| > if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising This would be my preferred outcome no doubt. And after widespread adoption of content blockers like uBlock Origin, the next step should be mass adoption of webpage mirrors (like archive.is and Wayback Machine do now, but more comprehensive), and stop giving impressions to read-only websites. In this sense, paywalls are a blessing in disguise: I don't ever visit wsj for example and thus any articles from it must be read from archive.is. But reading from mirrors should be more widespread, even for websites not behind a paywall. If browsers want to improve the situation regarding ads, besides bundling and automatically enabling content blockers, they should also provide integrations to mirrors like archive.is to go further than that and not even risk a page access to ad-infested sites. > or give it the tools it needs to be less bad. However there are more than two options. If society reach a compromise to ban targeted ads, this doesn't shut down advertising completely but sets it back to TV-era levels of analytics. This discussion should have happened after Cambridge Analytica. > Opinions differ, but all major browser vendors are in the latter category. I thought Chrome were in the business of making sure ads stay bad. |