French Trade Groups Plead With Apple To "Halt" Distraction Control

Distraction Control has got French advertising and publishing companies all riled up.

Several prominent trade groups, who represent their interests, have sent an open letter to CEO Tim Cook requesting Apple “halt the deployment of this feature pending further review.”

🎓 Recap: Distraction Control is a new feature that enables iOS Safari users to selectively remove elements from webpages, such as pop ups and ads. With a few taps, whatever element the user doesn’t want in front of their eyes vanishes. It was surprisingly introduced as part of the iOS 18 beta 5 release on August 5th, with a general roll out due in “the fall”.

You can see how publishers, in particular, would be anxious about this. Most are reliant on advertising to sustain their businesses. This feature gives visitors a way to say au revoir to functionality that supports this: cookie consent pop ups, newsletter email collection pop ups, and ads themselves.

Without ads, publishers don’t make money (unless they happen to be Le Monde with a healthy subscription business). Without obtaining cookie consent, publisher ad inventory is worth peanuts (it’s legally required to enable behavioural targeting, which makes ad inventory much more valuable).

The trade groups are a bunch of names you have likely never heard of — unless you happen to be French or a trade group aficionado.

Here they are:

• Geste. Digital media publishers.

• Udecam. Advertising agencies.

• Alliance Digitale. Digital marketing and advertising.

• Union des Marques. Brand advocacy

• Syndicat des Régies Internet. Online advertising sales.

• Alliance de la Presse d'Information Générale. News and press publishers.

For the reasons I have already laid out, the letter flags blocking ads and cookie consent pop ups as a primary concern.

Further, it notes blocking cookie consent pop ups could create scenarios where GDPR is unintentionally breached. Publishers already struggle to manage consent management in a completely compliant way, so this would add another layer of complexity.

To dramatise the situation, the letter says Distraction Control poses "an existential threat to the online advertising model, which underpins a significant portion of the internet's economy."

As a result, the groups are "actively considering all available legal resources" to prevent Apple from continuing with it.

Mon dieu!

Don’t call it an ad blocker

Is Distraction Control an ad blocker? Technically, yes.

It’s a tool that physically enables a user to remove an ad from a webpage — an ad that the publisher and advertiser wants to be there, but the user does not. It has that same tension of interest, hence why the French trade groups are making a stink out of it.

Apple tried to position Distraction Control as a tool that blocks distracting elements, of which an ad may one example. However, that is literally what ad blockers do. The term ‘ad blocker’ is really a misnomer in that they often block way more than this, including all of the examples Apple has given for Distraction Control.

Earlier this year in May, a previous incarnation of this feature — candidly named ‘Web Eraser’ — triggered both French and UK companies to protest to Apple for similar reasons. After that, Apple withdrew it with no official reasoning.

The name ‘Distraction Control’, therefore, was likely an attempt by Apple to distract publishers’ and advertisers’ from Apple’s true intentions with it. But, the cat was already out of the bag due to Web Eraser. It’s already on their radar.

‘Distraction Control’ should really be the name of Apple’s comms team. They are generally pretty good at focussing attention in strategic areas, to mask core objectives.

But, this time it didn’t work out — or did it?

How it works

In its current guise, Distraction Control is a pretty crappy ad blocker.

First of all, it requires users to manually remove every single element on a one-by-one basis. In other words: it doesn’t automatically block categories of elements, like ads or cookie pop ups, like most regular ad blockers do.

Don’t like a specific pop up, ad, or anything else? You have to poke around in Safari to remove it. Tap, tap, tap.

Below is an excerpt from Wired, which gives you an idea of the steps:

Yawn. 🥱

In many cases it would be quicker to just hit the “X” button.

Secondly, removing elements is not necessarily a permanent deal. Meaning: the next time you revisit the website the element may return.

What decides this? If the element is static (hasn’t changed), it will continue to be blocked. If it’s dynamic (has changed), it will likely appear again.

The practical outcome of this means that blocking ads is a one time deal while blocking elements like cookie pop ups is ‘permanent’ — i.e until the website owner manually updates (which could be days, weeks, months, or longer).

Ads change with at least every page load, so permanently blocking all ads or a specific ad element on a website with this feature is not an intended benefit — officially.

However, in the letter sent to Apple, the French trade groups noted from their own testing that ads were “sometimes [hidden] without explicit user action (i.e., automatically on a same website after previous similar choices)”.

This is most likely a bug, but it doesn’t negate that intention further down the line.

In the name of GDPR

GDPR is a strong contributing factor for the motivations of both sides in this situation. Reminder: GDPR is the reason we have those lovely cookie consent pop ups littering the web.

The French trade groups are using GDPR to say that Distraction Control could put them in breach of it (which is legitimate, until solutions are developed) and that blocking the consent request essentially defunds their ad revenue.

Meanwhile, Apple wants its users to be able to block cookie consent pop ups in the name of improving UX (also legitimate from user POV, since 99%+ must hate them).

Apple’s agenda

Apple famously markets its products as pro-UX and pro-privacy. Sometimes, this feels genuine. Other times, it feels like a facade for throwing its monopolistic weight around.

At this point, it is difficult to see what their intentions are.

It could be a genuine attempt to give iOS users a little more control over their web browsing experience, from which nothing paradigm-changing really happens as a consequence. A niche feature for the few that like to fiddle.

On the other hand, it could mark the beginning of an initiative for something much grander in scale. It’s no secret that App Tracking Transparency — a major update to iOS in 2021 that made iPhone users non-identifiable to apps and advertisers — helped to skyrocket Apple’s advertising business.

What could that be, though?

If Apple were to make ad blocking widespread or default in iOS, in the way that we are currently familiar with how ad blockers function, theoretically this could accomplish two things:

1. Differentiate Safari from Chrome, which means differentiating the iPhone from Android. One would be ad-free, the other not. Whereas Apple has relatively little commercial interest in the open web advertising ecosystem, Google does.

2. Apple could re-introduce its own “user friendly” advertising in-place of ads Safari has blocked. This would be analogous to Acceptable Ads — an initiative used by some popular ad blockers (e.g. AdBlock and Adblock Plus) to re-introduce “non-intrusive” forms of advertising.

Both of these feel like a far stretch. There would be profound implications, including unwanted scrutiny through an anti-trust lens — providing a lot of ammo.

Having said that, it’s hard to view this initial version of Distraction Control without thinking it has been specifically calibrated to neuter the concerns of publishers and advertisers. So that it passes through without too much of a fight.

How so?

It’s pretty toothless functionally, and, it’s buried with the UX — meaning only nerdy types will have the inclination to venture in there and play around. The average user won’t meaningfully use it.

In other words, this version won’t unlock much value for Apple.

However, rolling out ad blocking automatically to the Safari masses very much could. You can see how Distraction Control might evolve over the years to achieve this — at a ‘frog in boiling water’ kind of pace that keeps trade groups at bay.

A plausible scenario I see is this: Distraction Control is used to crowd-source a list of elements that people commonly want to block. Initially, it’s used by the extreme minority. Over time, Apple makes it more accessible and functional to use and the amount of people using it creeps up.

Eventually, the crowdsourced manual block list is used to automatically block elements for all Safari users. In effect, it becomes Apple’s ‘Easylist’ — the popular filter list that most ad blockers use.

There is precedent for this from a BigTech company. In 2018, Google implemented Easylist in Chrome for use under certain conditions. Using a third-party list like this doesn’t ‘feel very Apple’, so it would make sense they would build their own.

Should publishers be worried?

Yes, they should take this seriously.

In its current form, Distraction Control will not harm publishers or advertisers much. But, the real concern — from their POV — is not what it can do now, but what it will do in the future.

Mass ad blocking on iPhones would — with other challenges publishers face, such as traffic loss and signal loss — represent an existential crisis of the nature the French trade groups outlined.

That’s a problem because Apple’s track record with these types of things is to press on and do it anyway, despite strong pushback from entire industries (again: I refer you to App Tracking Transparency).

On that basis, a letter to Tim Cook is a decent start. This seems to have been a contributing factor to the demise of ‘Web Eraser’. However, it was short-lived. They’re now back where they started.

Interestingly, the recent letter requests that Apple provide “technical documentation detailing the Distraction Control functionalities, along with any planned updates, to ensure that the feature complies with European law.”

This is more along the right lines of thinking. But, from the trade groups POV, they should go further. They should setup a committee that lobbies Apple to establish guidelines for Distraction Control in collaboration together. In other words: accept that it’s happening and ensure their voice is present in the room when design choices are made.

Agreeing to this would not be ‘business as usual’ for Apple, but we are living through a period in which ‘BigTech anti-trust’ is on everyone’s lips. On that subject, the letter highlights “the fact that Safari has been designated as a Core Platform Service (CPS) under the Digital Markets Act (DMA)” and that “competition regulations” are “avenues” they are considering exploring. So, it does not look out of the question.

It’s a case of leveraging what they can against the most valuable company in the world.

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