a significant part of what was called the Internet backbone. Still is the Internet backbone. NSF just isn't really part of it, I'll explain. So you can think of the Internet as kind of like the nervous system that you would find in an organism, right, Like you could think of an end computer as being the very end of the line where a nerve ending happens to be. But any signals from that computer or that nerve ending has to travel to the brain, and to get there has to go up the nerve and then connect through the spinal cord all the way up to the central nervous system essentially the brain, not just the central nervous system, because I think technically that does include the spinal cord. It's been years since I've taken biology, but you know, it has to travel across the spinal cord in aid to get there. It can't just jump to the brain. Well, the NSF was contributing infrastructure that was part of the Internet's version of the spinal cord, So a lot of the traffic on the Internet would travel across insf's networks, which would be called NSF net Here's the kicker though. In order to do this, the NSF had to secure a lot of funding from the US government. But in order to do that, there were certain rules that had to be put in place, Like Congress said, yes, we'll provide you the funding as long as it follows these certain rules because we don't want this to turn into some sort of commercial effort as opposed to what you are telling us you want it to be, which is a way to connect supercomputing sites together. So one of the big rules was that these the NSF connections were not allowed to carry commercial traffic that was not to go across NSF net. And that became a problem because NSF net became an integral component of the Internet backbone, and that meant that if your work wasn't related to stuff like scientific research or advancing knowledge, then you started to run into the potential that whatever you were sending would be against the rules and technically should not be allowed to go across the nsf net part of Internet infrastructure. In fact, until nineteen eighty nine, the NSF wouldn't allow any commercial entities to even connect to the network. So Internet service providers that could have potentially sprung up in various places before eighty nine were stuck if the part of the backbone that they needed to connect to was controlled by NSF NET. Now in eighty nine, that changed. We started to see some commercial ISPs come up, and the access improved a little bit. In nineteen ninety one, but the general restrictions on commercial traffic across NSF net would remain in place until nineteen ninety five. That was a sticking point for the development of the Internet. It wasn't illegal to run commercial traffic over the Internet in general. So if your connections just completely bypassed the nsf net, like if in order to complete a commercial transaction between point A and point B, you never had to cross any of the network controlled by nsf net, that's fine. There was nothing inherently illegal about using the Internet for commercial purposes. The problem was the actual infrastructure was not supposed to do that, at least in parts of it, and that is what complicated everything. Now it was a huge joble The solution ended up being the creation of a new privatized network architecture largely built on top of what was learned through creating nsf net, but independent of nsf net. It essentially meant all these companies had to build a almost like a copy of nsf net in order to handle all that traffic and allow NSF to decommission nsf net in nineteen ninety five, and now traffic would just move across this other privatized architecture and there would be no limitation to the know to commercial traffic. Now, there's a lot more to that particular story. In fact, I could do a full episode about the entire drama around the transition of the Internet from a purely sort of research based entity into a commercial entity, But for our purposes, we're going to leave that part there. Let's talk about the Web and web ads, because that's what this is really about, right, Okay, I've set it up. When we come back, i'll talk a little bit about the birth of the World Wide Web and how that eventually led to the creation of web ads and thus ad blocking. But first, and trust me, I understand the irony of this. We need to take a break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So the beginning of the Worldwide Web. That starts with the guy who's credited for inventing the whole darn thing. He was a researcher who was working for CERN, you know, the same scientific research center that runs the Large Hadron Collider, and his name is of course Tim berners Lee. Tim felt that we were really missing a trick, you know, we had all these important documents. He was probably mostly thinking about scientific documents. But we had all these incredibly important documents, and they were stored on different computers all over the world. And a lot of these documents related to one another, or they each related to common topics, but they were all distinct. They were disconnected from each other. But what if you could build in a way that would allow related documents to have a link, to share a link with each other. You know, maybe you've got a document that's about one research project about particle physics, and you've got another research project about particle physics that's slightly different, But combining the two would provide future researchers with a lot more knowledge that would be beneficial to more work. If you were able to link those two documents together, that could be a really beneficial thing. So Tim developed hyperlink technology, which would do just what he was thinking. You could create a digital link between different digital documents and navigate from one to the other using some sort of client software. This was the basis for the World Wide Web, and berners Lee was able to convince CERN, which technically owned the research because it was his employer, to release this technology to the world in the public domain, rather than to sell it off and have it risk becoming some sort of proprietary software which would inherently limit its utility. Now, the world's first website launched in nineteen ninety one on August sixth. Then it was a text based document describing the basics of the World Wide Web project, including how hypertext links work. The very early days of the web were really all about text based documents. However, it didn't take too long for that to change. It did happen somewhat gradually because keep in mind, outside of universities and research centers and the like, those few people who had Internet access were depending on stuff like dial up modems, So if you were including things like images, it really slowed down how long it took for a web page to load into a browser. By the end of nineteen ninety three, there were only around three thousand websites total. Now that was still a growth spurt, because in ninety two it was more like ten websites. And also in nineteen ninety three, before the NSF net was shut down, we would start to have our first web centric platform that would support ads. And that platform wasn't itself a spinoff of a company that at the time was called O'Reilly and associates. These days, it's just known as O'Reilly Media. It was founded by Tim O'Reilly and the company originally focused on creating technical writing, technical documents and consulting that kind of stuff, and a lot of different documents and even events have come out of O'Reilly. The company is one of the reasons the concept of web two point zero even became a thing. For example, but we want to talk about the Global Network Navigator or GNN. O'Reilly launched the GNN website in May of nineteen ninety three, and essentially it was an online magazine. In fact, originally it had a quarterly publication schedule, so it would only change like four times a year. But you have to remember, in the early days of the web, web pages typically were static. You know, you didn't have sites updating content every day, let alone multiple times a day. Some websites would upload, and that was that. It just served as almost like a Yellow Pages ad or something. It didn't change. Also, I don't know how many of you know what a Yellow Pages ad is. Moving on. So GNN was already a little different from other web pages, right because it would actually feature updated content, though only a few times a year, and and this content largely focused on features about the blossoming technology of the World Wide Web. Another way that GNN set itself apart from other web pages is that O'Reilly decided they would allow for online advertising. GNN would offer companies a chance to secure some space, some real estate on the web page that would be dedicated to advertising to a potential customer. And you could use hyperlink technology to facilitate traffic to a different destination where presumably someone who's visiting GNN could become a paying customer of the company that advertised on GNN. Well, this set up conditions for AT and T to purchase the very first web banner. At least as far as I can tell, it was a brave new world. This was in nineteen ninety four when the first web banner ended up being displayed to the world, and it meant there was advertising on the Internet now. It didn't take long for there to be a kind of land rush to the web. You know how a lot of companies really jumped into the whole web three slash metaverse, slash blockchain, slash NFT bandwagon not that long ago. And how despite the fact that there were a lot of unanswered questions about the technologies in general. There was this perception that if you didn't get in there right away, you were going to be left behind. That's kind of what the Internet in general and the Web in particular was like around this time, and there was a bit of this struggle, this rush to get an online presence among various companies, and in turn that really picked up the pace when the last restrictions on commercial internet traffic went away once NSF net decommissioned. So in nineteen ninety five, AOL purchased GNN from O'Reilly for the print lease some of eleven million dollars, and in that same year a couple of guys named Dwight Merriman and Kevin O'Connor came up with a business plan. See GNN showed that online advertising was a very real possibility, but a lot of companies wouldn't have the know how or the resources to facilitate advertising on their web pages. So what was needed was a dedicated company to handle stuff like ad sales and performance tracking, you know, partnering advertisers with web pages, all that kind of stuff, running ads across networks of sites, not just on a single page and even getting into the earliest, earliest days of what would become targeted advertising. So the two created a service that kind of did all these things, and they called it Double Click. Kevin Ryan would become an early investor in the service, and later on would become CEO of the company itself. Now this isn't the Double Click story either, but the company did pioneer an era in which advertising would proliferate across the web. And if you want to know what actually happened to double click itself, Google announced that it would purchase double Click back in two thousand and seven for the even more princely sum of three point one billion dollars, showing that web advertising had truly become a gargantuan business, and it's now part of Google's overall advertising operations. But let's get back to ads and ad blocking, and we're back into the mid nineteen nineties. So web advertising begins to gainsteam. Some folks start to develop ad blindness already, because a lot of these ads were appearing either as a banner ad across the top or the bottom of a web page, or along the side like in a column, either to the left or to the right of the main content of the web page. A lot of people just got really good it not paying attention to that stuff, but some folks were still frustrated that ads were showing up when they were trying to just surf the web. A group of students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina started to come up with their own idea for a company. So rather than selling ad space and slapping banner ads all over the web, they were creating an extension to the web browser Netscape, which at the time was almost synonymous with the Worldwide Web itself. It's easy to forget now, but there was a time where Netscape was essentially the definitive web browser for the Internet. That would change, and things would change dramatically. Like today, you could argue that Google Chrome is one of the biggest ones out there, but there's still there's better competition now than there was back when Netscape was really dominating the landscape. Now, this extension that the students created would actually block banner ads from showing up in a user's web browser. The leader of this group of radical revolutionaries was a guy named James Howard. From why I understand, he wasn't even a computer science major. He was actually focused on studying drama as a theater, not as in, let me just walk up to the stranger in public and see if I can provoke a wild reaction. So Howard and his fellow students ended up creating a company called Privnet, and the tool they made, the ad blocking tool, got the name Internet Fast Forward. Why Internet fast Forward, Well, we got to understand how web ads work, right, So when you go to a web page, what you're really doing is your browser is sending a request to a web server that hosts that page, and the web server serves the page up to you. It sends the page to your web browser. Web ads, however, typically live on some other web server. There's like a little section in the web page that connects to this code that links to the ad in question, and that means that there's another fetch and retrieval process going on when you're accessing the web page. It's not just the content of the page itself, it's also the AD and that can slow things down. And again, remember we're talking in an era where people are using dial up internet, So you're using your dial up internet to access a web page and it's taking a really long time, because not only is it pulling from the website you're going to, but any web ads that might be included on the web page that you're trying to visit. So Internet fast forward, but speed things up by blocking those ads now. As you might imagine, the emergence of ad blocking immediately prompted a lot of criticism from various other parties. Obviously, ad companies were really upset because this was their business and blocking ads was a bad thing. Like if you're especially if your business is dependent upon and the performance of ads, and people are able to block the ad entirely, well, that performance drops to nothing if everybody's doing it. Content companies were also upset, right because this was how they were making revenue and being able to allow access to the content without otherwise charging for it. So a lot of people spoke up and said that in order for content on the Internet, well really specifically the Web, to remain free to access, there was this unfortunate need for ad revenue because in the end, nothing is free. There are costs associated with everything, whether it's creating the content or hosting it, and unless you have a pipeline to endless resources, you have to have a way to generate revenue to cover costs or stuff goes away. Now, I've read a few articles that actually published back in nineteen ninety six. That's when the Internet fast Forward tool started to really get attention. By the end of that year, another company called Pretty Good Privacy would actually purchase priv Net, the creator of Internet fast Forward, and a couple of years later they would actually have to shut down the tool because they were being threatened with legal cases from various companies, and in order to avoid any incredibly expensive legal fees, they shut it down. But anyway, back in ninety six, the interesting thing that hits me from these articles is that Howard would be interviewed all the time. I mean, this was big news. It was making like TV news, and Howard framed ad blocking is a way to cater the browsing experience to user preferences. He was saying, shouldn't the end user be able to determine how they get content? Like, shouldn't they be the ones to ultimately decide whether or not certain types of Internet content come their way, which includes ads? So why not give them a tool that lets them block those ads if they want to? And again, you know, since we're talking about the era of dial up modems. This can mean saving time for the end user. Of course, the user's time is important, so why not give them a tool that lets some access what they want faster by blocking stuff they don't want, namely ads. But interestingly, while I was looking at all these different interviews and stuff, one of the conversations I did not see or one of the topics that did not really pop up in those And maybe it was simply because the media didn't know to ask the question was really about privacy. Privacy would become an integral component of ad blocking moving on, but in those early days, you just didn't see it being talked about. See back in nineteen ninety four, a computer programmer named lou Montuli had this idea. There was a need to preserve a use when a person was engaging with a web page. So let me give you an example. Let's say you visit an online store, and let's say you start shopping around and you're filling your virtual cart with various items. But before you can actually go and complete the transaction, you have to log off your computer to go do something else. Now wouldn't it be nice when you later had the time that you could log back in on your computer, go right back to that web page, and your cart would still have all the things you had put into it when you visited earlier on. Wouldn't that be nice? Of course it would. That's kind of how the web works, you know, Otherwise you would have to start all over and that'd be a frustrating experience. Well, you would have to store that data, right You would have to have a place where that data would be associated with your visit to that store, and these were the items that you specifically chose. Storing that data on web servers look like a non starter because maybe you would never come back to the virtual store. Then the virtual store is just storing this data on its servers for no reason. It's just bloating up all the data storage as all these different customers come and go. Storing the data on your computer made more sense, right, Like, if you had just a tiny little block of data that sat on your computer, that's not a big deal. But holding millions of blocks of data on a server that just didn't make sense. So then the web page could access this little block of data living on your computer through the connection with the web browser, and you would be right back where you were from your earlier session. You'd be able to continue shopping. This technology was already in use in other realms of computing and it was called a cookie. So in nineteen ninety four, cookies became a thing for web traffic once developers created the Web Specification for them to work in Netscape and later in other browsers as well. When we come back, we'll talk a bit more about cookies and how that would end up fueling another era of development in the ad blocking space. But again and again, the irony is not lost on me. We have to take a break for some ads of our own. Okay, we're back, and before the break, I was talking about cookies.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? So today I thought we would talk a bit about ad blocking. It's no secret that lots of folks out there aren't crazy about ads, and it's totally understandable whether those ads are on television or on the web, or on a streaming video platform which is kind of an offshoot of the web, or yes, in podcasts. Folks can get fed up with ads, and I get it. Trust me, I get it when the ads are for stuff that doesn't relate to you at all. For example, you know, if I hear an ad that has anything to do with sports, it's probably not gonna be very effective on me. I'm just not a sports person. Not that I begrudge anyone who loves sports that's awesome, It's just not in my interests. But I also understand the negative reaction people can have for ads that relate to you, perhaps a bit too much, because targeted ads that you might encounter on things like social network platforms, for example, can get downright creepy, like I go back and forth. As an example of my own life. Just recently, I was checking in on Facebook to see what my friends were up to, and I saw an ad for a band performing here in Atlanta. The band being Southern Culture on the Skids. They've been around forever, and it's a band I really like. So this was a very targeted ad. It was a band I liked, specifically performing in a venue that's not far from where I live. In fact, it's right next to where I used to work. And yeah, that can feel a little creepy on the flo. If I hadn't seen that ad, I wouldn't know to get me a ticket so that I can listen to them play songs like Banana Pudden and camel Walk. But I'm sure all of you know I mean, it's it's very clear. It's very much at the very center of ads. Ads are a way to generate revenue, and in turn, revenue can be used to fund stuff like creating content. And if you didn't have the ads in place, you would have to have some other means of generating revenue to not only cover the costs that you encounter when you're doing stuff like creating content because you know, just to create stuff does cost money, and then you want to have some money left over, right, You don't want to just be able to cover your costs. You want to have a little profit so that you can do things like, I don't know, pay for rent and food and that kind of thing. But there's no question that the history of ads online has also It's been a history of developers and advertisers and platforms making decisions that have at times frustrated or other times caused actual harm to people who are browsing the web. There are examples of ads that have contained malware or ads that were peddling various scams. I see a lot of those on social networks as well, So like when I do go to Facebook, I don't just see ads that are targeted to me. I see ads that are highly suspicious, and then by looking into them, I find out, oh, this is one of four hundred different variations of this same ad, all of them purporting to be from slightly different businesses at different locations, and all of them being a scam. There are examples of ads that auto play video and audio, which should be illegal in my opinion. I mean, if you're like me, and I think a lot of you are. When you're using perhaps a desktop or laptop computer browser like a web browser, you might have lots of tabs open, Like I could have a dozen or more tabs open at a time, And if audio starts playing in one of those tabs and I don't immediately know which one it is, then I'm looking for that little speaker icon in the tabs so I can find out which one I need to mute. It is really irritating, right, So, Like, there are lots of ways that ADS have been intrusive and not great from a user experience. So I would argue that there are at least some cases where there is a very forgivable tendency to want to block or skip ADS entirely. And that's before we even get into the privacy side of things. Right now, before I go any further, I do have to acknowledge. I mean, there's no denying it. This podcast is ADS supported. You all know that I know that there's no denying that. Without ADS, I would not have a show. I would not have my current job. If it weren't for ADS, I would be doing something else, and I would probably be really unhappy about it. Generally speaking, I am against ad blocking because of how it can impact creators and companies that make the stuff I want to see and experience. I'm also against it because it pushes some platforms to lock things behind a paywall that makes it harder for other folks to access it without breaking the bank. Some of us can afford to pay those subscription fees to access content, others can't. I mean, obviously that also fuels development of workarounds and loopholes to try and get access to content without paying the paywall. It just creates more problems. But again, creating stuff isn't free. These companies and creators do need to generate revenue somehow, and if folks are going to block ads, that only leaves a few other options as far as revenue generation. On the privacy side of things, it is much harder to fight the practice of ad blocking. I see that as being really important. I think users do deserve to be able to protect their privacy, and for that job of ad blocking, I don't think I can put up an argument like I don't think I can argue against it. So while I think the ads are important in order to help support the content you love. I also think that, you know, the practice of collecting user information and the practice of buying and selling that in large amounts across the web, that's disturbing and I cannot really, you know, put up a good argument for it. So I feel very complicated about the whole subject. But in the grand scheme of things, if we boil it down, I guess I would say I'm against ad blocking. I do not use an AD blocker on the computer I'm recording on, for example, because I think it's important that when I'm researching stuff that the various sources I'm pulling from are also getting some AD revenue in the process. However, I do understand why people use ad blockers. So let's go over the history of online ad blockers. Now, obviously that history is somewhat tied to the history of web ads and the web. Right. Web ads were not always a guaranteed outcome, by the way. That's because of how the Internet evolved and the entities that contributed to the creation of the Internet. So you have to remember the Internet was a sort of an evolutionary step of the earlier arpenet. There are two different things, but you could say the Internet was kind of spawned by the development of Arpenet. Arpenet was a US government funded project that would create the technologies necessary to allow different computer systems in different locations to interc connect with one another and interoperate with one another. This required a metric buttload of work, according to my calculations. Researchers had to figure out how to make very different computers talk to each other. Right, they weren't all working on the same operating system. That in itself was already a complicated part of the puzzle. But they also had to figure out how to create the actual mechanisms for sending information over different kinds of connections. Those connections could be through things like telephone lines, or through radio waves, or beaming information up to satellite, which is still you know, radio waves, but much further away. I guess the entities that made up arpinnet and later the early Internet involved a lot of public organizations and private organizations, but not commercial organizations, So I'm talking about things like colleges and universities and government offices. Military installations were a big part of it. Research facilities that sort of thing, And in those early days there really weren't a whole lot of attempts to commercialize networking. You know, there were some attempts to commercialize within a specific location, right to network all the machines within a business, for example, Yes, but between businesses or between businesses and the world in general, not so much. In fact, most people weren't even aware that anything was going on at all. They just thought of computers as being kind of independent silos. Like you would have a personal computer, but it didn't connect to anything unless maybe you were dialing into a bulletin board system back in the day. Now, by the time we get to the transition of arpanet into the Internet, which again it wasn't like an evolutionary step. It was two things that, you know, one developed after the other, but they we had a lot of overlap. Well, one of the major organizations that would contribute to Internet infrastructure was the National Science Foundation or NSF. The NSF worked with various organizations, both public and private, to build a significant part of what was called the Internet backbone. Still is the Internet backbone. NSF just isn't really part of it, I'll explain. So you can think of the Internet as kind of like the nervous system that you would find in an organism, right, Like you could think of an end computer as being the very end of the line where a nerve ending happens to be. But any signals from that computer or that nerve ending has to travel to the brain, and to get there has to go up the nerve and then connect through the spinal cord all the way up to the central nervous system essentially the brain, not just the central nervous system, because I think technically that does include the spinal cord. It's been years since I've taken biology, but you know, it has to travel across the spinal cord in aid to get there. It can't just jump to the brain. Well, the NSF was contributing infrastructure that was part of the Internet's version of the spinal cord, So a lot of the traffic on the Internet would travel across insf's networks, which would be called NSF net Here's the kicker though. In order to do this, the NSF had to secure a lot of funding from the US government. But in order to do that, there were certain rules that had to be put in place, Like Congress said, yes, we'll provide you the funding as long as it follows these certain rules because we don't want this to turn into some sort of commercial effort as opposed to what you are telling us you want it to be, which is a way to connect supercomputing sites together. So one of the big rules was that these the NSF connections were not allowed to carry commercial traffic that was not to go across NSF net. And that became a problem because NSF net became an integral component of the Internet backbone, and that meant that if your work wasn't related to stuff like scientific research or advancing knowledge, then you started to run into the potential that whatever you were sending would be against the rules and technically should not be allowed to go across the nsf net part of Internet infrastructure. In fact, until nineteen eighty nine, the NSF wouldn't allow any commercial entities to even connect to the network. So Internet service providers that could have potentially sprung up in various places before eighty nine were stuck if the part of the backbone that they needed to connect to was controlled by NSF NET. Now in eighty nine, that changed. We started to see some commercial ISPs come up, and the access improved a little bit. In nineteen ninety one, but the general restrictions on commercial traffic across NSF net would remain in place until nineteen ninety five. That was a sticking point for the development of the Internet. It wasn't illegal to run commercial traffic over the Internet in general. So if your connections just completely bypassed the nsf net, like if in order to complete a commercial transaction between point A and point B, you never had to cross any of the network controlled by nsf net, that's fine. There was nothing inherently illegal about using the Internet for commercial purposes. The problem was the actual infrastructure was not supposed to do that, at least in parts of it, and that is what complicated everything. Now it was a huge joble The solution ended up being the creation of a new privatized network architecture largely built on top of what was learned through creating nsf net, but independent of nsf net. It essentially meant all these companies had to build a almost like a copy of nsf net in order to handle all that traffic and allow NSF to decommission nsf net in nineteen ninety five, and now traffic would just move across this other privatized architecture and there would be no limitation to the know to commercial traffic. Now, there's a lot more to that particular story. In fact, I could do a full episode about the entire drama around the transition of the Internet from a purely sort of research based entity into a commercial entity, But for our purposes, we're going to leave that part there. Let's talk about the Web and web ads, because that's what this is really about, right, Okay, I've set it up. When we come back, i'll talk a little bit about the birth of the World Wide Web and how that eventually led to the creation of web ads and thus ad blocking. But first, and trust me, I understand the irony of this. We need to take a break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So the beginning of the Worldwide Web. That starts with the guy who's credited for inventing the whole darn thing. He was a researcher who was working for CERN, you know, the same scientific research center that runs the Large Hadron Collider, and his name is of course Tim berners Lee. Tim felt that we were really missing a trick, you know, we had all these important documents. He was probably mostly thinking about scientific documents. But we had all these incredibly important documents, and they were stored on different computers all over the world. And a lot of these documents related to one another, or they each related to common topics, but they were all distinct. They were disconnected from each other. But what if you could build in a way that would allow related documents to have a link, to share a link with each other. You know, maybe you've got a document that's about one research project about particle physics, and you've got another research project about particle physics that's slightly different, But combining the two would provide future researchers with a lot more knowledge that would be beneficial to more work. If you were able to link those two documents together, that could be a really beneficial thing. So Tim developed hyperlink technology, which would do just what he was thinking. You could create a digital link between different digital documents and navigate from one to the other using some sort of client software. This was the basis for the World Wide Web, and berners Lee was able to convince CERN, which technically owned the research because it was his employer, to release this technology to the world in the public domain, rather than to sell it off and have it risk becoming some sort of proprietary software which would inherently limit its utility. Now, the world's first website launched in nineteen ninety one on August sixth. Then it was a text based document describing the basics of the World Wide Web project, including how hypertext links work. The very early days of the web were really all about text based documents. However, it didn't take too long for that to change. It did happen somewhat gradually because keep in mind, outside of universities and research centers and the like, those few people who had Internet access were depending on stuff like dial up modems, So if you were including things like images, it really slowed down how long it took for a web page to load into a browser. By the end of nineteen ninety three, there were only around three thousand websites total. Now that was still a growth spurt, because in ninety two it was more like ten websites. And also in nineteen ninety three, before the NSF net was shut down, we would start to have our first web centric platform that would support ads. And that platform wasn't itself a spinoff of a company that at the time was called O'Reilly and associates. These days, it's just known as O'Reilly Media. It was founded by Tim O'Reilly and the company originally focused on creating technical writing, technical documents and consulting that kind of stuff, and a lot of different documents and even events have come out of O'Reilly. The company is one of the reasons the concept of web two point zero even became a thing. For example, but we want to talk about the Global Network Navigator or GNN. O'Reilly launched the GNN website in May of nineteen ninety three, and essentially it was an online magazine. In fact, originally it had a quarterly publication schedule, so it would only change like four times a year. But you have to remember, in the early days of the web, web pages typically were static. You know, you didn't have sites updating content every day, let alone multiple times a day. Some websites would upload, and that was that. It just served as almost like a Yellow Pages ad or something. It didn't change. Also, I don't know how many of you know what a Yellow Pages ad is. Moving on. So GNN was already a little different from other web pages, right because it would actually feature updated content, though only a few times a year, and and this content largely focused on features about the blossoming technology of the World Wide Web. Another way that GNN set itself apart from other web pages is that O'Reilly decided they would allow for online advertising. GNN would offer companies a chance to secure some space, some real estate on the web page that would be dedicated to advertising to a potential customer. And you could use hyperlink technology to facilitate traffic to a different destination where presumably someone who's visiting GNN could become a paying customer of the company that advertised on GNN. Well, this set up conditions for AT and T to purchase the very first web banner. At least as far as I can tell, it was a brave new world. This was in nineteen ninety four when the first web banner ended up being displayed to the world, and it meant there was advertising on the Internet now. It didn't take long for there to be a kind of land rush to the web. You know how a lot of companies really jumped into the whole web three slash metaverse, slash blockchain, slash NFT bandwagon not that long ago. And how despite the fact that there were a lot of unanswered questions about the technologies in general. There was this perception that if you didn't get in there right away, you were going to be left behind. That's kind of what the Internet in general and the Web in particular was like around this time, and there was a bit of this struggle, this rush to get an online presence among various companies, and in turn that really picked up the pace when the last restrictions on commercial internet traffic went away once NSF net decommissioned. So in nineteen ninety five, AOL purchased GNN from O'Reilly for the print lease some of eleven million dollars, and in that same year a couple of guys named Dwight Merriman and Kevin O'Connor came up with a business plan. See GNN showed that online advertising was a very real possibility, but a lot of companies wouldn't have the know how or the resources to facilitate advertising on their web pages. So what was needed was a dedicated company to handle stuff like ad sales and performance tracking, you know, partnering advertisers with web pages, all that kind of stuff, running ads across networks of sites, not just on a single page and even getting into the earliest, earliest days of what would become targeted advertising. So the two created a service that kind of did all these things, and they called it Double Click. Kevin Ryan would become an early investor in the service, and later on would become CEO of the company itself. Now this isn't the Double Click story either, but the company did pioneer an era in which advertising would proliferate across the web. And if you want to know what actually happened to double click itself, Google announced that it would purchase double Click back in two thousand and seven for the even more princely sum of three point one billion dollars, showing that web advertising had truly become a gargantuan business, and it's now part of Google's overall advertising operations. But let's get back to ads and ad blocking, and we're back into the mid nineteen nineties. So web advertising begins to gainsteam. Some folks start to develop ad blindness already, because a lot of these ads were appearing either as a banner ad across the top or the bottom of a web page, or along the side like in a column, either to the left or to the right of the main content of the web page. A lot of people just got really good it not paying attention to that stuff, but some folks were still frustrated that ads were showing up when they were trying to just surf the web. A group of students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina started to come up with their own idea for a company. So rather than selling ad space and slapping banner ads all over the web, they were creating an extension to the web browser Netscape, which at the time was almost synonymous with the Worldwide Web itself. It's easy to forget now, but there was a time where Netscape was essentially the definitive web browser for the Internet. That would change, and things would change dramatically. Like today, you could argue that Google Chrome is one of the biggest ones out there, but there's still there's better competition now than there was back when Netscape was really dominating the landscape. Now, this extension that the students created would actually block banner ads from showing up in a user's web browser. The leader of this group of radical revolutionaries was a guy named James Howard. From why I understand, he wasn't even a computer science major. He was actually focused on studying drama as a theater, not as in, let me just walk up to the stranger in public and see if I can provoke a wild reaction. So Howard and his fellow students ended up creating a company called Privnet, and the tool they made, the ad blocking tool, got the name Internet Fast Forward. Why Internet fast Forward, Well, we got to understand how web ads work, right, So when you go to a web page, what you're really doing is your browser is sending a request to a web server that hosts that page, and the web server serves the page up to you. It sends the page to your web browser. Web ads, however, typically live on some other web server. There's like a little section in the web page that connects to this code that links to the ad in question, and that means that there's another fetch and retrieval process going on when you're accessing the web page. It's not just the content of the page itself, it's also the AD and that can slow things down. And again, remember we're talking in an era where people are using dial up internet, So you're using your dial up internet to access a web page and it's taking a really long time, because not only is it pulling from the website you're going to, but any web ads that might be included on the web page that you're trying to visit. So Internet fast forward, but speed things up by blocking those ads now. As you might imagine, the emergence of ad blocking immediately prompted a lot of criticism from various other parties. Obviously, ad companies were really upset because this was their business and blocking ads was a bad thing. Like if you're especially if your business is dependent upon and the performance of ads, and people are able to block the ad entirely, well, that performance drops to nothing if everybody's doing it. Content companies were also upset, right because this was how they were making revenue and being able to allow access to the content without otherwise charging for it. So a lot of people spoke up and said that in order for content on the Internet, well really specifically the Web, to remain free to access, there was this unfortunate need for ad revenue because in the end, nothing is free. There are costs associated with everything, whether it's creating the content or hosting it, and unless you have a pipeline to endless resources, you have to have a way to generate revenue to cover costs or stuff goes away. Now, I've read a few articles that actually published back in nineteen ninety six. That's when the Internet fast Forward tool started to really get attention. By the end of that year, another company called Pretty Good Privacy would actually purchase priv Net, the creator of Internet fast Forward, and a couple of years later they would actually have to shut down the tool because they were being threatened with legal cases from various companies, and in order to avoid any incredibly expensive legal fees, they shut it down. But anyway, back in ninety six, the interesting thing that hits me from these articles is that Howard would be interviewed all the time. I mean, this was big news. It was making like TV news, and Howard framed ad blocking is a way to cater the browsing experience to user preferences. He was saying, shouldn't the end user be able to determine how they get content? Like, shouldn't they be the ones to ultimately decide whether or not certain types of Internet content come their way, which includes ads? So why not give them a tool that lets them block those ads if they want to? And again, you know, since we're talking about the era of dial up modems. This can mean saving time for the end user. Of course, the user's time is important, so why not give them a tool that lets some access what they want faster by blocking stuff they don't want, namely ads. But interestingly, while I was looking at all these different interviews and stuff, one of the conversations I did not see or one of the topics that did not really pop up in those And maybe it was simply because the media didn't know to ask the question was really about privacy. Privacy would become an integral component of ad blocking moving on, but in those early days, you just didn't see it being talked about. See back in nineteen ninety four, a computer programmer named lou Montuli had this idea. There was a need to preserve a use when a person was engaging with a web page. So let me give you an example. Let's say you visit an online store, and let's say you start shopping around and you're filling your virtual cart with various items. But before you can actually go and complete the transaction, you have to log off your computer to go do something else. Now wouldn't it be nice when you later had the time that you could log back in on your computer, go right back to that web page, and your cart would still have all the things you had put into it when you visited earlier on. Wouldn't that be nice? Of course it would. That's kind of how the web works, you know, Otherwise you would have to start all over and that'd be a frustrating experience. Well, you would have to store that data, right You would have to have a place where that data would be associated with your visit to that store, and these were the items that you specifically chose. Storing that data on web servers look like a non starter because maybe you would never come back to the virtual store. Then the virtual store is just storing this data on its servers for no reason. It's just bloating up all the data storage as all these different customers come and go. Storing the data on your computer made more sense, right, Like, if you had just a tiny little block of data that sat on your computer, that's not a big deal. But holding millions of blocks of data on a server that just didn't make sense. So then the web page could access this little block of data living on your computer through the connection with the web browser, and you would be right back where you were from your earlier session. You'd be able to continue shopping. This technology was already in use in other realms of computing and it was called a cookie. So in nineteen ninety four, cookies became a thing for web traffic once developers created the Web Specification for them to work in Netscape and later in other browsers as well. When we come back, we'll talk a bit more about cookies and how that would end up fueling another era of development in the ad blocking space. But again and again, the irony is not lost on me. We have to take a break for some ads of our own. Okay, we're back, and before the break, I was talking about cookies.

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The thing about cookies is that they can not only preserve a state that you were in when you were visiting a website. So, for example, if you logged into a website, like if there was a user name, password kind of gate to the website, it could preserve that log in so that you're using the same device you revisit the site, you don't have to log in again. That kind of thing. Well, they could also potentially be used to ida to fy someone and to track a user's activity across the web. It gets fairly complicated, but the basic issue here is that if you want to really browse the web privately without worrying about your activity being tracked back to you personally, cookies are one of the things you have to be concerned about. And so developing a use case for ad blockers focused not just on blocking you know ads like web banner ads. It became a matter of protecting user privacy. The content platforms and advertising companies didn't really like that either, but the die had been cast, so by the late nineteen nineties and into the early two thousands, a whole bunch of different ad blocking solutions emerged and became available to folks. One of those was the CYBERsitter Internet filter tool. You know. Internet filters allow people to set a filter to determine what kind of content is allowed to come through and what kind of content should be blocked from a web browser entirely, and often it's used in a way where you could argue it's used in a way to censor information from the web. You could argue it's in a way to protect say, children from seeing content they really have no business seeing. That kind of thing. There are lots of arguments both for and against internet filters, but Cybercenter was a big one, and it added an ad blocking feature in the late nineteen nineties to its its service. A company called Wrq offered up a filter called at Guard. At Guard around the same time that CYBERsitter introduced its ad blocking tool. At Guard would block ads as well as cookies and other content, and could also serve as a general firewall service. While some ad block critics dismissed ad blocking as a nuisance back when Internet f ast Forward showed up, now people were starting to get a little bit more concerned, right, So you did have people who are saying, oh, this threatens the entire structure of the web from a revenue standpoint, But a lot of other people said, Oh, the average person's not going to bother downloading an ad blocker, Like maybe a few grouches will, but not everybody will, and so it's more of a nuisance. It's not really that big of a deal. By the late nineties and into the early two thousands, it was starting to look like a big deal because now ad blockers were one getting more popular and two bringing a little more attention to things like cookies that in part could lead to more effective targeted advertising, but the flip side of that was it could lead to a lot more tracking and identification, and people were starting to feel pretty squirreling about that. Part of the reason that web users were starting to experiment with ad blocking really had to do with how web ads themselves were starting to change. So early ads mostly involved simple banners, and they weren't that bad right, especially early early days, because everything was pretty static. You didn't have things like lots of animations or video or audio playing in web banner ads. It was just kind of a static image. Later on that would start to change as things became more dynamic on the web, the ads became more obnoxious. But really what pushed things into high gear was the development of the pop up ad. And I'm sure most of you don't need to be told what a pop up ad is, but just in case, a pop up ad uses JavaScript so that when a browser accesses a web page, the JavaScript prompts a new window, typically a smaller window, to open up on top of the web page you actually wanted to go to. So you all know these ads they can be awful. And because of that JavaScript thing, you can actually end up with a whole string of pop up ads, and you know, closing one ad can prompt another ad to open, and so on, because developers could link pretty much any user action with a prompt to open another pop up, and so closing one can make another one open. There were also variations to this. You didn't just have pop ups, there were also pop under ads. This also prompts another window to open, but it opens below the web browser, so it's hidden from you unless you're paying attention to, like a taskbar or something. It's hidden from you until you close out of your browser, and then surprise, you've got another window that's been opened this whole time. Now, not only was the scene as obnoxious, it also created opportunities for malicious folks to create all sorts of problems. On the arguably less harmful side, you can really troll visitors to your website site by having like one of these chains of pop ups activate, which just means the user ends up having to play whack them with all the low pop up windows while just trying to navigate the page they were actually interested in. That was stupid, but who is at least, you know, relatively harmless but you could also try and house links to malware and pop ups. This was already an issue with ads anyway, right you had malicious actors who would work with legitimate ad companies or in some cases they would run an illegitimate AD company and secure space on popular web pages and nestle a link that would take people to a place where they could potentially end up being infected by malware. That's a real issue. It's one of the Again, one of the reasons why ad blockers were really starting to take off is that companies were not being super careful and super picky about the types of ads they were displaying against their content, and that meant that occasionally you had these cases where people were getting their machines infected by malware because they clicked on an AD and you had to follow a couple more steps like installing something and then activating it or whatever. But the point is it was not a good look, right Well, in two thousand and three, Henrik Sorensen introduced a Mozilla browser extension, and this one was called ad block, and this for a while became one of the big names in the ad blocking world. However, it has changed quite a bit since Sorensen first launched the extension, because in two thousand and six, another developer who had been working with ad Block, a developer named Vladimir Palant, took over ad block and essentially he stripped it down to its foundation and then rebuilt it, and the new extension was called ad block Plus. So with ad block Plus, users could determine what they wanted to filter out or to allow through. And again this was following that same philosophy that priv net had set up in the mid nineteen nineties, this idea that end users should be allowed to control what does and does not go into their web browser rather than having some third party make those decisions for the users. And if a user doesn't mind certain ads but hates other types, like maybe they don't mind banner ads, but they hate pop ups well, or they don't mind ads from certain types of companies, but they hate ads from other types of companies, why not let the user filter out the stuff they don't like. While on the advertising side, you had folks who felt there were a lot of reasons why that shouldn't happen, because, of course, there are a lot of money and ads. Allow me to remind you that Google itself is not really a search company that is related to, say, a video platform, namely YouTube, and other companies as well. Google is really an advertising company. In fact, YouTube is really an advertising company. Those search results on Google Search and the videos that you get in YouTube, really that's just a way to serve more ads to users, and the ads generate a ton of revenue will actually come back to Google in just a moment. Now, moving on with the history of ad blockers, y'all might remember that the world faced a massive economic crisis in two thousand and eight. Some places were hit much harder than others. One of the places that was hit pretty hard was Russia. In the aftermath of the economic crisis, a few Russian developers created a tool called net chart and that would provide free web analytics, so you could use this tool for free and get web analytic information. However, in the process of creating and then distributing this tool, the team realized that one individual data has an awful lot of value to it. Two, most people didn't really understand that their data had so much value, and they were just handing their data over for free. So there was this massive gaps there right between the value of a thing and the general public's understanding that that thing had value. This in turn led to situations where people had no clue just how trackable and identifiable they were, and ultimately how exploitable they were. So the developers got a little concerned about this and they decided they would make a tool to address it, and they introduced ad Guard, which launched around twenty ten. So, like ad Block, ad Guard would become a really big name in the ad blocking community. The team turned it into a paid software application for the Windows operating system, so it was an independent thing that you would purchase, download and install, and it would work whenever you were accessing the web on a Windows machine. Back in those days, Google had launched its own web browser in two thousand and eight that was called Chrome obviously. Then a couple of weeks after Chrome launched, Google also laun paunched a smartphone operating system that being Android, and for a few years, Google was kind of hands off when it came to ad block extensions. In fact, Google even offered some elements of filtering as well on its browsers, so developers could create an ad blocking extension and have it for an Android device, and even list the app in the Google Playstore. But a few years later, in twenty thirteen, Google kind of changed its policy and began to remove ad blocking apps from the Playstore, including ad Guard, and you could still get the ad Guard browser extension for Chrome. Doing so for Android was a little bit trickier. It's not like it was impossible, but it was harder to find. And the world was migrating toward mobile as being the primary way we interact with the Internet and the web. So there are two massive motivating factors going on here, right, motivating factors among users who might not want to be bombarded with ads, or if they were on slower cellular networks, maybe they wanted to limit the ads being displayed to them because again, it was slowing down the browsing process, it was racking up the data charges. Why would you want to be paying for the privilege of seeing ads because you know you're running over your data limits when you could just block those ads and speed everything up. Right, It was just like back in the dial up days. So a lot of people wanted to have an ad blocker on their phone just so that they weren't having to wait so long for web pages to load. Up or to have to navigate a web page while also trying to dodge all these different ads that might display in a really irritating and frustrating way. So there was that. But then on the other side of it, on the industry side, there was this big shift of people starting to use mobile devices more frequently access the web than they had been with desktop and laptop web browsers, So there was a huge incentive for the industry to really push to make ad blocking difficult to do on mobile devices. So is this struggle between the two. Meanwhile, other companies would actually try to use legal means to force ad blocking software companies to discontinue their products. For example, there's a media company called alex Springer which is based in Europe, and it sued ad block plus in the German court system, arguing that the service was against the law, that it was interfering with the way alex Springer was trying to display web pages to users, and that it should be illegal or it was illegal. This case went all the way to the German Supreme Court and ultimately the Supreme Court of Germany ruled that it wasn't against the law. The ad block plus wasn't doing anything illegal. Ad blocking itself was not illegal, which was seen as a huge victory for the ad blocking community. Of course, that's one court in one region, so the battle rage is on all around the world. And again we can understand both sides, I think, right, you can understand the side that says we need to find a way to be able to support what we're doing, so we have to generate revenue. But you can also understand why people are one frustrated with the experience because there are a lot of web pages that incorporate ads in a way that's just terrible. I don't know how frustrated you are with web pages that are supposed to be an article about something, or this happens all the time, a recipe and you have to scroll and scroll and scroll past like ten paragraphs of text before you get to the point. That's because all that scrolling is taking you past web ad versus web ad.

The thing about cookies is that they can not only preserve a state that you were in when you were visiting a website. So, for example, if you logged into a website, like if there was a user name, password kind of gate to the website, it could preserve that log in so that you're using the same device you revisit the site, you don't have to log in again. That kind of thing. Well, they could also potentially be used to ida to fy someone and to track a user's activity across the web. It gets fairly complicated, but the basic issue here is that if you want to really browse the web privately without worrying about your activity being tracked back to you personally, cookies are one of the things you have to be concerned about. And so developing a use case for ad blockers focused not just on blocking you know ads like web banner ads. It became a matter of protecting user privacy. The content platforms and advertising companies didn't really like that either, but the die had been cast, so by the late nineteen nineties and into the early two thousands, a whole bunch of different ad blocking solutions emerged and became available to folks. One of those was the CYBERsitter Internet filter tool. You know. Internet filters allow people to set a filter to determine what kind of content is allowed to come through and what kind of content should be blocked from a web browser entirely, and often it's used in a way where you could argue it's used in a way to censor information from the web. You could argue it's in a way to protect say, children from seeing content they really have no business seeing. That kind of thing. There are lots of arguments both for and against internet filters, but Cybercenter was a big one, and it added an ad blocking feature in the late nineteen nineties to its its service. A company called Wrq offered up a filter called at Guard. At Guard around the same time that CYBERsitter introduced its ad blocking tool. At Guard would block ads as well as cookies and other content, and could also serve as a general firewall service. While some ad block critics dismissed ad blocking as a nuisance back when Internet f ast Forward showed up, now people were starting to get a little bit more concerned, right, So you did have people who are saying, oh, this threatens the entire structure of the web from a revenue standpoint, But a lot of other people said, Oh, the average person's not going to bother downloading an ad blocker, Like maybe a few grouches will, but not everybody will, and so it's more of a nuisance. It's not really that big of a deal. By the late nineties and into the early two thousands, it was starting to look like a big deal because now ad blockers were one getting more popular and two bringing a little more attention to things like cookies that in part could lead to more effective targeted advertising, but the flip side of that was it could lead to a lot more tracking and identification, and people were starting to feel pretty squirreling about that. Part of the reason that web users were starting to experiment with ad blocking really had to do with how web ads themselves were starting to change. So early ads mostly involved simple banners, and they weren't that bad right, especially early early days, because everything was pretty static. You didn't have things like lots of animations or video or audio playing in web banner ads. It was just kind of a static image. Later on that would start to change as things became more dynamic on the web, the ads became more obnoxious. But really what pushed things into high gear was the development of the pop up ad. And I'm sure most of you don't need to be told what a pop up ad is, but just in case, a pop up ad uses JavaScript so that when a browser accesses a web page, the JavaScript prompts a new window, typically a smaller window, to open up on top of the web page you actually wanted to go to. So you all know these ads they can be awful. And because of that JavaScript thing, you can actually end up with a whole string of pop up ads, and you know, closing one ad can prompt another ad to open, and so on, because developers could link pretty much any user action with a prompt to open another pop up, and so closing one can make another one open. There were also variations to this. You didn't just have pop ups, there were also pop under ads. This also prompts another window to open, but it opens below the web browser, so it's hidden from you unless you're paying attention to, like a taskbar or something. It's hidden from you until you close out of your browser, and then surprise, you've got another window that's been opened this whole time. Now, not only was the scene as obnoxious, it also created opportunities for malicious folks to create all sorts of problems. On the arguably less harmful side, you can really troll visitors to your website site by having like one of these chains of pop ups activate, which just means the user ends up having to play whack them with all the low pop up windows while just trying to navigate the page they were actually interested in. That was stupid, but who is at least, you know, relatively harmless but you could also try and house links to malware and pop ups. This was already an issue with ads anyway, right you had malicious actors who would work with legitimate ad companies or in some cases they would run an illegitimate AD company and secure space on popular web pages and nestle a link that would take people to a place where they could potentially end up being infected by malware. That's a real issue. It's one of the Again, one of the reasons why ad blockers were really starting to take off is that companies were not being super careful and super picky about the types of ads they were displaying against their content, and that meant that occasionally you had these cases where people were getting their machines infected by malware because they clicked on an AD and you had to follow a couple more steps like installing something and then activating it or whatever. But the point is it was not a good look, right Well, in two thousand and three, Henrik Sorensen introduced a Mozilla browser extension, and this one was called ad block, and this for a while became one of the big names in the ad blocking world. However, it has changed quite a bit since Sorensen first launched the extension, because in two thousand and six, another developer who had been working with ad Block, a developer named Vladimir Palant, took over ad block and essentially he stripped it down to its foundation and then rebuilt it, and the new extension was called ad block Plus. So with ad block Plus, users could determine what they wanted to filter out or to allow through. And again this was following that same philosophy that priv net had set up in the mid nineteen nineties, this idea that end users should be allowed to control what does and does not go into their web browser rather than having some third party make those decisions for the users. And if a user doesn't mind certain ads but hates other types, like maybe they don't mind banner ads, but they hate pop ups well, or they don't mind ads from certain types of companies, but they hate ads from other types of companies, why not let the user filter out the stuff they don't like. While on the advertising side, you had folks who felt there were a lot of reasons why that shouldn't happen, because, of course, there are a lot of money and ads. Allow me to remind you that Google itself is not really a search company that is related to, say, a video platform, namely YouTube, and other companies as well. Google is really an advertising company. In fact, YouTube is really an advertising company. Those search results on Google Search and the videos that you get in YouTube, really that's just a way to serve more ads to users, and the ads generate a ton of revenue will actually come back to Google in just a moment. Now, moving on with the history of ad blockers, y'all might remember that the world faced a massive economic crisis in two thousand and eight. Some places were hit much harder than others. One of the places that was hit pretty hard was Russia. In the aftermath of the economic crisis, a few Russian developers created a tool called net chart and that would provide free web analytics, so you could use this tool for free and get web analytic information. However, in the process of creating and then distributing this tool, the team realized that one individual data has an awful lot of value to it. Two, most people didn't really understand that their data had so much value, and they were just handing their data over for free. So there was this massive gaps there right between the value of a thing and the general public's understanding that that thing had value. This in turn led to situations where people had no clue just how trackable and identifiable they were, and ultimately how exploitable they were. So the developers got a little concerned about this and they decided they would make a tool to address it, and they introduced ad Guard, which launched around twenty ten. So, like ad Block, ad Guard would become a really big name in the ad blocking community. The team turned it into a paid software application for the Windows operating system, so it was an independent thing that you would purchase, download and install, and it would work whenever you were accessing the web on a Windows machine. Back in those days, Google had launched its own web browser in two thousand and eight that was called Chrome obviously. Then a couple of weeks after Chrome launched, Google also laun paunched a smartphone operating system that being Android, and for a few years, Google was kind of hands off when it came to ad block extensions. In fact, Google even offered some elements of filtering as well on its browsers, so developers could create an ad blocking extension and have it for an Android device, and even list the app in the Google Playstore. But a few years later, in twenty thirteen, Google kind of changed its policy and began to remove ad blocking apps from the Playstore, including ad Guard, and you could still get the ad Guard browser extension for Chrome. Doing so for Android was a little bit trickier. It's not like it was impossible, but it was harder to find. And the world was migrating toward mobile as being the primary way we interact with the Internet and the web. So there are two massive motivating factors going on here, right, motivating factors among users who might not want to be bombarded with ads, or if they were on slower cellular networks, maybe they wanted to limit the ads being displayed to them because again, it was slowing down the browsing process, it was racking up the data charges. Why would you want to be paying for the privilege of seeing ads because you know you're running over your data limits when you could just block those ads and speed everything up. Right, It was just like back in the dial up days. So a lot of people wanted to have an ad blocker on their phone just so that they weren't having to wait so long for web pages to load. Up or to have to navigate a web page while also trying to dodge all these different ads that might display in a really irritating and frustrating way. So there was that. But then on the other side of it, on the industry side, there was this big shift of people starting to use mobile devices more frequently access the web than they had been with desktop and laptop web browsers, So there was a huge incentive for the industry to really push to make ad blocking difficult to do on mobile devices. So is this struggle between the two. Meanwhile, other companies would actually try to use legal means to force ad blocking software companies to discontinue their products. For example, there's a media company called alex Springer which is based in Europe, and it sued ad block plus in the German court system, arguing that the service was against the law, that it was interfering with the way alex Springer was trying to display web pages to users, and that it should be illegal or it was illegal. This case went all the way to the German Supreme Court and ultimately the Supreme Court of Germany ruled that it wasn't against the law. The ad block plus wasn't doing anything illegal. Ad blocking itself was not illegal, which was seen as a huge victory for the ad blocking community. Of course, that's one court in one region, so the battle rage is on all around the world. And again we can understand both sides, I think, right, you can understand the side that says we need to find a way to be able to support what we're doing, so we have to generate revenue. But you can also understand why people are one frustrated with the experience because there are a lot of web pages that incorporate ads in a way that's just terrible. I don't know how frustrated you are with web pages that are supposed to be an article about something, or this happens all the time, a recipe and you have to scroll and scroll and scroll past like ten paragraphs of text before you get to the point. That's because all that scrolling is taking you past web ad versus web ad.

Right that it's the same thing as all the articles that were turned into slide shows back in the day, because you could display different ads against every slide.

Right that it's the same thing as all the articles that were turned into slide shows back in the day, because you could display different ads against every slide.

In the slide show or the gallery or whatever. That kind of stuff is what really rubs people the wrong way, because again, they see the sausage at work, right, they see the sausage being made and they resent being part of that. Or it can be very intrusive with the ones that are playing video or audio. So you can totally understand that. And that's before you get into the ad tracking part and the privacy and security concerns. Those are obviously very understandable too. So again, I understand ad blocking. I understand why people use it. I try not to use it. I don't use it on this computer. I've had it installed on another computer where I will occasionally use it if I'm encountering web pages that are just impossible for me to navigate without it being truly intrusive. So good about it. But I'd be lying if I said I never used it. But yeah, that's kind of the history of ad blocking. Now, one thing I didn't talk about are the actual mechanics of ad blocking, and that's largely because that's a seesaw kind of discussion. Right. The advertising world develops new technologies, the ad blocking world develops new ways to get around those technologies, and it goes back and forth. So that would require a whole series of episodes and get into some very technical details. I didn't think we're really necessary to get an appreciation of how we got here. Hopefully we will eventually enter into an era where everyone understands the value of their information. We have systems in place to protect information, people have more control over what information they do and do not share. But until then, I think the ad blocking stuff is really playing a necessary component in being a digital citizen and being one that is being careful of their own identity. It would be disingenuous to say otherwise, despite the fact that, yes, this show is ad supported and I love my advertisers like I love the folks who agree to support this show, and for the most part, I think we've done pretty well with partnering with companies that do do it the right way. But yeah, you can't deny that there are reasons to be careful in the ad world out there online. Okay, that's it for this episode. It was going to be a you know, tech stuff tidbits episode, but uh, coming up on fifty minutes that's not a tech stuff tidbits, but it was important. I look forward to covering related topics that I've touched on in this episode in the future. If there are any that y'all think are exciting? Get in touch with me. Let me know. I don't know how you'll get in touch with me. I guess you'll figure it out. Until then, I'll talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.