Cname cloaking, a disguise of third-party trackers

Here's my speculation about how this would change people's purchasing:

* Products would be a lot stickier. A lot of advertising is about trying to move people between competitors, or keep them from moving. Sometimes it's an explicit "here's a way we're better" (ex: company advertises that they don't charge unpopular fee X), other times it's a more general "you should think positively of our company" (ex: we agree with you on political issue Y).

* Relatedly, it would be much harder to get many new products started. Say a startup makes a new credit card that keeps your purchase history private: right now a straightforward marketing approach would be (a) show that other credit cards are doing something their target audience doesn't like, (b) build on their sense that this isn't ok, and (c) present the new card as a solution. Without ads they would likely still see uptake among people who were aware of the problem and actively looking for a solution, but mostly people would just stick with the well-known companies.

* Reviewers would be much more trustworthy. There's a long history of reviewers getting 'captured' by the industry they review, ex: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

* Purchases of things people hadn't tried before would decrease, both things that people were in retrospect happy to have bought and things they were not. One of the roles of advertising is to let people know about things that, if they knew about them they would want to buy. But "buy stuff they don't need" isn't a great gloss for this, since after buying the products people often like them a lot.

This is just my guesses; I work on the technical side of ads and don't have a great view into their social role, and even if I was in a role like that it would still be very hard to predict how the world would be different with such a large change. Where does your picture differ from mine?"

(For 'saving the planet' I think a carbon tax would make a lot more sense.)

This only seems partly right to me. Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay!

Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies. They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit.

In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.

But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites.

Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc.

So, yes, niche publishers in lucrative niches would make more money if we only had context-based advertising, but I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off.

(Disclosure: still speaking only for myself)

That's fear mongering. The ad company can't pester their clients to make changes to the DNS on a regular basis. I'd say that anything beyond initial setup would be unaccepted to most clients. And clients won't give control of their DNS to ad company, so automation is also not really possible.

Also, because this setup is substantially more friction than a simple 3rd party tracking "just copy-paste this code", I'd guess it will only be used by high profile clients.

This all means that while annoying, it shouldn't be too hard to find and add these subdomains to the ever-updating ad url blacklists.