China bans blocking ads in the country, AdBlock Plus against

Two weeks ago, the Chinese authorities introduced a number of new rules to regulate online advertising and some other areas related to the Internet. These rules, apparently, will most of all affect the Internet giants from China - Baidu and Alibaba.

In addition, the new rules that will take effect this fall prohibit the blocking of advertising. The ban on advertising blocking is set out in Article 16. The first to notice this were the employees of AdBlokPlus, a company that develops an ad blocker for browsers, both for PCs and mobile devices.

Starting in the fall, China will ban "the use of network access, network devices, applications that violate or hide normal advertising information, distort or block advertising, or download advertisements without permission." Also restrictions are imposed on technical companies that "intercept, filter, or in any other way disrupt the normal course of an online advertising campaign."
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The State Administration for Industry and Commerce of China (SAIC), which prepared these restrictions, does not act through the courts or the system of fines. This department has the right to use government services to monitor the implementation of its instructions. The body has more authority than the majority of similar organizations working in other countries.

The creators of Adblock Plus oppose this initiative of the Chinese government. In particular, Ben Williams, head of the ABP business unit (AdBlock Plus), said that creating new regulatory measures in China regarding advertising violates the fundamental rights of Chinese citizens. Now, according to the company's calculations, in China about 159 million users have installed AdBlock Plus, and blocking ads is their “inalienable right”.

“There are several reasons why users should not be prohibited from blocking advertising. Take, for example, information security. Recently it became known that in China, about 10 million Android smartphones were infected with malicious software that generated fake clicks on ads. I'm not saying that users will be completely safe using an ad blocker, but this tool and other tools that will be banned in the fall reduce this risk, ”says Williams.

“The Chinese government is trying to establish control over the advertising sphere, which means that they want to decide for themselves which ad should be blocked and which should not be blocked,” said another AdBlock Plus representative. The company is now considering the possibility of leaving China as a protest against the actions of the regulator.

At the same time, a large number of publishers in different countries are against the ad blockers, including AdBlock Plus. In Germany, several lawsuits were even filed against AdBlock Plus. But the company won all the cases where the legal validity of the AdBlock Plus business model was questioned. This is a “white list” of advertisers, whose ad is still being skipped by the ad blocker. According to the company, this is "unobtrusive thematic advertising that can be useful to the user." As a rule, an advertiser needs to pay a certain amount to get into this list. Microsoft, Google and Amazon in the list of allowed advertisers.