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Is there a new online battle looming?

Most people appreciate that advertising is just a fact of life on the Net these days.

Long gone are those heady days of the mid 1990s when a banner-ad was a curiosity rather than the norm. These days most web pages, especially those which contain news or anything other than a government or company website, are festooned with garish, animated ads that all try to out perform each other when it comes to catching your eye.

Even video content is now filled with pre-rolls, mid-stream interstitials and post-roll advertising.

As a result, a small industry has grown up around ad-blocking software but even some of these players have opted to sell-out by accepting fees from some advertisers to let their ads "slip through".

Well now there's a new twist on this advertisers vs ad-blockers battle and it's shaping up to become a very interesting contest.

According to this Arstechnica story one mobile carrier has decided to enter the fray by blocking ads on its network and then approaching the ad networks for a payment before they'll take their offerings off the block-list.

Now this is really interesting because it will really challenge a lot of definitions and roles in the online world.

On the one hand, the carrier has no obligation to carry any traffic at all so one could argue that it is well within its rights to block IP packets from any server it chooses. Indeed, the blocking of content such as kiddy-porn and other illegal content has become the norm these days and sets the precedent for this.

There are also the carrier's customers who would doubtless be chuffed to bits to find that their mobile devices and monthly data allowance are no longer being wasted by the annoying appearance of unwanted advertising on their screens.

Of course there are two sides to this coin.

Google and Yahoo (the companies whose ad networks are what the carrier Digicel are targeting) rely on advertising to pay for the provision of the services being accessed so naturally they're not going to be very happy if they are effectively giving "free" service to some customers.

Google and Yahoo are faced with a very difficult decision at this point...

Do they simply continue providing service to Digicel's customers with the ads effectively blocked, do they refuse to provide service to that carrier's customers until the ad-blocks are removed or do they pay what Digicel is asking for the carriage of those ads?

If they continue providing service with the ad-blocks in place then it probably wouldn't be too long before other carriers decided to follow Digicel's lead. Why not? After all it would mean that their customers would get a faster, less irritating service and their data allowance would go much further than if they were using a competitor which didn't block the ads. This could lead to a domino-effect where all carriers were effectively forced to block ads in order to remain competitive.

If Google/Yahoo opt to "pay up" then this would set a risky precedent and you could be sure that every carrier on the planet would line up to earn a little cash in the way that Digicel has done. This could severely impact the bottom line of the ad networks and the commercial viability of the whole model.

This really only leaves Google/Yahoo with one option as I see it. They're probably best advised to simply blacklist the IP blocks used by Digicel until such time as the ad-blocking is removed.

If they were to do this then you can be pretty certain that Digicel's customers would leave in droves -- because the vast majority of people are pretty reliant on Google's services in the online world.

Digicel also has to contend with the fact that if they start filtering content then they run the very real risk that they will lose their "carrier" status and thus become criminally liable if any of their customers transfer illegal content via their network. Carrier status is generally granted on the basis that an ISP or data network can't be monitor or be expected to detect and block such traffic. If Digicel opts to start blocking content for commercial reasons then it could be argued that they have disqualified themselves from such protection.

Anyone willing to place a bet as to the outcome of this stoush?

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