Granted, advertising in the early 2000s was vastly different though. It was served organically, with none of the tracking or embedded-scripting nonsense that's ubiquitous today (whether from Google or other actors). The very notion of "ad-blocking" or "tracker-blocking" would have made no sense back then.

While tracker-blocking in today's sense would have made no sense, there certainly was ad-blocking and cookie-blocking before the 2000s.

AdSubtract advertised it's ability to block doubleclick.com cookies in March of 2000: https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_bl...

The article also mentions Siemens' WebWasher product which blocked cookies. Other cookie-blocking products were released in the same time period.

I was referring more to their motivation for doing things, not specific shitbag things they do now.

I remember using Privoxy back in the early 2000s because even then certain ad networks were regularly serving up malicious content and pop-ups.

at that time Google was the good guy serving up only text ads.