You can disable that. The only questionable part is who decides what ads should be allowed when that setting is on. Here I agree, if AdBlock developers are paid for whitelisting, such practice is very questionable. Are they?
Source: My employer (a major site with Alexa rank <100) contacted ABP asking to have our text-only, clearly-delimited sponsored search results whitelisted. They told us that it wouldn't happen unless we signed an NDA, paid them a share of the revenue difference, and installed a third-party script on our site to allow them to track our users. (We just laughed at them and changed our markup to work around the block.)
I love the NDA part. Looks very transparent and opensourcy..
I wonder if there would be interest in a real community driven whitelist. One without money involved or a dominant company applying it.
edit: This might work under the premises that there is (1) such a tool/list itself (2) a maintaining community and (3) a set of adblockers to support the list.
(1) is pretty simple. It's a list of ad-placements followed by a set of exclusion filters. This one needs to be transparently editable and commentable (both the ad-placement and the filter list edits)
(2) is a bet, I admit. I could imagine that if there is a serious interest in the allowance of unintrusive ads than this would be not a problem if enough reach is provided.
(3) is again an easy one. There are only so many adblockers out there. One key differentiator to ABP is that they don't allow ads on default. If that stays the same and the exception list is treated as an opt-in addition, I can only imagine benefits for those blockers.
The only losing party is ABP since their overall impact might be reduced due to the lost of their monopoly. Since lists need to be transparent, their list could be used to start off and improve further maintainance.
Yes, Adblock Plus' whitelist has been compared many times to a mafia style extortion scheme. Companies pay to let their ads through. By using ABP over other copies of the same open source code (or competitors like uBlock), you are supporting this business model.
