France’s second-largest ISP deploys ad blocking via firmware update

Block is enabled by default—and French tech news sites are très unhappy.

Cyrus Farivar – Jan 3, 2013 7:35 PM | 189

The Freebox acts as DSL modem, router, Wi-Fi router, NAS, DVR, and DECT base—all in one single device. Credit: weweje

France's darling indie ISP, Free, has shaken up the French Internet landscape yet again: in a quiet firmware update released Wednesday evening, the company added an ad blocking option to its Freebox router and activated it by default.

On its developer blog, the company simply wrote (in French) that the Freebox's firmware update 1.1.9 included the “[a]ddition of an ad blocker that allows ad blocking (beta)”

The new move means that any user who has the new firmware will have ad blocking on any device connecting to the Internet via the Freebox.

Ars e-mailed the Free engineer who authored the blog post, Florian Fainelli, for comment, but we did not immediately receive a response. A French tech news site, Clubic, noted that the blocking doesn’t seem to have universally taken effect yet across the country.

“As far as we can tell, at first glance... few sites seem to be affected by this block,” the site reported (Google Translate) on Thursday. “Some ads on portals like portail.free.fr are effectively blocked at the Paris bureau of Clubic, but not for our colleagues in Lyon, even after they restarted their Freebox.”

Ars Video

However, a French Ars reader, @arkos_reed, confirmed that the update had taken effect in the southern city of Cannes and was blocking Ars' ads.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Sonntag, of the French online advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, sent Ars screenshots while using Free in Paris, showing that ads on the French tech news site Numérama were not blocked, but ads on the site of French newspaper Le Monde were.

Ad blocking hurts, seriously

Not surprisingly, many French sites are not happy about the move, which doesn’t have a whitelist option—it’s all or nothing.

“Free is being totally irresponsible and threatens to bring a violent blow to an entire segment of the digital economy!” said Numérama. That site also reported that the block appears to affect a number of large ad networks, including Google Adsense, NetAvenir, and AdTech.

Another French tech news site devoted to following Free—Freenews—penned a blog post arguing how and why its readers should disable this option. (Ars made a similar argument against ad blocking back in 2010.)

“We believe that Free's choice [to enable ad blocking] is dangerous and irresponsible; [by] activating default ad blocking without informing the user and without even offering a whitelist function to choose sites which the user wants to keep advertising, Free runs the risk of jeopardizing thousands of content publishers on the web,” wrote Yoann Ferret of Freenews. “Most free sites like Freenews rely on advertising to fund themselves. Without advertising, they would no longer exist, we would no longer exist.”