It can. Arguably however if you agree with the premise of the whitelist as beneficial and there is a fixed schedule of charges (ie no company is preferenced in charging) then to me it seems OK.
You can't have the whitelist without having ads/networks assessed to see if they meet the criteria. Even if you crowdsourced that [which probably wouldn't be objective enough] you'd need to administrate the whitelist and so you need some revenue to cover the overheads at least. Even automating it there's a cost in creating the code. It seems right to pass that cost on and the networks are the ones holding all the money.
You could have users pay for the whitelisting to avoid "misaligned incentives".
Indeed charging the companies for assessment gives an incentive to reject them so you can charge to assess them again ... 4) profit.
You can't have the whitelist without having ads/networks assessed to see if they meet the criteria. Even if you crowdsourced that [which probably wouldn't be objective enough] you'd need to administrate the whitelist and so you need some revenue to cover the overheads at least. Even automating it there's a cost in creating the code. It seems right to pass that cost on and the networks are the ones holding all the money.
You could have users pay for the whitelisting to avoid "misaligned incentives".
Indeed charging the companies for assessment gives an incentive to reject them so you can charge to assess them again ... 4) profit.