It would be another bit for the fingerprinting, that's an important caveat.
The point is that web site owners should be able to easily implement ad/pay walls, and let the market decide whether users are OK with that. The current situation is that ad blocking is a luxury, afforded by people like us with a decent Internet connection for the constant updates, and understanding of technology, to enable ad blocking in the first place.
Wouldn't something like AdNauseam be better? Even if the anti-abuse mechanisms successfully detect it, it would still consume resources, which seems better than simply blocking the ads? Plus if your IP/browser fingerprint gets blacklisted you may end up in a situation where you get banned from further ads and may not even need as much blocking/etc as advertisers preemptively block you?
Well no, because then the page would load way too slowly and users would click away and avoid the site in the future.
But suppose publishers did go this route. Adblocking software would just evolve to match it. They would fetch the ads from the server, possibly via a proxy, run their scripts, feeding bogus statistics to the trackers, and then not display the ads.
Users have the right to control their computers however they want. Trying to limit how the user can use their computer to have better control over your content is DRM. And, in fact, the only effective way of preventing adblockers would be to use traditional DRM software, since we have laws saying that users can't circumvent them.
Clearly the matter isn't simply presenting the ad. The issue is being able to trace and identify the user. Sites will put walls that identify blockers which when passed through by declining will still display ads! Showing the ad isn't nearly as important as tracking who is looking at them.
Pretty off-topic, but the reason why it isn't done is tracking, not ease of use.
Ad-networks want the ads pulled from their servers so they can track views. If web-owners serve the ads themselves, then the ad-network must trust whatever the web owner says about the numbers of visits/clicks/etc.
For now the ad-networks just don't care about ad blockers, because they are making money hand over fist anyway. If things ever get hairy for them, I suspect they'll switch to a reverse-proxy model. You point your domain to their servers as you do with cloudflare, and they they serve your content with ads injected in the right places, served under the same domain. This would be pretty easy for web-owners and completely nullify ad-blockers in their current incarnation.
This would be perfectly fair if there were a reliable way for ad-supported sites to restrict access to only clients which aren't running an ad blocker.
Did you read the article? It’s proposing a way to prevent websites from detecting that an adblocker is in use, effectively breaking their ability to selectively paywall.
This already happens. On one of our web fingerprinting solutions we provided our certificate to the vendor so they could use our domain when we loaded their resource (the fingerprinting code) on our app running on the user's browser (sorry - more of a data, slightly backend dude over here, so maybe networking doesn't even work like I'm describing) and the ad blockers wouldn't block the script execution - even thought the script is NOT an ad
I mostly agree with this in principle, but an important point is that, when you squint, the technology behind blocking ad blockers starts looking very similar to the technology behind blocking web scrapers. If you're capable of programmatically scraping content without a human user viewing ads, then you're capable of displaying the content to a user without the ads. So any solution for preventing ad blocking implies that the content can't be scraped programmatically.
I know that web scrapers carry some negative connotations, but keep in mind that search engines like Google couldn't possibly exist without web scraping. A world where you can't block ads or scrape content for indexing is a world where only a few preordained companies have the ability to build search engines. Proposals like Web Environment Integrity (WEI) accomplish two goals for Google: they make ad blocking more difficult, and they kick down the ladder to prevent new innovative search engines from emerging. There are already many websites which only allow-list Google's IPs for indexing, and I think we should be very hesitant about anything that could further entrench their monopoly on search even if we support content creators being compensated through ads.
Tangentially related but:
I think the ethical way forward for ad-blocking extentions/software would be for it to self-identify [1].
That way if a website owner wants to block you or be more upfront about asking for donations, they don't have to resort to JS hacks to determine if you are using an adblocker.
If they don't want me to see their site ad-free [2] I can either move on or decide that the content is worth a few ads.
[1] I only know the basics about the http protocol but I'm guessing something in the header could be added.
[2] Which is completely within their rights as virtual "land owners".
The next step in the arms race is to provide hosted ad blocking, where the action happens (however nested) in a headless server and an AI looks it over and relays only the stuff that looks like content into a cleaned up session for the user. It would eventually start looking like a CDN where the ad blocker caches the content so it doesn't have to bother contacting the underlying site so often.
Fine. BUT sites should be responsible for the ads running on their site and held financially or criminally responsible. Adtech is infested with intrusive tracking which is legally dubious in my jurisdiction. To say nothing of the security implications of allowing random unvetted transient 3rd parties to run code. At this point I see a good content blocker as a security measure more than an ad blocker.
The technical reason why it's really easy to block huge swaths of internet advertising is because unless the advertiser is serving the ads themselves they don't trust that they're being served.
If you serve the ads from your own domain, then the filters necessary become very complicated very quickly.
So if I understand his proposal, it's to allow bloggers to serve google/doubleclick/etc ads from their own domains to avoid the adblockers, but with some sort of reliable audit system to ensure the ads are being served as often as the advertiser is paying for.
That just demonstrates that ads are not web-specific, but actor-specific, so that adblock technology should work at the OS level^, like firewall and antivirus. This would shift the problem to bad adblock vendors, but at least we could have few okay-today options to choose from.
^ not gonna happen for most platforms, as it’s walled gardens all the way down, but hopefully some day it will become obvious that adcrap tech stack is a wrong foundation to make computers and their economy.
The point is that web site owners should be able to easily implement ad/pay walls, and let the market decide whether users are OK with that. The current situation is that ad blocking is a luxury, afforded by people like us with a decent Internet connection for the constant updates, and understanding of technology, to enable ad blocking in the first place.
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