I cannot wait to see the video of this speech.
- And then he gets serious. Addressing why the Adblock Plus team were banned from the conference, Rothenburg accuses them of “subverting freedom of the press” and “operating a business model predicated on censorship of content”. He also quoted a 2013 article by German blogger Sascha Pallenberg which characterised the AdBlock Plus team as “a mafia-like advertising network”.
Just to make sure everyone is following at home, that's a direct quote from the keynote speech of the chairman of an online ad network's industry trade group to that trade group. something something irony"Of course, none of this surprises me. This is what happens when your only motivation, your only metric, is money. For that is what AdBlock-Plus is: an old-fashioned extortion racket, gussied up in the flowery but false language of contemporary consumerism.”
Here is one even fucking better. This guy Rothenburg? He was a part of Booz Allen when they were spying on people. They've also been involved in the NSA spying stuff and in the PRISM programs. Him talking about freedom of the press is a slap in the face.
One of the biggest reddit butthurts I've gotten involved in was on /r/entrepreneurship over using an ad-blocker. They hated me for it; one couldn't both support small business and use an ad-blocker. I honestly don't believe people should deserve money if I just visit their site. If they consistently provide quality content and have no other way to make money off me, then I might take it off. But the brlief there was that ad-blockers just prevent people from making money. They just ignored arguments regarding privacy and the like, because only the lost money mattered. I figured a group of people who call themselves entrepreneurs could at least come up with another way to make money (and that way maybe actually deserve it), but nope, they were too busy bitching.