> EDIT: I'm guessing that the next wave of ad-configuration is going to ask content owners to proxy their content through the ad network, so that ad networks ac

> EDIT: I'm guessing that the next wave of ad-configuration is going to ask content owners to proxy their content through the ad network, so that ad networks act like a CDN and inject ads as a wrapper around content. Funny. I was thinking about this when I read the article since it seems like the next obvious step to make. Contrary to what seems to be the consensus here, advertising isn't going to go away (for better or worse), but the means of distributing those ads will likely change. And, realistically, I think pushing the advertising to the content providers themselves might not be so bad after all--they'd have to take a bit more responsibility for the advertisements they push. On the other hand, dishonest content providers could circumvent ad impressions/clicks, and it becomes a different classification of problems to resolve since you now have (by nature) a MITM-type problem to resolve between your ad network and the end user to keep both honest. (Although I like your idea of proxying; you could pass the appropriate cookies and data back and forth to the ad network.) Of course, such content would still be blockable with a little bit more work (content heuristics in the worst case, dumb HTML parsing in the best case in the event the content provider names the container something obvious) on a per-site basis and the problem comes full circle. I agree with the other sentiments here that there's too much money wrapped up in all this nonsense and too much on the line for many of these companies. Simply hating something and wishing it to go away isn't going to make that happen. However, a reasonable compromise wouldn't be all that bad, and we might be in a good position to influence the decisions that will inevitably lead to future incantations of advertising technology.