I favor this view of outcomes. The backlash caused by AMP in the first place was loud, but small. More people seem to be catching on with the negatives of it... AMP for email may not be the downfall of Gmail, but it opens new decision pathways that could be very harmful for the platform, such as inserting ads into private email conversations.

Ads are easy to block, even with this development. The delivery may have changed, but not the how to. Blocking ads at the DNS level is always effective. I enjoy the cat and mouse game with the ad companies. It's always interesting to see how the adblock guys do their thing. Employing a Pi-hole has been one of the best decisions I have made in regards to my own network. Couple the Pi-hole with uBlock Origin, Privacy badger, Decentraleyes, and a few other tweaks, and you get the WWW the way it was intended to be: content only.

I am unapologetic about blocking ads, beacons, cookies, trackers of all kinds. My computer, my rules. Just as I'm not required to look at roadside ads, and I don't, I refuse to allow my network to become compromised to give someone else another BMW. Running a website is the cost of doing business. If you cannot afford the domain name, bandwidth, etc., choose another business model. Ads were and are a horrible business model. I haven't seen an ad in literally years. I plan on keeping it this way.

If DNS adblocking becomes too widespread, expect Google to start serving ads on the same subdomains as your Gmail messages.

Can still block them with element blockers. Elements are quickly cataloged, added to block lists and shared. Happens in mere minutes. A lot of this is automated, but it can be hand curated as well for some that were not noticed or perhaps new. An entire "industry" exists to keep the web clean. uBlock Origin does a fantastic job in this regard. In fact, it's one of the only methods that kills adblock blockers. I've not seen a successful adblock blocker since using it. It kills them dead. No more nag screens. Nothing but a clean content-only website, as nature intended.

There are some very smart people in the blocking arena. Since most of this stuff is delivered via JS, it's fairly trivial, at least at the moment, to handle same-domain ads. The game may change in future, but the adblock people usually prevail.

One idea I have if the sites start outright blocking blocking users, is to sort out how to write the ads to a form of /dev/null while making the site think they've been shown. I used to do this with Flash cookies/LSOs. I wrote them to /dev/null so I could take advantage of Flash back when it was a thing, yet have no LSOs on my machine to track me. Coupled with referer blocking, history blocking, no fingerprinting, and other settings, it worked a treat.

I'm willing to bet that if we cannot "block" them as part of the domain, we can sort out a way to block the element, shunt the ads into the bit bucket and continue on our merry.

>One idea I have if the sites start outright blocking blocking users, is to sort out how to write the ads to a form of /dev/null

I think several dns-based ad blocking programs can do this today, but so far I have not had a problem with returning NULL address (0.0.0.0). Pihole talks about the pros and cons of common approaches: https://docs.pi-hole.net/ftldns/blockingmode/. One downside is you have to run a webserver to catch the redirect and all the overhead that comes with it.