It's not even difficult to do so, by eg. serving pages from a Google-controlled CloudFlare-like proxy service and/or a high-profile Google-style HTML-to-JavaScript encoder. Google's AMP project shows they're willing to throw the decentralized web under the bus.

The real question is: are you ok with ad-financed web sites in general, but have a problem with tracking (like me)? If so, we should really come up with a community-driven criteria for Acceptable Ads, or should disable un-vetted/not-whitelisted JavaScript alltogether.

Turns out, that (currently) involves ad blockers. For a while, I tried to use only uMatrix (i.e. blocking third-party requests), without an ad blocker. Sites broke because they assumed they could load Google Analytics. Workaround: Install uBlock Origin, because it (like NoScript) knows how to fake out specific scripts enough that a stubbed-out version of GA is used and the rest of the page runs correctly.

Isn't that what ABP / Eyeo is doing? You may criticize them for the fee they ask of the Ad companies to include / review their ads, but it's not like the fees are unfair or they aren't doing work that needs to be paid somehow. They even set up a non profit to deal with this matter.

> or should disable un-vetted/not-whitelisted JavaScript alltogether.

This is already being developed by the FSF as a Firefox extension. It makes the modern web completely unusable (of course) but it's the principle that counts, right?

> Like https, this will put alternative ad networks out of business.

How did https do anything like that?

They are a venture-funded company, so they are in it for more than the community, and can find other ways to monetize their service.

As you pointed out, we're a company. That means making money to defend against lawsuits, paying employees, etc.

It's not blackmail though, because as it was also pointed out, most websites join for free. No strings attached. Well, the strings are that the ads they want to display need to meet all of the Acceptable Ads criterias, which we found most users don't mind.

That allows us to find a middle ground between "we're drinking all the beer and pay nothing" that other, more scorched-earth-like adblockers go for, and the "oh gods my eyes"-design some ad-bloated websites go for, which no one really wants.

From a publisher perspective, we're not the evil guys either. We're not reducing anyone's revenue, we're allowing publishers to recuperate some of the losses caused by the user's choice of opting out of really annoying ads.

Hope this made sense!

Also, it's frustrating to still see your company play the "help us out we're broke" card by asking for donations after install even though you're a venture-funded company.

If anything, you guys should be going after the ad-networks since they are the ones allowing the malicious and rude ads to be placed - not the people whose livelihood depends on ads.

You are right. That fee is anything but fair. I was under the impression that they were operating their program under a non-profit, but it doesn't seem so.

FSF's LibreJS initiative is laudible, and something I'm willing to support with what I'm offering on the web. I found that sites that have content worth reading typically aren't script-heavy and entirely usable without script, or by using either F/OSS JavaScript (including jquery) and "trivial scripts" according to FSFs definition. The notorious exceptions are Google Analytics, ReCaptcha, and maybe Disqus, for which solutions must be found. Google Analytics, and the necessity to make use of it might be a case where Google as a major sponsor of web standards are acting in conflict with a solution based on web standards.

Wrt. ABP my initial gut reaction to paid ABP acceptable ads was extremely negative, but maybe I might reconsider.