Germany's top court rules ad blockers legal

Germany's highest court has dismissed a case against the company behind the popular Adblock Plus online advertising filtering tool, declaring ad blockers to be legal.

The case filed by publisher Axel Springer is the latest in a line of cases in Germany seeking to ban ad-blocking applications and is the first to reach the Supreme Court.

Axel Springer's lawyers had argued that Adblock Plus developer Eyeo is violating German competition law by blocking unwanted advertising and by charging a fee from companies to whitelist unintrusive advertising.

But the court found that because internet users have to seek out and install Adblock Plus themselves, and publishers have the ability to block access to a website from users operating an ad blocker, the application does not directly interfere with a publisher's online ads and poses no direct obstruction to a publisher's business.

The court also struck down a lower court's finding that operating the Adblock Plus whitelist is tantamount to unfair competition.

Axel Springer has pledged to appeal the finding with Germany's Constitutional Court, arguing that ad blockers violate press freedom by threatening the very viability of the online publishing operating model.

The verdict meanwhile has the potential to increase interest in crypto-mining as an alternative to the advertising funded model for websites.

While the practice is controversial and the legal status is still up in the air, some websites have already started raising money by utilising visitors' spare computing cycles to mine for cryptocurrencies, often without users' knowledge.

Although browser plug-ins already exist to prevent this practice, these plug-ins are currently not nearly as widely used as ad-blocking software.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/4Max

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