I'm with you. I'd be very curious to see what the internet would look like without large-scale advertising. I know that would kill significant chunk of "free" content, but would the world really be worse for that? As a tradeoff we wouldn't have the scary empire that is Google (and Facebook etc), we wouldn't have ubiquitous tracking, we wouldn't have artificial page view count inflation (via pagination etc), probably less ugly SEO, and much more.

But the cat is out of the bag, while ad-free internet might make fun thought experiment I don't see really the situation changing in the large anytime soon.