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Looks like the war against advertising is continuing to fail, predictably. Google Chrome is now
banningrestricting ad blockers starting as early as next year. (1) I am not convinced this model of: create a free, ad-free service to get users --> slowly pull in ads for $$$ --> eventually become an ad-riddled hell is the best model. I often balk at paying for services up front, but if a service as essential as google is now bowing to the pressure, when will it end?Advertising definitely has some uses in connecting buyers to sellers, and informing consumers about the market, but I'm convinced it's a bit of a 'tamed demon.' If we don't want to devolve into a horrid anarcho-capitalist future, we need to get serious about restricting what advertisers can do, and where they can advertise. I predict advertising will become far more ubiquitous with the rise of Dall-E and similar image producing AIs. The cost of creating extremely compelling, beautiful ads will plummet, and more and more of our daily visual space will become filled with non stop advertising.
On top of this, we have Meta and other tech oligarchs attempting to push us all into the Metaverse. I am no detractor of AR/VR, in fact I think utilized correctly it could solve many of our current problems. However if the Powers That Be take over the metaverse, we will soon have ads that engage all of our sense - not just vision and hearing.
Given how powerful advertising already is, can we really afford to let it run rampant in an age where we have such powerful technologies?
1 - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/
Manifest v3 doesn't ban adblockers. It imposes limitations on the way that adblockers can be implemented, but it doesn't eliminate them entirely. It is also the same model (as I understand) as is used by apple's safari in their extension system, notable for being the only adblocking system available on iphones. It is a much poorer model than we are used to, but it is not nothing. That apple chooses to implement a similar restriction suggests that the impetus behind this may be stronger than just making adblocking difficult. While apple makes money off of advertising, very little of it is on the web where content based ad blocking is used. DNS based blocking is still feasible under their and google's model. So the reason for apple to implement this restriction is plausibly the same reason for google to move to this model, with any effect on adblocking being a mere (perhaps beneficial) side effect. The reason given in both cases is that it prevents poorly designed or malicious extensions from consuming too many resources on the host device.
Ad blocking can be bypassed easily if you try. See examples like Facebook obfuscating sponsored posts. CSS classes can be randomized, etc. It's fundamentally an arms race, and it's only an even match when both sides are Turing complete.
Once ad blockers are restricted to a finite set of limited rules, the circumvention side will have the upper hand and we should expect it to win. Maybe not small providers, but large ad providers like Google have more than enough resources to beat suitably crippled ad blockers. It's already a lot harder to avoid ads on Youtube than it used to be.
What do you mean in this context?
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that "old-style" adblockers could run arbitrary code on every request to decide whether to filter or not. This also meant that they could potentially do malicious things like log all your requests, which is where the (stated) motivation came from to limit the API.
In the new API, adblockers are data-driven and can only specify a list of rules (probably regex-based?), and even that list is limited in size. So it may be able to filter divs where the class contains "ad", but obviously advertisers don't need to make things that easy. There is no corresponding limit on their end, and they can do whatever they want dynamically on the server side. In computing, if your enemy can write arbitrary code and you can write some regexes, you lose.
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