Just read this over at slashdot, could be bad for those of us running ads in Europe?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/05/...ble-for-google
Europeans are simply butthurt about Google's dominance. While Google's competition in the US in non-negligible (Bing and Yahoo have one third of the market share), it enjoy a virtual monopoly over search in Europe and that irks a lot of people.
Here's why ISPs blocking ads is downright illegal: The ads are inserted into the content by the publisher, not by Google. Viewing the ads is a qui pro quo; you view content for free as long as publishers can serve ads alongside to support their operation.
You don't have to go back very far to see how this would play out: Not long ago, Spanish publishers wanted Google to pay to index their content, or they would pull their content from Google. Google simply did as they wished and stopped crawling their sites; the traffic dried up, and they came back begging to be re-listed.
European publishers wouldn't be able to survive without Google. In the absence of a search engine that can rival Google's quality of search and advertising infrastructure, there is nothing anyone can do. The only exception is China, who bans foreign companies and steals their technology for the most part to build clones.