From AdGuard, a brief history of ad-blocking. In the article:
A little story to illustrate how powerful and influential a filter maintainer can be. In one of the countries there’s a filter list that’s clearly far more popular than any other local filter. And the maintainer of this filter list has a very peculiar way to deal with websites that show what this developer considers to be bad, shady or malicious ads. Instead of blocking such ads, the developer simply blocks the entire website. And then they send an email to the website owner with an ultimatum: “I blocked your website. You better take down these and these ads if you want to be unblocked”.
– Are ad blockers doomed or have we already won? A history lesson
Extortion for good.
I would love for this to be a whole series of articles, or a well-made documentary. I would pay well to read/see it.
Also: When on the go, I run a DNS sink based adblocker on the iPhone and iPad, which created a VPN for device-wide blocking. I explain this to people who ask me about the VPN icon in the status bar of my screenshots. To which some have commented that they actually like the ads they see, and wish there were more aggressive data collection for better personalisation. It is more than just the odd person who feels this.