Who could possibly be in favor of this? Like sure industry lobbying is strong but could any politician really argue they're acting in the interest of their constituents with this?
European countries have been pretty consistent that they want to protect their publishers, no matter the downstream consequences. Banning ad blockers wouldn't be very different from e.g. forcing Google to pay link taxes, it's just directed at end users instead of Google. So I'd say a lot of people who want to protect European publishers are probably in favor of this.
I don't know if the German politicians are actually doing this, but good politicians should be considering the big picture.
The big picture includes:
• A large majority of the politician's constituents each regularly use several large websites that cost a lot of money to run, and the constituents would be upset if those sites went away. Someone has to pay for those sites. Ads are the most common way that is currently done.
• Almost nobody likes ads other than in some exceptional cases [1].
• Most people dislike paid subscriptions. This dislike grows exponentially as the number of subscriptions they need to cover the content they want goes up.
• Many people think they would like micropayments but would likely change their mind once that actually became an options. If people have to pay money they tend to greatly prefer predictable monthly costs. It's not necessarily rational, but for many people if they see they spent $1.26 on YouTube videos in one month and $2.76 in the next month they are going to be annoyed even though they watched a lot more videos that second month.
• Some sort of Spotify or Netflix for the Web type thing might work, but as with subscriptions if you have to use more than one of these types of service people will be annoyed.
• Another approach would be to make the web version of the site limited, and require using an app for full functionality. A social media site for example might only allow reading on the web, so if you want to post or comment you need to use the app where they have much more control than they do on the web.
If ad blocking becomes widespread enough and effective enough that sites do have to switch to some other revenue source it is quite possible that a majority of a politician's constituents will in retrospect find that they preferred the ad supported model.
Good politicians should be trying to figure out what would make their constituents happiest in the long run and find ways to encourage things to end up that way.
In the long run what would probably make most people happy (or rather make them the least unhappy) would be ad supported sites with restrictions on the ads to limit intrusiveness and tracking.
[1] For example many people like the ads that run during the Super Bowl in the US. A lot of people with no interest in the football game watch just to see the ads.
It's Germany, certain parties are corrupt on higher levels, to the point of being harmful. They protect the interests of certain industries, even if it means burning down the country. The one suing here is Axel Springer, a well known misinformation-complex, with very strong political connections.
They also made laws happen that limit how Google can link to news sites to prevent Google News from stealing readers.
And they tried to make Google pay each time a user clicks a link that leads to a German news site.
Also there are surcharges on printers (around $50 or so per piece), laptops etc because you might copy copyright-protected texts with it.
And the German online news websites know they lose a lot of money to adblockers so of course they want to ban them.