Distraction Control lets users wipe away website elements they don’t want to see
A consortium of publishers and ad companies in France have written to Tim Cook to ask him to ditch Distraction Control, undaunted by how he ignored them last time.
It was in May 2024 when members of French organizations including Alliance Digitale, and press organization Alliance de la Presse d’Information Generale, read AppleInsider and went wide-eyed. For AppleInsider had exclusively revealed Apple’s Web Eraser, which would later be renamed on release as Distraction Control.
At the time, Web Eraser was expected to let Safari users remove any part of a website from view, and naturally target number one would be ads. So the consortium wrote to Tim Cook, asking that Apple abandon it.
It appears that neither Cook nor anyone else at Apple responded. However, when it was ultimately released, Apple did say that Distraction Control would not permanently remove ads.
Now according to Business Insider, the same French group has written again. The new letter does not appear to be entirely a copy-and-paste from May 2024, but it’s close enough.
The letter says, presumably in French, that Distraction Control represents “an existential threat to the online advertising model, which underpins a significant portion of the internet’s economy.” The group wants Apple to suspend Distraction Control entirely.
What might make Apple pay more attention this time is that the group says they are “actively considering all available legal resources.” Significantly, that includes having sent a copy of the letter to the European Commission, which doesn’t seem overly fond of Apple at the moment.
Apple has not yet commented on the letter.