I don't buy this.

These kinds of sites are already behind a paywall for most of the content you'd want to see, as Graham notes. I do not understand why sites like the New York Times, which generate massive amounts of traffic as far as I know, cannot use other real estate on their websites to serve static ads with zero nefarious tracking enabled. The model already exists for their physical product. I fail to see why we can't have a version of the Internet that ports over that previously successful system.

I don't work in Internet ads; I work in hardware. So maybe someone here can help me understand why what I would otherwise assume to be a simple implementation is viewed as impossible. I'm obviously missing something.