Besides the acceptable ads program being an obvious cover narrative for extortion (that would be criminal in almost any other industry), my thought was always:

Besides the acceptable ads program being an obvious cover narrative for extortion (that would be criminal in almost any other industry), my thought was always: if in some alternative universe this business model starts to gain widespread traction, where does it end? SafeAds by Java on 500m PCs? AdFish by Lenovo, powered by some OEM adblocker? LiveAds for Windows by Microsoft with 85% market penetration?