>I think a very strong and concerted push to outlaw ad-blocking is almost inevitable
Is there any indication for such a push? What might get outlawed is paid unblocking, because that is arguably extortion, but free, non-commercial, browser based ad blockers will never be outlawed.
I think what will happen once advertising growth can no longer outrun ad blocking is one or both of these two things:
a) Commercial content producers move to unblockable platforms, i.e off the open web.
b) Google et al come up with a server side solution that creates trust between advertisers, ad networks and websites so that browsers no longer need to make blockable requests to third party sites in order to retrieve ads and send clicks. That would force any ad blockers to become a lot more resource intensive because they would have to analyse the content itself, which would slow down the page massively.
Is there any indication for such a push? What might get outlawed is paid unblocking, because that is arguably extortion, but free, non-commercial, browser based ad blockers will never be outlawed.
I think what will happen once advertising growth can no longer outrun ad blocking is one or both of these two things:
a) Commercial content producers move to unblockable platforms, i.e off the open web.
b) Google et al come up with a server side solution that creates trust between advertisers, ad networks and websites so that browsers no longer need to make blockable requests to third party sites in order to retrieve ads and send clicks. That would force any ad blockers to become a lot more resource intensive because they would have to analyse the content itself, which would slow down the page massively.