Unfortunately, moving to DNS blocking could only be a brief refuge before the creeping anti-adblock efforts target it as well.
Adtech and the web are identifiable by mostly unique domains, but what if that could be hidden? What if the adtech industry builds and pushes a reverse proxy tech of sorts for page content inside the page where the web server goes and loads 3rd party content for the page render before sending it you? The theoretical result could make every request looks like it comes from the domain you requested and there's nothing to discriminate on when it comes to DNS requests.
Unrealistic? Today, maybe. Wait until DNS ad blocking goes mainstream, Manifestv2 addons are long since stamped out and Manifestv3 addons are proven to be gutted and defeated. If click-through rates are noticeably higher with some kind of anti-dnsblocking proxy, we'll probably see proxies everywhere. What we'd do then for ad-block is beyond me.
we'll probably see proxies everywhere. What we'd do then for ad-block is beyond me.
Filtering proxies on the other end. A lot of corporate networks already MITM all traffic so they can block, monitor, and rewrite; and ironically that has been much-maligned by those working for Big Browser, ostensibly for "security" reasons. Ditto for the DoH advocates.
I've been running a filtering proxy on my network since the turn of the century. This was somewhat common in the past, then waned as browsers started growing extension functionality (one wonders if growing, and then now heavily restricting, extensions was a way to discourage proxying) but I suspect it'll become more popular in the future too.
...and the fact that TLS fingerprinting is now a thing, and you'll be easily considered a "bot" by many sites if you MITM your own traffic, shows what their real intentions are.
Adtech and the web are identifiable by mostly unique domains, but what if that could be hidden? What if the adtech industry builds and pushes a reverse proxy tech of sorts for page content inside the page where the web server goes and loads 3rd party content for the page render before sending it you? The theoretical result could make every request looks like it comes from the domain you requested and there's nothing to discriminate on when it comes to DNS requests.
Unrealistic? Today, maybe. Wait until DNS ad blocking goes mainstream, Manifestv2 addons are long since stamped out and Manifestv3 addons are proven to be gutted and defeated. If click-through rates are noticeably higher with some kind of anti-dnsblocking proxy, we'll probably see proxies everywhere. What we'd do then for ad-block is beyond me.