Exactly. In principle I understand the point of ads from a market perspective; their purpose is to inform potential buyers of the existence of products that they would not otherwise know about, thereby making trades happen. It increases competition and helps reduce prices by presenting competing products to customers.

These are good effects, but they are not the only effects of an unregulated advertisement market optimizing for profit. In the current ad-tech market, the information is increasingly of the mis-information or dis-information type, and we have whole platforms whose central purpose is to attract the attention of people just to show them ads. None of that is good for anyone but the ad-tech companies, and this has to stop.

I know that a total ban is probably unrealistic, but we desperately need some kind of regulation which takes the advertisement distribution away from these companies and lets it be controlled by someone else, preferably non-profit organizations that actually optimize for maximizing the amount of useful and truthful information that is distributed to customers. Murdering Meta is a very happy side effect of that.