The choice citizens would make every single time is to see the website without ads. Of course, publishers aren’t happy about that, since they would have to close shop. Maybe the EC should consider both sides of the equation.
Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally. And there's not a lot of companies that can handle a 90% drop in revenue.
The real solution would be to make users pay for the content, but charging for something that users used to get for "free" is also essentially impossible.
It doesn't have to be untargeted. You know the type of content the website hosts, therefore, you know a lot about the type of visitors. You can then charge appropriately for advertising that is targeted at those visitors. Don't show diaper ads on a site called Jalopnik. Instead show ads for Armorall, jack stands, tools, etc. When you visit a media site specializing in content like real houswives or kardashians, don't show the previously suggested ads. Instead, show ads on inane fast fashion, beauty products, luxury items, etc.
Targeted ads are always dumb as they tend to push an item that you've looked into before purchasing, but never realize that item has been purchased and you are no longer interested. They never get that the person researched item but has not looked for some time for item. Let's now advertise accessories for that item. If it was a fridge, show stainless cleaning items, for dishwasher, show ads for different detergents or other kitchen related items. It's not hard. For whatever reasons, they can't do targeted well. Targeted doesn't work as advertised.
We’ve been talking about federated micropayment technologies for some two decades. I’d happily pay for content but I refuse to sign up for 30+ publisher websites. If I could opt to pay $.25 for some article without giving the site all my personal data or incurring a subscription I’d be all for it. As it is I either “steal” the content through an archiving site or simply leave the site. More and more it’s the latter. I’d also happily pay some monthly fee for unlimited content from a consortium of publishers rather than disable my ad blocker, and let them sort out how much each one gets based on my browsing habits. None of these seem like hard technical problems, it’s certainly not impossible. I think the days of believing content comes without any cost are long behind us.
> Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally.
If targeted advertising, as a whole, is banned, you can be pretty damn sure the payout for untargeted will come up—not necessarily to match what targeted is now, but way more than that 10% figure.
Ad spend, in aggregate, doesn't change that much based on new "innovations" in advertising annoyance. If you've still got roughly the same amount of money being spent on untargeted ads, continent-wide, as you do now on targeted, they're going to pay out much closer to parity.
> Untargeted pay less than 90% of targeted ones generally.
This could well be true. Unless targeted ads are just flat out banned, at which point the profitability of untargeted ones will rise, as the air (user attention, available space in web pages) is no longer being sucked out of the room by targeted ones.
Also - if by untargeted you mean completely randomly chosen ones, there absolutely is a happy medium - choose them based on the content of the page (I'm browsing for baby wipes and formula? Show me ads for strollers and child car seats, and maybe earplugs and some gift ideas for infants, not for motor oil or landscaping or circular saws). I don't buy the excuse that they are so much less effective - especially if the personally targeted ones are out of the picture.
As a huge bonus, they are comparatively trivial to implement and would provide a way out of the current monopoly were only Google, Facebook and a handful of other "know" what to show you and everyone must make these few greedy incumbents even richer by advertising through them. This would also help fragment what information exists about your habits, so even actors determined to break the law would get less advantages by doing so.
The preponderance of dark UI/UX patterns in advertising and cookie consent pop-ups, as well as the grey-hat browser fingerprinting and DRM based tracking, unfortunately stand testament to exactly that.
Given that ~98% of Internet users couldn't even articulate what javascript does as part of their browsing experience, the exfiltration and reassembling of their PII via meta-data into sellable profiles for targeted auctions is completely beyond their capacity to comprehend or engage with. Thus consent is de facto ungrantable.
There is a very clear law that forbids any additional contract terms post the point of sale, so that if you go to a store, purchase a box with software in it and then go home to install it, when it pops up a dialog for you to "agree" on, you can just ignore it, nothing in that is enforceable at all. And no, small print text on the box that says you have to agree to terms in the software does not change anything. But that's not how software is sold anymore.
EULAs in general are not unenforceable, so long as they are presented before the sale. This is precisely why Steam (for example) now gives you the EULA before it lets you buy anything.
I'm not even sure you can generalize to "in the EU" here. A lot of contract law might be different between countries.
So for example, in Germany, an EULA would be considered an AGB, and subject to §303 BGB and following paragraphs, which e.g. means, "surprising" clauses which you cannot reasonably expect beforehand being part of the EULA would be unenforcable or §307 BGB would make certain kinds of one-sided/lop-sided clauses unenforcable.
Other EU countries might have other laws. I'm not really sure this is an area of unification, and a lot of the commonalities there is might be more due to the common heritage of Napoleon's Code Civil which underlies contract law in many european countries, instead of EU unification efforts.
There’s still some principles that it must be proportionate and reasonably intelligible to the average person. A 100-page EULA for end-user software generally won’t be enforceable.
It was a lot more plausible when it is likely the judge has never clicked past an EULA. Today unless you've dug up some archaic fossil the judge is perfectly familiar with this nonsense so you're in a position where the person who decides what the law is knows EULAs are bullshit nobody reads.
I'd expect a situation like Somerset v Stewart. Mansfield clearly didn't want to rule you can't have slavery because that's going to be extremely disruptive to powerful people - so he suggests they settle and then the case goes away and he isn't called to say anything. But Stewart refuses to settle, apparently nobody could convince him that it's in his best interest - so, OK says Mansfield: fiat justitia, ruat cælum (Justice be done though the heavens fall). Somerset walks free.
Are corporations relying on EULAs smart enough to take the L? I guess we'd see.
This is something which courts should consider more about other things, such as EULA and Terms and Conditions. Same reasons.