What if there was no advertising on the internet?

Remember the bad old days of email, when you’d get 15 spam emails for every legitimate one — or more? And then the “junk mail” folder came around, and spam-sniffing programs that tried to weed out the bad email from the good.

And now, I’ll bet, most of your email is pretty good. In fact, I’d wager that most of what you call spam now, if it’s in your inbox,  is actually something you signed up for, mistakenly, or whatever, and not misaddressed Russian v1agr4 pitches.

(Note: some businesses, like the one I work for, deliberately tune their spam filter low, so that they don’t mistakenly filter out any legitimate email. But most personal email addresses, like hotmail or gmail, I find to be remarkably spam-free.)

Now what if you could have an ad-free existence elsewhere on the internet? No ads floating across your screen. no flashing banners at the top, screaming “You’ve Won!!” Well, you can — easily, with Firefox and the AdBlock Plus extension. That’s what I’ve been using for eons.

But Orin Thomas, at Windows IT Pro, argues that default ad-blocking will be the browser standard within five years, just like tabs and integrated search engines.

Of course, it’s not all just fun and games for users, he points out. Who will pay for ads if no one will see them? And who will produce “free” content, if it’s not ad-supported?

And then he tosses out this bombshell idea:

If newspapers wanted to hit the online content industry hard right now, they would be running non-stop information about how to obtain and use Ad Block plus. From the perspective of traditional newspapers, free online content is trashing their business model, so turnabout would seem to be fair.

Of course, that would mean newspapers themselves wouldn’t be able to get advertisers on board, but maybe in the absence of competition, they would have a little more breathing room?

And, also, the obvious workaround would be “sponsored content” like in a reality TV show. So perhaps there would be text Ford ads mixed in with Coca-Cola the regular content, that would Doritos be difficult or impossible to block.