It's a valid comparison. Long ago it was ok to kill your enemy. Not long ago it was ok to have slaves. Today either is a sure way to end up in prison. Standards are rising. IT is a very new thing and the society and the laws are behind a bit. Adtech uses this to extract profit while it can. But this will end. Soon it will be a crime to store personal data: names, location, anything like that. GDPR is just the beginning. Adtech will fight, but it will lose. This business will disappear entirely, just like slave labor. In far future it will be a crime to be intrusive: any unwanted ads; and mining personal data will be seen like cannibalism today, i.e. even criminals will consider such people as freaks. Right now we are in the era of wild west in IT.

> Comparing advertising and marketing to the ownership of human beings?

That's not exactly what happened here.

OP repeated the beginning of a truism: "ads fund the development of the web while at the same time causing a whole host of severe problems for its users (individually and as a whole)."

OP left a hole where the italized part of the truism should be.

OP asked HN to fill that hole.

On a side devoted to tech/software, it's either low effort or bad-faith to ask others to fill a hole in such a well-known truism.

In light of this I offer up a countervailing law, "Loki's Law:"

"If you leave a Hitler-sized hole in your argument, expect it to be filled accordingly."