Yea I have to agree. Although it'd be interesting to see some sort of regulation against advertisers, it's hard to imagine a situation where that actually comes to fruition. In all honesty although I don't like ads, sites are well within their rights to try as hard as they can to show them to me, so long as that doesn't extend past their website.
So the solution is having the choice of either paying not to have ads or having ads? I'm not saying that is right or wrong, I just want to clarify.
Food for thought, I wonder if that works specifically for them because it's harder to block their ads. I.e. it typically takes a different level of expertise to block their ads, as compared to a browser extension (have to block their ad traffic on a network level). Or is it really something else about their product?
As a counter example, I don't pay for youtube premium. Definitely part of the reason behind that is because it's easy to block them so long as I'm watching in a browser.
Open ended question, is there a solution? Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads. Advertisers inherently want their ads to be seen/heard, which means there is pressure to make their ads more intrusive. Yet the more intrusive the ads become, the more annoyed the person accessing the content becomes (and thus perhaps becomes more likely to get an ad blocker). The more people that block ads, the more the website needs to make from each person who isn't blocking ads (likely meaning additional pressure to make ads more intrusive). What path are we headed down? What happens when so many people are blocking ads that the amount of value needed to be extracted from those who don't block ads is impossible to achieve? Does the internet consolidate more?
I personally use ad blockers. Right now I'm browsing with Ghostery and AdBlock. I'm surprised that only 27% of people use them currently. Makes me want to check out my parents computers when I visit next and make sure they have an ad blocker installed. But back to the questions, does this mean that the contract between websites their visitors is inherently broken? Is the current situation a race to the bottom? Is that tenable? What's the alternative?
Why are we attacking the person instead of the argument? We should be discussing the points, not trying to start a flame war. I'm really not sure how vaccination documentation to eat in a restaurant is equivalent to jailing people for their ethnicity, sexuality, or ideology. Can we take a step back and discuss your thought process? You have come to a much different conclusion than I and I would like to understand how. While doing so, can we kindly assume the other person is not trying to be evil?
I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing. When I hear people say "vaccine passport" I assume they mean "COVID-19 vaccination documentation". Is that a correct interpretation, or does a vaccine passport mean something more? If it is just "COVID-19 vaccination documentation", has there been a push to not allow the paper documentation? I've been primarily using my paper documentation without issue. As far as I'm aware, digital access to your vaccination status is simply a nice to have redundancy.