[username223]

> Given a large number of ads shown every day, with nominal cost,...

And here we descend into spammer-logic. It took a decade or more, but spam filters are good enough now that spam is almost a non-issue; the flip-side is that email, which was designed to be reliable above all else, is now flaky because some legitimate mail can't find its way through the maze of filters, many operating according to machine learning that defies introspection. Ad blockers will eventually be that good, will break web pages in equally unpredictable ways, and the "Open Web" will be a worse place for it.

But I guess you make some money from your book.

[mbrock]

Spammer logic is basically human nature. You can't kill it with morality because a few self-interested actors are enough to spoil the soup. It's an inescapable arms race.

[wanderingstan]

I would add that Spammer logic is the nature of life itself. I think it was Neal Stephenson who commented that plants "Spam nature their environment with pollen." Same goes for sea turtle eggs, tadpoles, and sperm.

[mbrock]

The Spamming Gene, I guess.