[growt]

They are a company so they have to make money (Most of HN readers should relate to that).

Some of this money is also used to fight law-suits, keeping ad blocking legal (at least in germany [1]), something a free solution like ublock origin can not do.

[1] https://www.golem.de/news/adblock-plus-olg-muenchen-erklaert... (german)

[gorhill]

> something a free solution like ublock origin can not do.

The core of the lawsuit was about Eyeo's business model specifically, charging for being listed in a whitelist. This of course does not apply to uBO.

[growt]

I think the lawsuits started before Eyeo introduced the whitelist?

But imagine if uBO was used by 90% of all Users, so the big publishers would notice and lobby to get ad-blocking banned, there would be no one to defend it then.

Or if google took over ad-blocking by making it build-in in chrome (and of course whitelisting it's own ads).

edit: just realized you're the ublock author! I didn't mean what I said as an insult to you (like you wouldn't care to defend adblocking). I just think it might be beneficial to have a commercial player in ad-blocking (that isn't google) from time to time.

[jnink]

>I think the lawsuits started before Eyeo introduced the whitelist? That's correct. Publishers explicitly say that they don't want to have adblocking at all (Whitelist is just a sideshow). You can also see that from the lobbying activities in Germany pushing for an anti-adblocking law (https://netzpolitik.org/2016/informationsfreiheitsanfrage-lo...) and other proceedings with smaller adblockers. Plus, most obvious, it is way easier for a German publisher to sue a German company rather than a someone behind a project whom you don't know and obviously not seated in Europe.

[freeone3000]

If you're not a company, legality is less important.