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

Nuno Silva <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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,

Reality is that there are only really "three upstreams": Doubleclick 
Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari.  So every other "different 
browser" is just paint and trim attached on top of one of these three 
cores.

> 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?)

On that I do not know.  My point is that *if* the browser engine makers 
really wanted to halt "auto-play" (for any/all media) then there would 
simply be no "auto-play" (whether triggered via running JS or not) 
capability.  The website html might request it, the JS that runs might 
also request playing, but the engine that does the "playback" would 
simply not do any playback (i.e., it would not honor the request to 
play the media).

But, honestly, I would not at all be surprised to learn that the 
Doubleclick browser core (Chrome) has "auto-play" turned on at a very 
deep level within the core such that it is somewhere between very hard 
and impossible for the paint and trim on the surface to prevent 
auto-play from occurring.  My reasoning would be that Doubleclick wants 
the ad revenue that results from charging more for "auto-playing ad 
videos" over "static banner ads" and so they have a money incentive to 
force it on in their browser core and keep it on no matter what the 
paint and trim on top tries to do.