Although many people here seem disparaging of Fairfax and Stuff, I am a fan of Mike "MOD" O'Donnell and I enjoy his intelligent columns in the Dominion Post and elsewhere. His latest, on Stuff, discusses the pros and cons of ad blockers. This is an issue that has also popped up on Geekzone.

I have used script blockers since the days of Proxomitron. I find most advertising unwelcome and intrusive. It generally doesn't interest me. If I want something, I research it first and my decisions are not based on advertising claims.

In the early days of the Internet, before commercial interests took over, it was mostly open source and devoted to the idea of free sharing. Comparing then to now it could be argued that money and commercialisation have corrupted something that was once pure and noble. It can also be argued that commercialisation has resulted in the enormous range of goods, services and sheer knowledge now available on-line that could not have even been dreamt of in the 1990s. Money has also had an empowering effect.

So which is it? Good or bad? Or somewhere in-between? Commercial interests don't just saturate us with uninvited ads that might or might not be useful for anything. They also spy on us, mine our data, try to track us, steal our bandwidth and data allowances with their endless intrusions, pursue an active and relentless campaign to manipulate and motivate us. Are the rewards of the modern Internet worth the price?

I block ads because they irritate and annoy me and I don't see any personal value in them. Whatever actual information they may contain will turn up elsewhere if it has any real usefulness. I just don't see the point of them. Yet they do support and make possible a great deal of content that I do see the point of and would miss very much if it was no longer available.

I can live with static ads, especially if they support something I appreciate. I do not tolerate uninvited audio or video pop-ups, or anything that tries to jump into my face. The latest trick seems to be seemingly useful links that appear in search results but then hijack your browser and loop you around whatever they are pushing while preventing you from exiting. I just hit another one while doing a perfectly innocent search for an Opera Mail question. These links don't seem to be making permanent changes, which is marginally less criminal than in the past, but the only way to exit them is to close the browser with Task Manager. Is this kind of crap the future of the Internet?

Here is the link to the O'Donnell item: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/70512028/adblockers--blessing-or-curse-for-the-free-internet