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I kind of suspect adblocking is doomed to die rather quickly if it ever seriously threatens the ad industry. As anti-adblock has shown even fairly trivial measures can be effective; and if you control the platform in more depth you can be a lot trickier about it, e.g. by doing minification-esque transforms to the complete dom tree.

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Markets and competition should prevent this outcome. Unless we're not in a competitive market situation, in which case regulators can step in.

How would markets prevent this? The only party interested in adblocking is the consumer, who isn't the supplier nor the customer of ads. Now, if there were some real alternative to ads; but nobody has found that yet. I suppose regulators could create that alternative, but that doesn't seem politically likely for the foreseeable future.

Any browser provider that has a different business model than ads?

For example, Safari.

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