[Proposal] Ownership of content

I have a proposition about the ownership of content and some use cases where this can be relevant. I am not very sure whether it should be an HTML element or a CSS property. I would like your advice on it. Also, I am new to this and if this is not the correct procedure, please guide me in the right direction.

Objective: Various content in a web page should be allowed to be tagged as one of the following.

• first party content: typically content that the owner of the web page created or owns
• second party content: content like comments and other user interactions where the client(s) created the content
• third party content: typically ads, search bar powered by some search engine, embedded maps, recommendations, etc fall into this category

The above classification can be used in creating views in browsers: for example reader view can be made more focused by selecting only first party content. The user can have better control over whether to allow third part content or not.

I understand that web sites owners can easily violate this intention by showing ads in first party content section. So, this more or less operates in good faith that web sites will tag data appropriately.

Possible implementations:

1. as HTML elements

This is my content This is a commented by my reader

2. as properties

I hope I am not talking complete rubbish. I welcome your feedback.

So, this more or less operates in good faith that web sites will tag data appropriately.

And this is where the flaw lies in my opinion. Many sites rely on ad income, and would have great incentive to declare it “first party” content.

I agree with @jhpratt on this. Relying on developers to classify things appropriately shouldn’t be relied upon. I do really like this idea though.

I guess another option could be for browser vendors to implement this, so that it happens automatically? If so, there would be no need for an API proposal. But not sure if they’d agree to this since there are probably big legalities involved. If they do this, they would be preventing website owners from making money on advertisements if they were to block/disable third-party advertisements when a user goes into “reader view” mode, for example.

[T]hey would be preventing website owners from making money on advertisements if they were to block/disable third-party advertisements when a user goes into “reader view” mode

This is exactly what ad blockers do, and those are legal (at least, I don’t think they’ve ever been challenged).

However, mobile Safari has a “reader view”, as does Firefox. I haven’t used either of those recently, but I believe they’re relatively accurate as is. I’m not aware of any proposal from the Chromium team to implement something along these lines.

Yeah, but the big difference is that the issue of liability is not on the browser vendors, but on the developer of the ad blocker program. Accepting ad blocker plugins is perfectly legal for browser vendors to do. This is not a problem for browser vendors because ad blocker plugins are totally up to the user to download and use, which is really a small amount of internet users, ironically. But, I suspect that if browser vendors were to proactively start blocking ads (or any other third party content), it would affect all browser users, which is a much larger population than ad blocker users. This would be very risky for browser vendors to do and would be a totally different ball game that hasn’t been attempted yet. I’d like to see what the browser vendors think of this idea.

Valid point. I don’t think it would be an issue, but IANAL so that’s just my personal opinion. I would like to hear what a lawyer or the vendors think about this (legally speaking).