You're talking about killing the primary income source for publishers. That's writers, bloggers, journalists, experts of all stripes who want to make a living f

You're talking about killing the primary income source for publishers. That's writers, bloggers, journalists, experts of all stripes who want to make a living from creating content. Donations don't do it because nobody donates (tragedy of the commons). And most content creators are terrible at marketing and have no idea how to create their own products and sales funnels (and would be hard-pressed to expertly monetize them if they did). We're left with ads. Without those, the web goes back to being abandoned by professional content creators, and instead becomes the domain of Tumblr/YouTube/Imgur, the new Usenet/Angelfire/Geocities. The solution I suspect is most likely if ad blocking becomes too ubiquitous and publishing companies are finding it too hard to make money online is that publishing companies all get behind a locked (non-plug-in-able) browser that users cannot block the ads from. If you want to surf the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or the Economist or read the links on HN, Reddit, or Google News, you fire up your Media Browser and click the links and suck up the ads as a necessary evil. Click those links in a non-approved browser and you see a message saying, "Please install Media Browser to view this article." If you don't feel like looking at ads, you stick to your regular browser and surf Tumblr. But almost everyone will install Media Browser and watch the ads. That said, I don't think the arms race ever ends. There will always be people who need to find a way to get paid to create content, and there will always be people who don't want to pay. That race goes on forever.