This is just terrible.

However, while it does add a layer of annoyance that'll mess things up for most, like any DRM, it fundamentally is unsound and will get cracked. Us good people have a big incentive to do so here. Reading the spec, it still relies on a trusted party (expected to be the OS) and, unlike ie. games consoles, we already have admin access to that party from the get go.

Where it could be a problem is mobile phones. They could target browsers that support ad blocking and you'd probably need to root the phone to get past that.

I remember watching Chrome fill up long lists of ??? in the task manager, back when I still used Windows and Chrome on an old Laptop. Both CPU and RAM were working at their utmost and that shit blocked everything.

Definitely time to make our own internet, with hookers and blow.

Also fun to read this (by Google employee): https://blog.yoav.ws/posts/web_platform_change_you_do_not_like/ I literally snacked popcorn.

Greed kills everything good

This has to be seen in context of AI - Google will offer this to companies to ‘protect their pages from being scraped’

If they overcome / disable ad blocking, they will lose browser market share - and people don't design websites for marginal browsers with exotic features.

I find it hard to see how they could protect content from ad blockers without also crippling pages that self modify their own content. Perhaps they could put headers akin to content security policy that forbids external modification. Assuming a browser were to honour that header I could see bad publicity and a lot of people just moving to another browser which doesn't. Additionally, ad blockers aren't the only things that modify pages - breaking accessibility add ons could be more negative publicity (just like with Reddit).

I think browsers would be best off to let websites develop countermeasures if they're so sore about ad blockers. Perhaps they could use "self healing" Javascript libraries that put back content which is removed. Or they could just refuse to work if they detect an ad blocker, e.g. they stick some canaries in the DOM or along blocked paths to see if an ad blocker is present.

Is these a real google plan, or just an engineer proposal on github?