Germany could ban ad blockers, but don't panic, the case hasn't even been decided

Over the past few days, there has been a rather controversial topic "Germany could ban ad blockers" that has caused an outrage among users. These people need to chill, the case is still undecided.

Long story short, Axel Springer sued Eyeo GmbH (owners of Adblock Plus), in a lawsuit that has dragged on for over a decade. It was complaining about lost revenue due to ads being blocked by the extension's users.

Springer lost multiple appeals based on competition law. Then the publishers turned to copyright law. It claimed that ad blockers violated copyright law by modifying a website's HTML code in order to block ads, i.e. the browser displayed the website differently. The appeal was rejected by a Hamburg court, which said that changing the way a website is displayed by a browser does not amount to modifying the code, and hence did not violate the copyright law.

The German Federal Court of Justice, Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), heard an appeal from Springer, which argued that the DOM node tree, and CSS Structure used by the website (for formatting), are forms of user expression, and that these are protected by copyright. The BGH decided that the previous ruling by the Hamburg Court, was not sufficiently substantiated. The lower court has been asked to hear the case again. (via: Heise.de)

Mozilla published an article about this drama, and its headline resulted in quite the confusion, perhaps that could have been avoided. Its article clearly states that the case has been returned to a lower court for additional fact-finding, and it may take a couple of years before a resolution is reached.

Back on topic, should one company's complaint compromise the privacy and security of millions? China banned ad-blockers in 2022, so yes it is a possibility, but I doubt such a law would be passed in a democracy, where privacy is a fundamental right.

Ad-blockers don't merely block ads, they add a layer of protection that prevents malicious scripts from loading, and they also prevent users from being tracked or fingerprinted, thus protecting their privacy. By removing an ad-blocker, you would be exposing users to serious security and privacy risks.

In the unlikely event that ad-blockers are banned in Germany, I'm not quite certain how this would work, will browser makers have to ban ad-blockers like Adblock Plus, AdGuard, uBlock Origin, etc., from their extension stores like China did? Would it be illegal for users to have such add-ons installed, even via side-loading them from a different source? What about the built-in ad filtering in browsers? I suppose advanced users could use system-wide ad blockers, or self-host a Pi-hole.

Forget AIs for a minute, the immediate threat to privacy are laws like this. They want backdoors in your phones, want you to verify your age by submitting IDs, they try to strong-arm messaging services to disable encryption. It feels like we are living in some sort of cheap fiction novel.

Source

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Posted Wednesday 20 August 2025 at 4:58 am AEST (my time).

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