How our love affair with ad-blocking risks giving Internet providers even more power

For consumers, the case for using an ad-blocker seems evident. Web pages load faster, you use less of your mobile data and you save money as a result. The New York Times took a look at this and It found that for many online news sites, it takes longer to load the ads than the news content visitors are presumably there to see.

Though an average Internet user might consider using an ad-blocker after seeing these results, the study offers even more compelling evidence to Internet providers that they should start blocking ads at the network level. Here's why. It takes 19.4 megabytes of data to load the Boston.com homepage once, according to the Times. Of that, advertising accounts for a whopping 15.4 MB. To the consumer, this is wasted data. To the wireless carrier, it's a waste of network capacity. That's a piece of the pipe it would otherwise devote to a new customer, or to improving Internet speeds for everyone else. Advertisements contribute to network congestion, and nobody likes that. So, filtering out ads offers Internet providers two main benefits: They look good in front of their customers. And they ease the demand on their own infrastructure.