Why is there a debate about ad blockers at all?

Follow the money.. All $150 billion of it (1)

The reason you see a lot of opinion pieces against ad blocking in mainstream press and blogs is because their main income stream comes digital advertising and either changing business model to paid content or negating ad blocking will take a lot of effort and expense.

There's literally hundreds of thousands of people in the journalism and ad industry who's ability to put bread on the table is put at risk and Apple's support for ad blocking threatens to tips the scale of blocking use. Naturally there is every incentive to expend journalistic and PR efforts to protect their income stream. Much like the music industry did in Napster days before iTunes.

It has very little to do with rights and morals and the like. I'd be surprised if most of the tech savvy writers writing these pieces don't use ad blocking themselves personally.

1. http://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising...

I just wrote this about how we're handling ad blocking with our news recommendation engine startup and the iOS version of our news app: https://medium.com/@declanm/the-right-way-to-block-ads-on-ne...

TLDR: We're enabling reader view, but not by default.

In terms of the linked article's prediction--"disable/enforce the removal of ad blockers is...futile"--I don't think that's the case. There already are ad-blocker-blockers and probably ad-blocker-blockers soon too, if they don't already exist. This arms race is only now starting in earnest.

One possibility is you'll see news organizations rely more on sponsored content for revenue, with disclaimers about sponsorship only in the fine print. Offhand I believe Wired, Buzzfeed, VentureBeat, TechRadar, ReadWriteWeb, and Android Authority run sponsored content already; even The Atlantic did, though there was a fuss about it.

More broadly, think of it as a piracy problem: You probably don't care if <=5% of your potential customers pirate your product--they're probably the folks with the least disposable income anyway. Some people are probably still using lynx to read news articles (not that there's anything wrong with that). But you do care very, very much if ad blocking becomes sufficiently mainstream that 50% of your users are "pirates."

Why do you think there's a debate? Because they're in the interests of some people, and they're against the interests of others.

Once something is in someone's interest, they will always, always manage to dream up a moral justification for it.

Yes, why? I get to choose the behavior of my property. My computer is my property, even more than your idea is your "intellectual property". So, why can't I block ads? Ads are all lies anyway.