People think it's about checking for ad block because protecting ad revenue is the very first concern the proposal addresses. The obvious path is that Chrome im

People think it's about checking for ad block because protecting ad revenue is the very first concern the proposal addresses. The obvious path is that Chrome implements WEI and disallows ad blocking, and then Google gradually starts pushing websites to favor approved browsers that don't allow ad blocking. Perhaps they pay out a bit extra for "authenticated" ad impressions made using an approved browser. Or they could start suspending AdSense accounts for "invalid traffic" (https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/understanding-account-suspensions-due/ https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/understanding-acco...) because a high percentage of visits have no WEI token or a token from an "unrecognized" browser. I'm sure you can imagine Google doing something like that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=adsense%20account&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... EFF clearly explains why the holdback mechanism doesn't make sense, and why the proposal authors' personal beliefs are not relevant. What matters is what capabilities this technology allows, and what Google's corporate motivations are.