The ethics of defending the descent of the ad system into such destructive behavior is an interesting discussion, perhaps.
I'd like to emphasize this. Somehow there is a sense of entitlement. Many businesses got where they are today by driving competition out of business, preventing new entrants in their market, and/or 'disrupting' entire industries.
They (the media companies that took ads too far and ruined the experience for us) did this to themselves. Ad blockers would have never proliferated, had the web not come to a state where 25% of web requests were ads and tracking requests.
Imagine an adblocker that blocks what we know are the worst. Then, implement an upvote/downvote overlay system to the ads and if downvoted, dynamically remove them from the page and future requests on a per user basis. The votes are tallied and if beyond a certain threshold, global block. Then, sell this information back to the advertisement agencies.
This was on the New York Times website, of all places.
I use firefox, so I disabled them all using media.autoplay.enabled = false. That solved it, but it made Youtube embeds and a few other things work a little funny.
... a new business model. I have no problem with that.
If other people's patronage is required to keep your favorite store open, that is none of their concern.
"The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it." -- John Gilmore
The advertisers will just inline the ads, changing content sites from redirectors to proxies.
Rock, paper, scissors.
The ethical dilemma I see is whether users should have tracking disabled by default. These users do subsidize much of the content on the internet; is it wrong to leave them be.