Most of complain about ads, particularly ones that are "in our face" like the new floaters appearing on Web sites. Barnett has an interesting perspective based on a year spent in the Soviet Union in 1985:

One thing I remembered from my summer in the USSR in 1985: no advertising meant no one knew where anything was or how to buy it, so you wasted so much time ferreting out such info--just wandering around.

From The Gap will map itself (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog)
Referenced Thu Jun 28 2007 16:12:22 GMT-0600 (MDT)

Of course, that doesn't mean all ads are good or appreciated. The Web has allowed many of us to get at information that we need by easily pulling it when we need it rather than getting it by having the ads pushed at us and hoping the stream of information is helpful.