They can refuse service for any reason (outside of protected class like race, gender, etc.). YouTube already does this, it refuses to play if you have an ad blocker. Of course people have developed further countermeasures to ad blocker detection.
>YouTube already does this, it refuses to play if you have an ad blocker.
No, it doesn't. Maybe they'd like it to work that way, but in my experience it's never worked that way: it works just fine with my ad-blockers. (knock on wood)
I guess we'll see if they come up with more effective measures, but honestly I doubt it: anything they come up with can be countered, and there's a literal army of people happy to find ways around their ad-blocker-blocker measures.
There was a period of time where uBlock origin wasn't cutting it, so I switched to Brave. But yeah, I agree that the whole ad-blocker is a big cat and mouse game that doesn't favor the tech companies.
Once in a while, the tech companies might figure out a way to block the ad-blockers, but it just won't last: the hackers will figure it out before long.
If the tech companies stopped using regular HTTPS to serve webpages and set up a walled garden like Netflix, they really could stop the ad-blocking. They'd have to make their own browsers/clients to support their proprietary protocol, and use encryption, so for instance you'd have to download and install a new app just to watch YouTube videos, but it could be done. But this isn't going to go over well with users I think.
