Great!

Why can't we have nice things?

 

Two things, unfettered capitalism and the lure of "free" services. Nice things (and places) get destroyed by exploitation and demand.

 

Hopefully ad blockers will find a way.

 

Think of it like this: normally, when you visit a website, your browser talks to several ad companies, loads their scripts, and decides which ads to show. With Trusted Server, your browser doesn’t do any of that. Instead, the website’s own server handles the ad business — talks to ad companies, picks the ad, and sends the final result back to your browser to display, all in one package.

Putting ads back in the hands of individual web sites sounds like a good idea (and is because it could negate the current ad serving monopoly) but I wonder how many sites have the technology and ability to do so. In the very early days, web sites were text only and almost none had ads. Then sites started using locally served ads. I didn't mind the ads at first since they just sat there like magazine ads.

Then graphical browsers became popular and some idiot got the idea to use animated ads. The flashing ads were the worst. That's when I started blocking them. The ad blockers of the time worked by blocking the specific web page URL or a group of URLs using pattern matching. That, of course, was more difficult to do as every set of new ads and every new site had a new set of URLs. That type of ad-blocker could have been easily defeated by generating random URLs for every ad. I'm a little surprised that ad servers don't use randomization and other techniques to defeat ad-blockers now. On the other hand, new ad serving technology will probably be countered by new ad-blocking technology. Script based ads are already covered by script blockers and techniques like cross-scripting are blocked by some browsers.

The problem faced by ad-server companies is that they don't control all web browsers so consumers are free to choose options that provide extra features like ad-blocking, script blocking, pop-up blocking and privacy controls. That why Google wanted to dominate the web browser market and it is also a good reason why that should be undone. Unfortunately, the judge in the recent anti-monopoly case brought by the US government ruled otherwise.

 

Putting ads back in the hands of individual web sites sounds like a good idea (and is because it could negate the current ad serving monopoly) but I wonder how many sites have the technology and ability to do so. In the very early days, web sites were text only and almost none had ads. Then sites started using locally served ads. I didn't mind the ads at first since they just sat there like magazine ads.

It's going to be a plug and play solution.

"On top of that, there’s server-side processing. Instead of running JavaScript in the browser, the entire ad-serving logic runs invisibly on the server. From the browser’s perspective, it’s just a single request: no trackers, no external calls, nothing to intercept.

Here’s a simplified version of what’s happening behind the scenes:

let ad_response = fetch_ads_from_partners(&synthetic_id).await;
let proxied_creative = proxy_asset(&ad_response.creative_url);

This makes it much harder for browser-based blockers to detect or stop ads in real-time."

 

I can see how it would work if the page were constructed with embedded ads as part of a single download or with ad graphics embedded like other page graphics. I see pages now with embedded advertising that is disguised as news stories, similar to the way infomercials are disguised as regular programming on TV. I wonder if AI ad blockers could be designed to recognize embedded advertising and filter it out. Companies are now able to recognize pictures, music and programming just from "seeing" it being streamed. AI ad blockers should be able to do the same.

 

Yes, but introducing AI increases page load time and cost. And it needs to be able to handle cases like when you're reading an article about an ad, you should be able to see the ad.

 

AI processors may be required. Content access is easy to fix. My mail agents blocks graphics until I ask for them to be loaded. Some browsers can block selected types of page content with the same option.