I wish all websites would use TLS. I've seen ISPs do a bunch of shady bullshit like redirecting misspelled domains to their own landing pages and placing an advertisement in third-party pages by sending fraudulent HTML. A secure connection for any transfer of information is the only defence a user has.

My impression from the article is that the ad-blocking is done at the client, when they use the ISP's standard software install. So TLS/HTTPS won't help.

Free, as well as all major ISPs in France, rents you a router when you subscribe. This is where the filtering is done, using lying DNSs it seems.

in this day and age, requiring installation of software from the ISP to get online is very suspicious, and should be frowned up on.

I would explain to a non-technical person by analogy - imagine the telco needed you to use _their_ particular telephone when you make/recieve calls.

It shouldn't be hard to imagine for a lot of people who lived before the mid 80's.

The Bell monopoly required you to not only use their handsets, you usually had to lease the phone from them.

Whether TLS would prevent it depends on how it's implemented. They could just drop connections to AdSense's servers.

That's what happens, they block at the DNS level. Counter-measure could be to put those under google.com, but there might be issues with cookie sharing between ads and products (not necessarily technical issues).

i dont see why not more people use a public DNS (or google's own DNS - its super easy to remember 8.8.8.8).

It prevents the ISP from screwing around on their end.