Newspapers escalate their fight against ad blockers

The newspaper industry is upping its tactics in the fight against ad-blockers. The Newspaper Association of America, the industry association representing 2,000 newspapers (including the Washington Post), filed a federal complaint against the ad-blocking industry on May 26, alleging that software companies which enable users to block ads are misleading the public. The complaint asks the Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that oversees trade practices, to investigate ad blockers that offer “paid whitelisting,” – a service which charges advertisers to bypass ad-blocking software – along with services that substitute ad blockers’ own advertising for blocked ads or get around publishers’ subscription pages.