Hopefully they will just go away; much easier to understand the value proposition of some content if the owner has had to put an actual price tag on it. Yes, people will end up consuming less media - but given how precipitously the quality of news and news-like publishing has dropped, I'd be glad to have fewer, better sources of "journalism".

If you don't like them then don't visit them or visit them with an ad blocker on. Don't deprive users from the content and don't deprive staff from their jobs.

This is just like the "I have nothing to hide so I don't mind tracking" argument.

No. It's really not. It's "I would gladly give person A the thing I have X for the thing they'll give me Y but you won't let me because you don't want to do that".

It's more like the minimum wage argument or something like that but you don't really need an analogy.

Not that simple. Even for paid media (Netflix, for example) advertising is starting to creep back in, because consumers have no way to resist it. Companies which don't gather ad money and just rely on actual value-transfer transactions get outcompeted.

Advertising itself is only mildly offensive; if done with taste it can be no problem at all, but too many companies seemingly don't know when to stop - the line from Ready Player One about monetizing 70% of a person's field of view sounds exactly like what Meta and Google would do if they could get away with it.

I want legislation on this topic to create breathing space for real businesses which make things of value.

You're talking as a richer person.

Advertisers aren’t charities though, their objective is to show ads to people who have the means to buy stuff - poor people seeing their ads (and having their content subsidised) isn’t something they want and they’d be more than happy to stop it should there become a reliable way of tracking and detecting poor people.

They can close if it is too expensive to run them.