Ad blocking was born in response to the arms race advertisers launched (and lets be fair here, also the websites that hosted them) where their ads became increasingly intolerable, obnoxious, disturbing and disruptive (to simple reading comprehension, never mind anything else). This behaviour *necessitated* a response; intitially simple pop-up blockers (now integrated into browsers AS STANDARD!) and gradually moving forward.
If anything, we've seen a lull in hostilities for the past few years as ad blockers have proved very successful, limited only by their install base.
The next round will probably involve websites refusing to show content until adblocking software is disabled (seen here and there already) and if/as this becomes more prevalent, ad blockers responding with stealthing mechanisms.
Since users ultimately own the rendering device, I'm not certain the advertisers can ever win. And god knows, they lost the moral argument long, long ago.