> legislation could require websites to label all ads with some kind of strictly defined watermark. In addition, some kind of software-readable indication would

> legislation could require websites to label all ads with some kind of strictly defined watermark. In addition, some kind of software-readable indication would be required for accessibility purposes. Could be a special HTML tag or attribute. That would make ad blocking much easier. The legislation would have to be very explicit about the format of the label and that it be machine readable, otherwise you'll get obfuscation like Facebook is doing: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...: > This is not the first time Facebook has changed its code in a way that has broken our tool. For example, all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends. Many of the participants in our project noticed the effects of this change because it caused some menus to pop open unexpectedly or the page to scroll to the top repeatedly. Nowadays, the disclosure says “SpSpSononSsosoSredredSSS.” Some of these changes were likely also intended to thwart ad blockers.