> I can feel with your sentiment, but don’t see a practical way to do that.

> Define “ad”.

"How to define 'ad'" is a question worth asking, because it is important that we block ads without blocking valuable content. And how to block harder-to-detect forms of ads is a real, open problem.

But it's just not an argument that blocking ads is impractical. The vast majority of ads are ones that no one is confused about, and which can be detected fairly easily. Imperfect != impractical.

What you're saying is an example of a perfect solution fallacy. Obviously adblocking is never going to be perfect, but it works pretty well.

> And for true ads, would you want to block a starting blog author from promoting their work online?

Not in a void, the way you're presenting it. I'm proposing blocking all ads, not just newcomers' ads. Ads provide the greatest advantage to the best-funded, and that's usually not newcomers. Advertising benefits entrenched interests, not newcomers. Uniformly blocking all ads would be a boon to newcomers, not a harm.

At a more fundamental level, ads fundamentally prevent capitalism from providing the greatest value for the least cost. Ads allow advertisers to provide lower value at greater cost by spending more money on advertising.

An absence of advertising means that people find out about products from higher-signal-to-noise ratio sources of information, such as independent review sites, word-of-mouth, and subject experts. Consumer reports is an excellent ROI: buy nice or buy twice. My friends are better at recommending books and movies to me than any advertiser. And it should be the responsibility of the FDA to disseminate information about new treatments to doctors, and the responsibility of doctors/prescribers to keep up-to-date: drug ads and prescriber kickbacks from pharmaceuticals should be unequivocally illegal.