This seems self-servingly reductive. It sure would be convenient for people who don't like paying for content if the Internet was an amoral technical automaton, but in fact there are human people on the other side of that HTTP request. Your your interactions with them are subject to moral and ethical considerations just like any other, even though they are mediated by automatic mechanisms.

note: I don't think PH is a particularly sympathetic example since most of the content is probably pirated in the first place, but your argument bumped me.

The moral and ethical considerations are simple - you sent data to me, I get to do whatever I want with it, subject to legal limits. I can view the whole site in my browser. Or half of it. Or view it in Emacs. I can run scripts. Or not run them. This is my machine, my execution environment. If you want to dictate how I consume the content, then you have the right to present me with the option and let me agree or disagree. If I disagree, don't serve me the content. Talking morality here is just trying to guilt-trip people into compliance with crappy money-making tactics.

If you also believe that's immoral, then I really think this thread is going nowhere, as it's unlikely we'll find common ground. If you don't believe TV ad-skipping is immoral, then what's the difference between that and web ad blocking?

Because it's automated? Why does that magically change its morality? Does that mean a self-built DVR that automatically skips ads is immoral? You and others are arguing "just because something is technically possible, it doesn't mean it's moral"... but you can't have it both ways. The technical ease (or lack thereof) by which you do or don't avoid seeing ads should have no bearing on its morality.

I enjoy reading sci-fi and fantasy, but it's getting harder and harder to pick the next thing to read, because I'm getting pickier with age. It would be great if I could find a source of information about new sci-fi and fantasy books, so that I didn't have to pick my books blindly and get disappointed so often.

Fortunately, I've discovered a printed magazine being sold at a store a few blocks away from my home. The greatest thing about it is that it's free of charge! I don't have to pay for the magazine, I just have to go to the store and pick up the copy.

However, it's peppered with ads. Some are annoying because they're placed in such a way that I don't realize they're ads. Instead, I think I'm reading a book review and I don't realize my mistake until I'm almost a full paragraph into the ad. Others are clearly ads, but they're a whopping four pages and they interrupt my reading flow because I have to skip them. Others are just half a page in size, but the paper for those pages is much, much thicker than normal, which makes turning pages awkward and cumulatively adds to the weight of the magazine -- so much so that some issues weigh close to an old-school telephone book!

But hell, it's still a good source of information, so I use it and grumble, until one day one of the other readers gets so fed up, that they lock themselves in their home for a couple of months and invent a machine that can examine the magazine, cut out all the ads from it and assemble what remains into a smaller, nicer-looking magazine. So now I can go to the store, grab a new issue of the magazine, come home, feed the magazine into the ad-cutter and then enjoy reading all the information I wanted without any ad-related annoyance.

This works fine for all readers, but not so much for the ads industry. Naturally, something's got to give, so new technologies emerge. The ads industry designs new ads for the magazine to print and these ads have tiny cameras that observe what the reader is doing and tiny wireless components that report what the cameras observed. That way the magazine publisher and the ads industry can know whether I'm actually reading the ads or not. Not only that, they can also know which ads I look at longer, which ones I skip faster, which ones I come back to look at later and they can even know other things about what I do at home, including what other magazines I like to read.

Of course, I don't like that at all. It's my home, you know? Maybe during the summer I like to get up and walk to my coffee-maker clad only in an old T-shirt I slept in -- family jewels hanging freely -- and read the new issue of the magazine while sipping my morning coffee, before getting dressed. Only now I feel uncomfortable because there's a fucking camera catching glimpses of my danglies and sending them to some ad executive up there. Or maybe I'm not that gross, but I still object to intrusive shit being forced on me.

And then it gets worse: the magazine publisher starts complaining if I use my ad-cutting machine. They don't stop me from reading their magazine -- still free, mind you! -- but they send me passive-aggressive letters whenever I put an issue through the ad-cutter: "Ads pay our printing costs and allow us to pay our authors and editors. We're not charging you for any of this. Won't you reconsider reading our ads?"

Since I'm not the only reader and this magazine isn't the only one to use the ads to sustain themselves, things get complicated. Huge discussions erupt about ad-cutting: readers just want to read their stuff without annoyances and creepy surveillance, writers and editors just want to produce content and get paid for doing the stuff they love, publishers just want to retain their readership and keep making money from putting content in their hands, and the ads industry just wants its profits and the rest of us can get fucked, thank you very much.

It's clear that there's a problem with ads, though, so different magazines try different solutions. Some band together and spin off ad companies that promises to serve only "nice ads" that aren't annoying or intrusive. Others say "Fuck it, this didn't work, we're charging you from now on." Others get rid of ads and try subsisting on donations and patronage. Some others get rid of ads by forming a group that charges you a monthly submission and distributes that money based on what magazines you get more frequently from the stores. Still others decide to offer premium content that you have to pay for and don't care whether you cut their ads as much. Some even decide to give you a choice by offering a free ad-ridden edition and a paid ad-free edition for each issue. Not to mention those who go the other way and work as hard as they can on injecting their ads into content in such a way that your ad-cutter can't get rid of them easily.

How does the story end? I don't know, we're all still trapped in it. But it still boggles my mind whenever someone tells me that I have a moral and ethical obligation to leave the ads intact in the magazine that's in my hands, in my home, just because I got it for free and the publisher expects me to use it in a certain way. To me, it's not me who's at fault for "stealing content" and "getting something for nothing"; it's the publisher and the ads industry who are overstepping their boundaries and crossing several lines, just because they don't want to change their business model. Every time someone berates me for cutting ads from my magazines and telling me I can't eat my cake and have it too, I can't help but wonder why they don't think of the publishing industry and the ads industry in same terms.

That freedom was confirmed in the EU for cars, and some other personal devices recently.

If its in your control, its yours to use.

I request a webpage, and receive back text data.

My browser parses and manipulates it into a visual form.

If I want, I can discard any piece of the data before displaying - and browsers frequently do this when syntax errors occur.

Is a browser obligated to serve the user an error if the data is incomplete?

Why is the browser then obligated to display another page in its complete form?

Especially if said complete form contains software designed to break the security of the browser?

Its just not an ethical issue. The ad industry needs to pivot. They've lost their credibility that they can be trusted.

Visiting Forbes today may be as dangerous as visiting a torrent site in the early 90s.

You don't know till you execute the code, so why not stop treating the browser like a sex partner who might just have HIV, but you're not sure, and start wearing a little protection?

No they are not. They are willing to serve you pages with ads. Not pages without ads.

The logic that you guys use is pretty twisted.

These companies exist because of ads.

No ads = they don't exist = no content.

In the long run:

A) They will find a way around it in which case you will see ads.

or B) They will all be about of business, in which case you get no content.

Nothing is free, everything takes time and energy from someone else.

"is also none of their damn business" obviously it's 'their business'. It is literally their business :)

My bet is that companies just find a way around ad-blocking.

It'll be interesting to see just how.

[0] - rightly so, but that's a feature of capitalism, isn't it?

Demanding that I execute all these instructions without exception is like a subscription service sending me a newsletter in the mail and demanding that if I pick it up, I've somehow agreed to read the whole thing, beginning to end, out loud. Absurdity.

This is an out-and-out lie. They are willing to serve me pages without ads, because they do it every time I browse there with an ad-blocker. I make an HTTP request, their site responds. The HTML code asks me to download an ad, and I, through my ad-blocker, decline. That doesn't stop their server from sending me the content.

If they don't like that, they're perfectly free to design their site to force me to download ads in order to view the content. They have every right to, for instance, show me a video ad, and then have me take a quiz to demonstrate that I viewed the ad and remember it, before continuing on to the rest of the site. If they don't want to do this, that's their problem, not mine.

>No ads = they don't exist = no content.

It's not my job to worry about their business model.

>My bet is that companies just find a way around ad-blocking

Well, they could just embed the ads into the page, such as by serving them from the same domain and making it non-obvious which images are ads and which are not. People have been proposing this for ages. But the ad companies don't like it because they don't trust their own clients to accurately report ad-servings. Again, not my problem. They need to fix their own business model. If they can't do that, and go out of business, that's their problem. They should have done a better job coming up with a viable business model.

This may sound greedy to you, but for you to have the absolute gall of telling people that they need to expose their computers to malware is purely asinine.

You people are naively deluded.

" No ads = they don't exist = no content. It's not my job to worry about their business model."

You don't seem to grasp the realpolitik here.

No ads = no content - in the long run.

Get it?

You don't seem to grasp the math here.

If there are no ads, they, and all their peers cease to exist.

Or else they go full paywall.

I'm not even making an ideological statement - although I could very well do that, I don't need to.

Do you know the reason that there are maybe 1/3 the number of foreign correspondents for major news networks - and why there is so little coverage of Middle East etc? Because CNN now competes with click-farms like Buzzfeed. Less revenue = less product.

So it's the 'choice' consumers make.

These things don't exist in a vacuum they are real.

You don't want ads, you don't want to pay - they you are 'de facto' saying you don't want the content in the long run.

There is no argument against this - you can rant and rave as much as you want about side issues such as 'the http stream belongs to me' yada yada yada - it's totally irrelevant.

No ads (or pay, or donations) = no content.

It's as simple as that.

"This may sound greedy to you, but for you to have the absolute gall of telling people that they need to expose their computers to malware is purely asinine."

No - I am not exposing people to malware by suggesting that they 'not use ad blockers'. Because 99.9% of the world does not use adblockers and don't face such malware problems. I'm not even suggesting they 'not use ad blockers'. I'm merely pointing out the reality of the situation.

Denying reality is the only 'asinine' thing going on here.

You didn't mention the other options -- publishers could get together and come up with a micropayment standard so users can pay the few cents for each view that the advertiser would have earned from ads.

I use an ad blocker, not because I am opposed to paying for content I view, but because ads are annoying and distracting, and I'd be happy to pay them the money they are earning from ads.

But what I'm not willing to do is pay "just $3.99 for unlimited access to our site!". I'm not going to pay $50/year for access to a site that I might only visit a couple times a month or less.

But let me fund $10 a month into a micropayment account, and then dole out payment for each page view, and I'll gladly sign up -- as long as it's an open standard so with one funding account I can visit pretty much any micropayment site.

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

They show cat pictures instead of ads, while still letting you pay a couple pennies to the publishers.

It still fails the 'open standard' test.

It allows you to do what you described as wanting for most sites, and you're not going to use it because it's not perfect? You should try it.

"Here’s how it works: when Contributor users visit a site in Google’s network, their monthly contribution is used to bid on their behalf in the ad auction—so they, rather than an advertiser, end up buying the ad slot."

> It allows you to do what you described as wanting for most sites, and you're not going to use it because it's not perfect? You should try it.

Someone being able to pay extra to get past my ad blocking is not what I want. Nor do I like the way money is allocated from such a system. But beyond that, being adsense-only means it doesn't affect the worst quarter of ads, and I can't even lobby those sites or ad networks to join the micropayment system. Also the system I want has a "this site tricked me, don't give them money" button.

If it could merge with flattr and invite other companies, then it would have a real path forward toward an ad-free landscape and I would be much more willing to use it.

Patreon has a lot going for it in the sense that if you support stuff you like, you will see more of it.

Who's naively deluded now?

No ads = not much for you to download.

Realpolitik will very quickly trump any ideological arguments.

Waiting for it. Because I predict that with ads gone, the content that will be gone is the worthless kind. People are fine with sharing stuff for free out of the goodness of their heart, and they're also fine with asking for money for their services.

The problem with ads is that ad-driven sites serve content created only to support their ad-driven business model.

No they won't. The entire way the web works gives far more control to the client with regards to what they do and don't see. There will never be a way around ad blocking.