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Now this will be interesting

I am probably one of the very few Net users still around today who can recall the golden age before spam and before every webpage carried advertising.

Okay... I have to admit that even back then, in the early 1990s, I would occasionally get an email from "Dave Rhodes" encouraging me to sign up to his ponzi scheme and become frightfully rich -- but even those were few and far between.

The Net was still largely an academic tool way back then and one of the few commercial operations I recall actually selling stuff was books.com (or something) and even then I think that began as a service that relied on telnet as the primary interface.

My, how things have changed!

These days, everywhere you go (even on Aardvark!) you area assaulted by advertisements that seek to attract your attention and your wallet. eCommerce is everywhere and now you can buy almost anything your heart desires -- with a few flicks of the mouse and the click of a button.

The massive rise in the popularity of mobile computing via smartphones has only made things worse and now that the majority of Web access seems to come from such devices, advertisers are ramping up their activities in this area.

But now they have a problem... a big problem...

Across the EU, mobile carriers have mooted the prospect of blocking ads targeted at their customers.

Oh dear... this really opens up a huge can of worms and I feel a certain sense of deja vu.

The mobile operators are preparing to pitch this ad-blocking service as an opt-in choice for their customers and expect it will save huge amounts of advertising data from clogging their networks.

There are obvious benefits to the carriers and the customers alike. Carriers can deliver the same service levels to a larger number of customers if the ad-traffic is culled out and customers won't find their data-allocations being consumed by annoying and often irrelevant ads appearing on the screens of their phones.

Or at least that's the theory.

The reality is that where sites are effectively ad-funded they may opt to install geoblocking to prevent EU customers from "freeloading". This could see the customers of such carriers facing a reduced range of options when surfing the web.

The other problem relates to copyright.

If a *user* fits adblocking software on their computer then no law is broken. Once a "creative work" (be it a webpage, video, picture, audio or whatever) arrives on their computer, the user is legally entitled to alter it in any way they choose -- so long as they do not redistribute the modified work.

However, if the carrier modifies a creative work (such as a web page) in any way before delivering it to their customers, it could be argued that they have created a "derived work" without the permission of the original copyright holder (the website publisher). Such breaches of copyright, when performed for commercial gain, carry some pretty stiff fines and penalties.

Whichever path the publishers choose (geoblocking or suing), the results could be a real bunfight that will ultimately result in either reduced choice for customers or greater costs.

Sadly... there are still no free lunches on the Net as, I suspect, some EU mobile carriers are about to find out.

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