How Apple’s Web Eraser Could Impact Business Education Coverage

Apple made plenty of news during its June 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference. The biggest story was the firm’s push into artificial intelligence support for many of its software applications, branded as “Apple Intelligence.” The company also announced a new partnership with OpenAI that will allow users to tap into ChatGPT directly through Siri and through many of the other Apple apps instead of the current method that routes all access to the chatbot through a web browser.

Customer reaction to all this news was swift and unusually enthusiastic. About 55 percent of Apple’s worldwide sales now come from the iPhone, and once news leaked that the company would restrict the new AI functionality to the iPhone 15 Pro and later models, Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan predicted that Apple Intelligence will ignite a torrent in upgrade sales of the newest Apple hardware.

Apple’s stock price then exploded, closing at an all-time high of $219.75 on June 12. That drove a $215 billion surge in Apple’s market capitalization to $3.2 trillion—ranking among the ten greatest 24-hour market value leaps in history. CEO Tim Cook and the other executives in Cupertino must have felt thrilled because, once again, Apple ranked as the world’s biggest company.

However, one highly disruptive new Apple AI product spotted in beta software released to developers didn’t appear among any of the WWDC’s new product announcements. Only weeks before the conference, that technology drew fire from nationwide media associations in two of Apple’s largest markets—the United Kingdom and France—that drove intense media scrutiny in Europe and the United States.

In previous years, Apple has delayed new product launches scheduled for the WWDC when products weren’t ready, so this omission doesn’t mean Apple scrapped the project. But while we wait for more details, our readers deserve to know about the potential damage this product could inflict on a broad range of advertising-supported news outlets worldwide. Such outlets provide most of the original reporting we rely upon for our BSchools reports and guides.

The NMA Assails Apple’s Web Eraser

On May 12, the Financial Times reported that a British newspaper association warned Apple that its comprehensive new “Web Eraser” ad-blocking technology could threaten journalism’s financial sustainability.

AppleInsider, which broke the web eraser story at the end of April 2024, reported that the beta version of Apple’s new AI-enabled Safari browser on all Macintosh and mobile platforms—including the forthcoming iOS 18 software update for the iPhone—enables users to easily remove any unwanted web content, including banner ads, text, images, and entire page sections. That means the new system will also be capable of removing the full spectrum of monetized advertising content, well beyond static display ads. And that spectrum includes pop-up video commercials that publications increasingly depend upon to provide essential revenue.

The News Media Association, representing 900 media outlets across the United Kingdom, sent a letter to Apple’s director of governmental affairs expressing concerns about how the users’ ability to easily block the full spectrum of advertising through AI might reduce the industry’s revenues. The Association includes some of the biggest publications in the U.K., such as The Guardian, The Times, and the Daily Telegraph.

In requesting a meeting with Apple’s senior leadership where publishers could express their concerns about the technology’s likely effects, the letter points out that “advertising is a key revenue stream for many publishers” and reminded Apple that professional journalism requires funding. The letter continues:

Ad-blocking is a blunt instrument, which frustrates the ability of content creators to sustainably fund their work and could lead to consumers missing important information which would otherwise have been very useful to them.

The letter also points out that if Apple’s AI applications deleted or modified the content of articles published by the NMA’s member companies, serious questions involving editorial accountability could result. Moreover, deletions by the Web Eraser will be persistent, meaning that content that a user removes stays removed throughout all future browsing sessions until the user reverts the changes.

That reversion functionality resembles a similar feature available on Apple’s Photos application for more than a decade, which enables users to revert to the original condition of an edited photo with a single click. In Photos, users revert to unedited image versions all the time. But in Safari, few if any users would ever restore their deleted advertising.

An NMA spokesperson reported that the Association had not received a reply from Apple.

The Web Eraser Backlash Hits France

Across the English Channel in France, the backlash was more comprehensive. In that nation, trade associations representing roughly 800 advertisers, ad agencies, and adtech companies along with publishers signed a letter asking Apple to reconsider any potential implementation of the Web Eraser functionality. And the French associations went straight to the top—instead of writing to Apple’s leadership in France, they wrote directly to CEO Cook in Cupertino.

According to Business Insider, the signatories included the digital marketing trade association Alliance Digitale, the digital publishing association Geste, the advertising agency association SRI, the media/agency trade group UDECAM, the newspaper association APIG, and the advertiser association Union des Marques.

The letter argues that because Apple’s Safari browser in France dominates almost 90 percent of the market share on Apple iPhones and iPads and controls about a quarter of the entire browser share on all platforms, the consequences for France’s economy could be catastrophic. According to the European Association of Communications Agencies in Brussels, the Web Eraser would potentially undermine an infrastructure of 9,000 companies, plus eliminate 100,000 jobs in France that depend upon internet advertising.

The French associations write that the Web Eraser would:

Restrict citizens’ access to free, diverse, and quality information, with significant consequences for pluralism, content accessibility, and democratic vitality. . .Besides the extremely short notice period and the lack of detailed and verified information on this new feature, it raises numerous questions, particularly concerning legal and editorial responsibilities that Apple has still not responded to.

The associations further argue that this new technology might demonstrate yet another example of how Big Tech conglomerates repeatedly inflict disruptive changes on advertising and media firms—changes over which such companies lack any influence or control. Under the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple has also been designated one of six Big Tech “gatekeepers” that is required to fairly interoperate with other firms while not favoring Apple products, including its own Apple News platform.

Previous Apple Initiatives That Reduced Media Outlets’ Revenue

Although the firm has never branded any of its applications as ad-blocking or content-deleting technology, Apple has a long tradition of providing users with the de facto ability to remove web page advertising, resulting in reduced publications revenues. For example, in 2017, Apple introduced the Safari Reader, a “distraction-free” browser component that deletes advertising and only displays an article’s text and photos according to a consistent font and layout format selected by the user.

Other browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox soon copied Apple’s Reader. Fortunately for advertisers, the buggy Reader’s reformatted pages aren’t viewed by many users. Apple does not offer Reader-formatted pages on many websites with complex layouts, and the Reader frequently deletes essential editorial content such as publication dates and author bylines from many of its pages.

Apple initiatives intended to enhance privacy protections have also yielded reduced revenues for web platforms. For example, under the company’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature launched in 2021, advertisers and applications were no longer able to collect data on iPhone and iPad users unless they chose to deliberately “opt-in,” which the vast majority of users refused to do. As a result, advertisers suffered revenue losses that a German research team estimated at 21 percent. That feature is currently the subject of antitrust actions against Apple by Germany and France. Later privacy safeguards further reduced ad revenues when the company tightened its restrictions on email tracking and device fingerprinting.

How Other Big Tech Firms Depleted Media Outlets’ Revenue

Other companies besides Apple have also recently implemented strategies that diminished the revenues earned by publications and media outlets. For example, Facebook dramatically scaled back its news coverage in the United States in 2023. The platform also dropped news coverage entirely in Europe, dramatically decreasing the revenues from the web traffic referred to newspapers and media organizations.

Another example involved Google’s first Helpful Content Update (HCU) in 2022. Although now replaced by more recent updates, this sudden modification of Google’s page rank algorithm reduced referral traffic and revenues for numerous media outlets. And for various reasons, the quality of Google’s search results has continued to degrade ever since.

Why We Broke Our Silence

Here at BSchools, we’ve focused on our core coverage of business schools and MBA programs without saying much about some of the changes to the technologies we rely upon in conducting the research for our reports and guides. But when Apple released the beta versions of its Web Eraser to developers and the controversy over its potential effects gained momentum, we decided that it was time to break our silence.

Although most people never stop to think about the benefits of advertising, the industry continues to fund most of the world’s professional journalism. That journalism is essential to the functioning of democracy, the operation of the global economy, and the social life of this planet.

If Apple really wants to risk wiping out the public’s no-charge access to most journalism by releasing the Web Eraser, the company should at least exercise some responsibility by first proposing alternate mechanisms for replacing the revenue that the advertising and media industries could stand to lose. But if that’s not possible, perhaps Apple would be better off omitting the Web Eraser from all future product announcements.