The browser makers also have a lot of power here. At the moment, the anti-tracking / anti-advertising tools are a bit of a blunt instrument. I don't want to ad-block The Register, because I want to read your stuff, so I want you to get paid. But equally, I can't be bothered to turn on an ad-blocker, and then manually configure it to see ads from the sites I want to get paid. I've therefore decided it's only fair to accept advertising - rather than be lazy and block it all.
The same with tracking and cookies. It's a lot of effort, what with having to clear the Flash cache, the browser cache, and presumably when IPv6 comes in, regularly change the MAC address of your pooter that it's reporting
The browser makers could simplify a lot of this. They could play around with what info they give out in headers, what links they automatically follow, what images they download, how they respond to javascript tracking and how they accept cookies. And give the user back a lot of control for all the sneaky stuff that's going on. Although I guess Chrome has no incentive to do that, and Firefox do get a lot of their cash from Google - so will have to be cautious about pissing them off.
One thing that would be nice (and very easy) is a way to right click on an obnoxious advert and kill it. Like the O2 ones that the Register was running a while back, and said they couldn't cancel because they had a contract - and O2 took an absolute age to fix. Adobe don't want to give you tools to turn that shit off, because they're crap, but Firefox could easily do it. Either a one-off thing, or just a one-click way to kill the Flash Plug-in, if Adobe won't play ball in some way.
There's likely going to have to be a deal at some point. There's a whole bunch of people holding the nuclear option on each other, so if they don't deal, someone's going to press it. Governments may choose to get involved, which will almost certainly fail - but could do so by buggering up the market totally. Browser makers could nuke the advertising market instantly - if they were really pissed off. Facebook, Google and social networks have loads of info gathered through log-ins, so might feel that going on an anti-advertising-tracking campaign could suit them - as they get their creepy info a different way. Or the consumers could go rogue and start boycotting the creepiest stuff (in reality whichever high-profile target missteps and gets noticed), and force change.
It's all fun and games, until someone loses an eye...