Re: Disable autoplay and infinite scroll or risk massive fines, EU tells Meta

On 2026-07-13, Rich wrote:

> Nuno Silva <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On 2026-07-12, Rich wrote:
>> 
>>> Sylvia Else <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Auto-play has always seemed to me to be a fraud on their advertisers. 
>>>> And it seems to keep being turned back on.
>>>> 
>>>> They can be showing advertisements, and charging for them, when there's 
>>>> no one there to watch them.
>>>
>>> That's the entire point.  They get to charge the advertiser for an 
>>> "ad-view".
>>>
>>> For some reason the advertisters do not seem to recognize (or care) 
>>> about the grift.
>>>
>>> Of course, the browsers could solve the auto-play problem overnight by 
>>> disabling all auto-play.  But since the largest majority browser is 
>>> written and distributed by an advertising company, that is not likely 
>>> to happen.
>> 
>> I think the chief problem might have been how at the same time the
>> implementation also allows for playback to be controlled by
>> Javascript. So a least a few browsers offer a way to disable autoplay,
>> yet content might still play anyway?
>
> Old style pop-up ads also were "controlled by javascript" (it was JS 
> that even allowed them to be a thing in the first place).
>
> And every browser eventually blocked them all.
>
> If the browser makers actually wanted to block auto-play, then 
> auto-play would no longer exist.
>
> The advertising company Doubleclick (most call them Google now) is more 
> interested in selling adverts., so of course Chrome will never 
> implement a true auto-play block.

Yeah, you got a point there. Now some projects are more restricted
because they follow an upstream with not so many differences, but are
there projects implementing such a "disable autoplay" feature on top of
existing browser codebases? (And are there upstreams where that is
already a setting that works even in the face of JavaScript?)

-- 
Nuno Silva