BUT the publisher intercepted you and said "you cannot continue with adblock turned on". Why do you think you have the right to see that content without seeing the ads when the publisher explicitly said you can't do that?
When he wastes your bandwidth with ads, he is the devil, but when you waste his bandwidth, it's perfectly OK?
Technical ability has nothing to do with it. You have the technical ability to stab someone with a knife. You have the technical ability to download a book, copy it and then distribute it. Is that OK too?
Just because you CAN do something does not mean you SHOULD do it.
> you cannot continue with adblock turned on
They don't say that. They tell their users "to continue, please whitelist our site or turn off your adblocker", which is a whole lot more irresponsible and something I am totally not okay with.
People might actually believe the message, they ought to turn off their adblocker and view the site!
I help many non-technical people clean their laptops (yes it takes a lot of time, but I'm a nice guy and it can be done during beers). I install them an adblocker. If the only reason was "because the Internet just looks nicer without ads", I probably wouldn't. But especially for not-very-technical people, an adblocker is usually a better (and way less resource-intensive) security defence than an actual virus scanner.
What if sites like Forbes manage to successfully guilt these people into disabling their adblockers? Forbes will get a few dollars yay and my friends may lose a few hundred because they got ransomware not-yay.
I wish they just told people to go away.
Yes. He can try to stop me, just as I try to stop him. This is the game. It's an antagonistic relationship. There's nothing inherently "wrong" about either side - it just is how it is.
> You are not entitled to see the content.
If their server gives me HTML containing the content, it's up to _my_ computer what to render, therefore I am entitled to see or not see whatever is in that response.
I am very entitled to use of my own computer. They do not get to decide what happens once their content is on my end. If I were sending malicious code to their server in order to remove the adds or similar, you'd have an argument but since it's happening entirely on my computer, you don't. The entitlement to how my computer renders it rests entirely on me.
This is not a game. You just like to freeload and when somebody calls your bull, you throw a tantrum.
Blocking ads will only make things worse, btw. You just don't see it coming, yet. Just wait for the telcos.
You think your privacy is violated now? LOL.
Oh and btw, if you missed it, Verizon bought AOL. Have a nice evening.
This is the same as music/movie piracy. Basically you're doing it because you dont have the legal/physical repercussions of taking other things in life.
With ad blocking you go right to the original source, ask them for a copy of the content, they give it to you, then choose how you're going to render it. They gave you the content. They never made me accept a license agreement on it. I can choose to render it however I damn well please because that's up to my computer. Does IE produce an immoral rendering of the page because it doesn't support a CSS feature they use? What if I load the page in Lynx and don't see ads, is that immoral?
Might depend on your country (or state). But it doesn't really seem like a legally enforceable condition to me. Not to mention all the practical snags of such a demand.
For instance, these ads are generated real-time and are targeted towards the user. Would yielding to that be part of the same demand? If you block or shield against targeting, or even in a private tab, or clearing cookies on exit. You could make the same argument that, this too deprives publishers (part) of their income because tracking is less effective.
What if the ads contain tooling for realtime monitoring how long you are "active" on the page, which parts your mouse hovers on, etc? Are we morally obliged that we run that code and (truthfully) submit that data as well? (Rhetorical question obviously)
Morality is tied to intention. If you can only access something with a screen reader and can't see ads, that's fine. If you're intentionally removing ads while full well knowing what they are for, that's immoral.
Then again morality is subjective to the individual so perhaps this is better described as basic ethics.
Sorry, but it's _my_ computer. I control it. Publishers don't get to decide what it does or does not do. I do.