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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

If AdBlock becomes a big enough problem, publishers will create "unskippable" ads with current technology. HTML doesn't really change that. It's always been a cat and mouse with ad blockers.

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It's possible to build a website that renders itself unusable if an ad fails to load, to prevent browsers with AdBlock enabled from viewing your content. The problem with this approach is that if a single ad fails to load for any reason, the entire website goes down. Do you trust your ad network to have 100% uptime?

There are ways to engineer around that, but it's always been a cat and mouse game. My point is that it's a side issue; ad blocking doesn't have much to do with having an "official" DRM spec. You can make ads harder to block without it, and you can probably still find a way to block ads with it.

Do you think that the likes of Disney and Sony care? If the ad network is down, they're not getting paid for that view, anyway.

Even if we assume that each page only loads a single ad, which either succeeds or fails, the perception of a site being unreliable hurts the company running it. Household names like Disney and Sony might be able to live with that, but they'll still do everything possible to avoid downtime.

But right now, it's a legal cat and mouse game for both sides. With DRM, it becomes illegal for the mouse to do anything but get eaten.

Maybe I'm just missing something, but I don't see why DRM being implemented in an HTML spec is any different from implementing it in Flash or Silverlight or Javascript. The DMCA doesn't care about specs.

I could "protect" the copyright on my site's content with a trivial bit of a javascript, and you would arguably be circumventing it with your ad blocker.

(To be clear: I think the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions are terrible policy.)

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