Most people will not do this. Otherwise the major ad firms wouldn't pay to AdBlock. The same for blocking the most effective ads: if only the least profitable ads will remain, than ad firms will not pay real money to AdBlock. But lets hope that some miracle happen and they invent the ad format which is profitable and unnoticeable at the same time.

I am a web application developer. In addition to that I maintain 50+ servers. Including web application servers, HTTP servers, proxies, DNS servers. May I suggest to you to not buy lottery?

At the worst case the bandwidth cost will be doubled. This will be a setback for everybody (including visitors), except infrastructure firms. But this will not stop the transition, I know very well the network traffic prices. I am sure Google and others will do everything to make the whole thing technically the easiest. The smallest sites wiill quit. Other small sites may need to move to a CDN or PaaS like service. It might be possible that they have to select a single ad company. This strong dependency will make them weak, large ad companies become even stronger.

If this will be the case, then again, this will be a problem for the small sites, which do not bring enough profit for the ad firms to justify the larger costs of auditing.

The whole ad-blocking movement is as counterproductive as it can be. I can consider it as a demonstration, but than again it would be worthwhile only if people were prepared to pay for content. But they are not. The best example is Flattr. Almost nobody use it, even though it is mostly targeted to technical people and it is a very easy and cheap way to support for example the open source products you use.

I think it is an irrevelant technical difference if the ad is coming from a google server or from a - maybe google - server leased by the web page creator. Anyway, now that the percentage of ad blocking users exploded I am sure that within one year a few web hosts start to proxy ads. I am afraid you will be the only one who will be happy with this solution.

I am afraid you are a bit too optimist. Most of the known web is ad supported. The only major site which is ad free is Wikipedia. But I do pay to Wikipedia every year. If you mean that you go to a subscription based alternative, than you are still too optimistic: in that case you and me are the only two people I know who intend to pay for an ad-free website. This will not be enough :)

There is a difference between not looking at the ad directly and blocking it.

If I remember well, devices which removed ads automatically was proven illegal. PVRs which made it possible to fast forward on ads were not.

The mafia forces local businesses to pay money to protect them, mainly from the mafia itself. The AdBlock company forces ad firms to pay money to protect them, mainly from the AdBlock company itself.

If you cannot see "any" similarity than I give up here.

I am sure that morally and ethically ad blocking is wrong. On the other hand I am free to not visit a page. And I do this, I abandoned several sites where I was a regular visitor for years. It is not fair to enjoy the content but do not pay the price.

I am not sure that you are legally free to block ads. If - similarly to the EU consent cookies - web pages would start with a popup saying "you agree that read the page without ad blocking LEAVE/STAY" and you choose STAY, then I guess you legally accepted ads.

Similarly, it is not your problem that the mafia receives protection money from local businesses. What is the difference?

There is some truth in what you say, but in my experience ads as an attack vector are overrated. In my company there were four virus infections from which only one came from a web page (and not from an ad!). If you can be attacked by an ad, than you can be attacked by any random link on any random page.

RTFA. Adblock asks for and gets a serious sum of money to not block part of web pages, namely ads, the sole or almost sole income source of web pages.

No. Until now the percentage of ad blocker users were low. Web sites accepted that, saying that a non-paying user also has some benefit, namely he brings paying users. Today ad-blockers become so popular that the loss affects the bottom line. Moreover an ad-blocking user likely brings only other non-paying user, therefore he is a pure loss. I predict that within a year there will be serious changes and polite requests for ad-blockers to either subscribe or turn off ad-blockers become usual.

False analogy. You visit the web page, and not the web page visits you.

This is a good idea, which should be implemented on every OS, but is is only useful for rarely typed accents. I do not know French, but in my language there are 4 different accented variant of O. Even if the order of the accents are customized to the language so that it reflects the real life frequency of those accents, it would be unacceptable to type 5 keys to get a single character. Another issue in the example is that on the usual standalone and laptop keyboards the function keys cannot be touch typed. On a standard keyboard there is no easily accessible keys which is free or which can be replaced, there is no place for dedicated accent keys and there is also no place for a symmetric (both left and right) third level shift keys. Only a new type of keyboard hardware can help, with more accessible keys. (Or older type of hardware: on some pre-PC era keyboards this problem was solved.)

At the very first sight it must have been obvious that this layout was useless. Like all modern Latin layouts. Among other reasons, these layouts have only one third level shift key, the AltGr, on the right side. There is no AltGr on the left side. Conversely, there is no Alt key on the right side. So you cannot touch type text on this if you are a user, and you cannot touch type commands if you are a developer.

The progress of keyboard layouts stalled after the Space-cadet keyboard from the 1970s. After that the dark age of keyboards began. Nowdays the ErgoDox keyboard is the most useful for typing accented characters, it has less keys than the usual keyboard in total, but more keys which are accessible for a touch typist. But ErgoDox is only the hardware, there are no standardized international layouts for it.

We tested asm.js a year ago, it is not particularly fast even within the JavaScript universe (i.e. it was much slower than other JavaScript solutions we have found). And of course browser variants/versions (even small versions!) seriously differ - but that would not be a showstopper, as that can be said about anything in JavaScipt.

Of course they can slowly fix everything in JavaScript, make it more performant, and eventually reach the current level of the Java virtual machine - in about 10-15 years. This is what I expect.

The security model is more related to the class library, not to the virtual machine. Like Android uses Java byte code, but an entirely different security model.

Lawsuits would be a problem, but I guess Oracle would agree on the terms of standardization.