Advertisements have been disabled on East, West, and Europe gateways, both in classic bnet packets and WAR3's third party ad thing. Asia remains fully enabled. Sounds like they're slowly disassembling bnet1 in preparation for either a move or a drop.

Potentially! They did say they were porting the games to Bnet2... and they always say that when I ask every BlizzCon and Press Event, ;).

Ads have been switched off for quite some time now

I hadn't really noticed... I don't go on bnet much, and when I do, I'm usually more focused on bn2 research... I just thought it was an odd turn of events.