I would be in favor of some kind of vetting program, where you (the ad network) commit to ensuring your (customers') ads aren't scammy, e.g. advertising on software download sites with an ad that looks like a download button. Much like spam, if your ads get reported and they're verified as being in violation, you get taken off the whitelist.

Unfortunately, the main use case I have for 'ad blockers' isn't just blocking visual ads; it's blocking sometimes tens of megabytes of third-party javascript, tracking, analytics, etc., which is not just a huge privacy issue but also slows the page down tremendously.

I remember working at a company which hosted and maintained, for a client, a forum for A-level testing students in the UK, or something of the sort. Over the years, they had insisted on us adding more and more to the site; third-party widgets, trackers, analytics, etc. Each time, we pushed back because of the impact to page loads, which leads to increased bounce rate, lower time-on-site, and so on, but they were the customer and had the final say.

Then, suddenly, Google announced that it was going to start factoring page load times into pages' search ratings and, overnight, the client was frantically asking us how we could improve their page times because they were absolutely atrocious.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, a lot of techniques came around to improve page load times while still letting you load your page full of noisy cruft and garbage, so now we have pages that load nice and quick and then, over the next few seconds, ruin themselves with trash that ruins the experience. "Articles" where every paragraph break is punctuated with another ad, pages with pop-up after pop-up asking if you want to join the site, sign up for a newsletter, check out our substack.

This is the sort of reason why people gravitate towards a site's app, I suspect, but that just solves the loading time issue and prevents you from blocking trackers and ads.

> I would be in favor of some kind of vetting program, where you (the ad network) commit to ensuring your (customers') ads aren't scammy, e.g. advertising on software download sites with an ad that looks like a download button. Much like spam, if your ads get reported and they're verified as being in violation, you get taken off the whitelist.

On principle I'd disagree, and say that those types of ads should be illegal to begin with. It's amazing how many straight up scams are being advertised on otherwise trusted platforms, like Youtube. You should be responsible for what ads you put up and make sure you aren't perpetuating something illegal.

I also have no faith in the ad companies not using this as the thin end of the wedge and opportunity to start chipping away at what constitutes a non-intrusive ad. Today they only allow static ads, in two years they'll allow gifs, and in five they'll allow autoplaying audio.

If a serious bargain could be made with the ad industry that we allow them to show non-intrusive ads, and don't block them, and in exchange, they behave like human beings, then I'd take that, but I'm still not convinced the people who work in those industries are quite human to begin with. And that bargain probably wouldn't even fix the 'site loads super slow because it has to download 5 GBs of JS bloat', which is something ad blockers and the like also help to manage.

Is this a case for steel-manning? We know what this is about and what's at stake.