Chances are they’re a minor distraction, a rectangle or square that you’re used to ignoring. It’s been available on non-Apple mobile platforms, such as Android, too. Maybe a flight to a country that you were thinking of visiting. Or it popped up over what you were reading.

Randall Rothenberg, chief executive for the Internet Advertising Bureau, the lead trade association for digital advertising, did an interview with the Wall Street Journal and a bylined piece in Ad Age earlier this week.

Many sites have backend code that works similarly to ad trackers.

Furthermore, an expectation of getting something for nothing proliferated with casual piracy. The ads on mobile Safari, however, might be removed, the report explains. Pages would often look broken or not work, or would constantly have to be turned on and off to watch something like Youtube. Those in-app ads make up the majority of mobile advertising. iOS users are glad the feature has been introduced, but with so many content blockers out there it’s hard to decide which one you should opt for. Now publishers, the IAB and industry observers are legitimately concerned by an increase in awareness and usage of ad blockers, as evidenced by the immediate adoption of Peace and other iOS 9 apps. Advertisers have leaned on publishers to make ads more obtrusive – first with pop-up ads, then, after blockers became standard, with roll-downs, interrupters, pop-unders, ads that scroll with the page (eating your CPU in the process), and the whole parade of mutated attention-economy market-failures that fill your browser every day. It’s that simple.

Adobe and Pagefair estimate the global cost of ad blocking to be $41.4 billion by 2016.

Today, content providers, such as TechRepublic, rely on revenue from advertisers.

Both content and ads are expected to migrate to apps – whether Apple News, Facebook, or Snapchat – which you’re likely to see happen whether you believe blocking ads is moral or unethical, or whether you download a blocker that deletes all ads or let them all load on their own.

Of course, some sites blast you such that you have no choice but to block the ads to make it readable or watchable. Google Contributor solves a problem for publishers and possibly for people who worry about the ethics of ad blocking. Apps with these capabilities – going by such names as Purify Blocker and Blockr – quickly became top sellers. The IAB has suggested that it may sue to try and stop ad blocking; however the prospect of legal victory is dubious.

Such an arrangement may be the best way to preserve independent media on the open web. “I think I’ll buy a new phone”.

Yet those were just soft jabs compared to Apple’s recent decision to enable developers to create ad-blocking extensions for Safari on iOS 9.

And in this environment of sites so cluttered with misleading ads they are nearly unnavigable, Apple looks heroic, riding to the consumer’s rescue by providing all the content from newspapers without the ads, and by blocking ugly advertising on websites. Salaries. Payments for writers, photographers, creators. It still pays for the main part of content on the internet and TV. By comparison to the desktop findings, ad-blocking rates on mobile devices are below 1 percent now. By including ad blocking in iOS9, Apple isn’t trying to take down your site or mine-just like the drone program doesn’t deliberately target civilians and children.

“I don’t feel good… being the arbiter of what’s blocked”.

All the same, Apple’s “solution” to this problem is utterly ugly.

Hip web consumers have long used third-party ad blockers to unfug the web experience, and great applications like Readability explored alternate content revenue models while boosting type size and removing ad clutter from web content. I served on the Readability advisory board.

Some publishers are fighting back. Peace, which Mr. Arment made using data from Ghostery, a privacy-minded software developer, climbed to the top of the paid-apps chart.

As users we may have to ask ourselves whether the frame of the Mona Lisa being covered with McDonalds’ ads is less attractive to us than the idea of a clean frame around a portrait of the Mona Lisa eating a Big Mac.

For a contrarian view, Media Post columnist Ari Rosenberg argued that the industry and the IAB are now reaping what they have sown with screen blocks, autoplay and other obnoxious and intrusive digital ad conventions.

People who favour ad-blocking are generally in denial about the function of ads on the web.