So your suggestion is that instead of trying to convince these "publishers" (as people like to call them apparently) that they should use a less user-hostile ad/analytics solution, we should all just boycott their publications completely?

I bet they'd all love that - no visitors because of their shitty ad network choices, thus no costs right. They can eat their own failed dreams for dinner.

Is this the ad-blocking equivalent of "if you don't like the laws here, go to a different country" ??

How would that be any different than any business model? Don't do what customers like, or do specifically what they hate, you have less success...

The current situation is the equivalent of a physical store attaching a tracking device to everyone who looks at their window displays at force, and tracking every other store the person looks at.

In that analogy ad blocking is giving the guy trying to attach the tracking device a punch in the nose and stopping him.

As I've said, ads don't have to be so invasive and intrusive. If they acted responsibly we wouldn't be so adamant about blocking them.

So you must have the built-in pop-up blockers built into almost all browsers turned off too, right? Since that's the only non-hypocritical way to make the argument you're making.

No, because as a developer of a site, you know the defaults... if browsers defaulted to predictably blocking ads, content providers would adjust accordingly. There is a difference between a standard on pretty much every browser and an addon.

But those pop-up blockers weren't always the default, and when people started installing addons to Firefox back in the day to block them I kept hearing all these same arguments about how it was immoral and going to kill the publishing industry.

It's not an issue of morality. It's an issue of overstepping what's acceptable to someone clicking on a link, exactly the same as what happened to pop-ups and pop-unders.

Look at the two dev tools charts here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9605/the-ios-9-review/10#Safar...

That is crazy. I'm sorry, but if your business model depends on megabytes of JS and 20 seconds per-page of network activity on my mobile device, I'm going to block it if I can. And if your business model fails, that's not my problem.

It's not even the advertisements that are the issue. If everyone started just serving images and removed all of the JS coming down from these ad exchanges I would turn my ad blocker off.

(As an aside, it's a hilarious juxtaposition listening to the arguments about the taxi industry and why Uber killing them is for the best, at the same time as I'm hearing the arguments about how a random publisher should be able to decide how much code I'm going to allow to execute on my own personal device and me blocking it is immoral or entitled.)

Pop up blocking wasn't always a standard feature. Then it was.

Once you get a chance to decide if the page's ads are to your liking, though, you have already been tracked and had the ad network's code executed on your machine.