> Nobody is 'hurting anyone' - not even slightly, by ensuring that their free product also has ads.
This isn't a convincing argument. As an extreme example, replace ads with something that's clearly detrimental for the user: "nobody is hurting anyone by ensuring that their free product also delivers a LD50 of cyanide" is clearly bogus. While ads don't kill people, the way that they are distributed currently has many negative externalities that the user must deal with.
> So 'ads are bad' but 'cyanide is bad' therefore 'ads are bad'?
More like "ads are bad" means that your free product with ads is also bad, just as "cyanide is bad" makes your free product laced with cyanide bad.
> The vast, vast majority of ads are just fine and have no negative externalities.
The problem is that bad ads show up basically everywhere. Sure, 99% of the ads on news websites can't infect me with malware, but there's that one that Google hasn't gotten around to banning yet that is running on every website…and even if this wasn't true, basically 100% of them track me or make my web browsing experience slower.
This isn't a convincing argument. As an extreme example, replace ads with something that's clearly detrimental for the user: "nobody is hurting anyone by ensuring that their free product also delivers a LD50 of cyanide" is clearly bogus. While ads don't kill people, the way that they are distributed currently has many negative externalities that the user must deal with.