It is abusive and hard core sales that I don’t understand (why do they want to piss off their potential customers). However, it will cause most surfers to welcome more government regulation.
I agree with your premise but the internet is certainly one free-market arena where supply and demand have worked efficiently ie the arms race between obnoxious ads and browser extensions that combat same.
It’s interesting to note that the big three browsers - Chrome, Firefox and IE/Edge - have rarely, if ever, provided the ability to fight off these ads. In the case of Google, it’s because they have no incentive to block their own revenue stream but all are guilty of leaving the heavy lifting up to others. It really is ridiculous to have to install half a dozen or more browser extensions to rope in all the Javascript, Flash and other idiocy, especially when things like Flash have demonstrable security exploits.
I’m not defending them but obnoxious ads and advertisers often get paid based on ‘impressions’ or ‘click-throughs’ only. For better or worse, a delivery of an ad or an inadvertent click still pays the same even if it annoys the end-user.