Well it turns out they kinda do. Sites have terms of service people supposedly agree to, all the time, without reading, because it's fucking impossible.
I posted this argument before and got the following comments which make a good argument:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095147
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14095410
However the comments get into implementations like Netflix and rendering that data, but it's a bit different because in that case you are paying for access.
Will we be in a world one day where sites can require specific web browsers, by law?
Do you realize just how much advertising funds? It's a 12 figure global industry and 99% of the content you consume is funded in part by it - and that's before we get to how advertising drives the economy by efficiently matching businesses to customers. Every company relies on advertising (whether paid, word-of-mouth, etc) to succeed.
It's irrational to see so much hate and it's likely your complaint is really only about intrusive ad formats and data privacy. That is something I agree with and I'm for every change that makes for safer, better, and more private ads, but that is vastly different than calling for the elimination of advertising in any sensible reality.
We say the same things with government waste over military and healthcare. And we can fix it in the same ways with better trust, accountability and regulation.
As Admiral's blog post points out, Github recommends using the same contact procedure for anti-circumvention takedown requests as for normal DMCA takedowns. But as far as I can tell, they're doing so purely on their own initiative; such a takedown request doesn't have the force of law in the same sense that a claim of copyright infringement does.
I made this mistake to, Admiral's blog post does imply it. However, they were making a DMCA take down request, based off the reasoning it was for anti-circumvention.
It most certainly does apply to anti-circumvention in many cases.
The DMCA is a set of laws. The DMCA takedown procedure is a part of those laws, defined in a fairly rigid way: it has specific notification requirements, timeframes, and is clearly defined to only apply to copyright infringement. Just because the DMCA also prohibits circumvention, it doesn't automatically follow that circumvention is the same as copyright infringement. And the Wikipedia section that you linked to doesn't mention the takedown process at all.
EFF has gotten in touch with easylist according to [1]. That's good.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/dmca-used-to-remove-ad-server-url-f...
Admiral seems to be a paywall server basically. If blocking their domain gave access to paywalled content, then the DMCA seems to apply http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyright-cont...
However, that defense is a bit flimsy to me since the fall back to having the paywall blocked could/should be a "Paywall blocked, please disable your addblocker to gain access to our content" msg.
Anyhow, that is immaterial because so long as they don't actually serve adds, Easylist could/would have removed the line no problem. Admiral should have just said "Our domain doesn't serve adds, we work on paid content access" and they would have been removed without all this hassle.