Outstanding piece on the current state of ads and ad-blocking from my past debate partner on this very subject!
From my view, Solution #3 with a heavy peppering of Solution #1 seem the best way to go. Standardize ad actions and insist on ethical ad behavior. The IAB did this once upon a time when it set uniform sizing, and it helped tremendously. It could go a step further and declare, ideally with cooperation from the biggest ad serving companies (Google AdSense, et al) additional, stringent requirements.
Once upon a time in America, there was a habit of advertisers on television to double or triple the volume of their commercials, causing televisions to blare loudly, deeply upsetting viewers. Advertisers knew this tactic was effective, because people would hear the commercials far louder than the program they were watching, and it all but required their attention. The discomfort reaching for the volume control to turn down the suddenly-loud television could be directly equated to closing an annoying pop-up, or hunting desperately to find the hidden "X" in a takeover ad online. How did we fix this problem? We passed the CALM Act -
https/www.fcc.gov/guides/program-background-noise-and-loud-commercials That is, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, requiring that commercial advertisement on television be the same average loudness as the programs they accompany. Rest assured, if we hadn't introduced this regulation, there would have been a private inventor somewhere out there who would have come up with a way to automatically mute commercials, or eliminate them completely (until the advent of DVR/Netflix, a whole 'nother ball of wax).
The IAB and others have an opportunity to develop a deeply beneficial set of guidelines and keep the industry held to them - the alternative is a collective, eventual wipe-out of content publishers if browsers begin to come stock with adblocking plugins, or the gradually increasing adoption en masse by users of adblockers as just another part of life surfing the web, natural as sunscreen at the beach.
-JP