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.
>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.
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.