(credit: Dominik Meissner)
A mobile operator called Digicel announced yesterday that it plans to block advertisements at the network level—unless Google and other companies pay the carrier to let their ads through.
Such a scheme would likely violate network neutrality rules in the United States, but the Jamaica-based Digicel operates in the Caribbean and South Pacific. That means ads will be blocked on mobile devices starting “in the coming months” even if customers haven’t installed ad-blocking software themselves. But ads will get through if ad-serving companies are willing to pay Digicel.
“Digicel is looking to companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook to enter into revenue sharing agreements with it so that this money in turn can be reinvested in network deployment,” Digicel wrote. “Currently, these companies do not pay to make use of the network and the services they provide on it suck up bandwidth to make money for themselves through advertising while putting no money in.”
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