The publishers aren&#x27;t very innocent themselves. Clickbait articles are nowadays not a dirty strategy to get ad views, but to be expected. Then you have the endemic tracking going on, the tracking that has become intertwined with viewing an ad. Being tracked and seeing an ad... it&#x27;s the same thing! Nowhere else in the real world but on Internet is this to be expected. And it&#x27;s a debate that is frustratingly only discussed in organizations like the EFF, never lifted to the general public.<p>The mafia comparison feels much more like a stretch when talking of ad blockers than when talking of the bulk of the world&#x27;s news sites secretly (unless inspecting network traffic or HTML code) using a common few advertisement agencies.<p>I think the recent cookie laws feel pretty useless, especially since cookies aren&#x27;t nasty by themselves. &quot;Hi! This site uses cookies! Click here to learn more.&quot; It doesn&#x27;t tell me anything. It doesn&#x27;t imply that the site is evil nor good. However, give me a law requiring web sites to say &quot;Hi! We are part of a tracking network where your behavior on this site will be registered.&quot; Then we&#x27;re talking. Where the link doesn&#x27;t lead to an explanation by the publisher, but be required to lead to a link on an external part with an easily digestible, up front explanation of what an ad tracker does and can do. I&#x27;m honestly quite fed up that this offensive behavior can keep going on behind the scenes. All people see are photos of a new car model. A normal ad that is anything but normal.<p>For as long as there is this World Wild West on the publishers&#x27; sides, I&#x27;m not going to change my behavior on defending myself. Because I look at this as a form of defense. It&#x27;s simply like running antivirus tools on Windows. I wouldn&#x27;t want a trojan horse to be downloaded that uploads my browsing behavior to some server either. The difference from what these guys are doing seems razor-thin.