If this is not your argument, please clarify, but it seems like the inevitable conclusion of your claim that visiting a web page obligates me to download and execute other resources that the web page publisher desires. If, at the end of a meal, my waiter brought me a check and a USB drive with software that the restaurant wanted me to install on my computer, I would pay the check, but I wouldn't install the software. If, before the meal, the restaurant informed me that I could not dine there unless I installed the software, I would gladly do neither.
If you want to exploit your technical capabilities to deny publishers their revenue, don't fret when publishers do the same with DRM, walled gardens and other such measures.
Current adtech practices need to be made both illegal and technically impossible, but that obscenity does not make ad blockers more moral. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Using that content without paying for it (with ad impressions or direct sales) when those payments make the creation you consume possible in the first place – there is no moral high ground in that.
By ad blocking you're just taking things for yourself while relying on others to pay for your share of the cost to produce the content you're consuming. Zero marginal cost is not such a big intellectual barrier to understanding that this is unfair and unsustainable.
People are quite content with ad blocking only because someone else has to pay for creation of the content they consume. Of course people are content getting a better deal than other people.
But you can't translate this individual selfishness into a general society-level desire because ad blocking only works when not everyone is doing it. On a society level, if you don't pay for something, you don't get it, because there is no one else to pay for it. Whereas what people want is to get something without paying for it.
And if you claim the society is in agreement that ad based business models are unacceptable, I'm yet to see any indication of that. People really like not paying for things with money, and ads let them do that.
But what people like to do even more is taking without giving in the name of some unconvincing ideology.
No. The price is absolutely not known in advance by design. There's no way to me to audit which "partners" a site I visit will share my browsing data with. If ad providers were transparent about how my data would be used and who it would be shared with you might have a point. But most current TOSs leave the door open for tracking data to be shared with anyone for just about any purpose in the future.
It's as if I walked into a department store and the price on goods was unknowable - the store just reserved the right to take money out of my account at any point in the future but assured me that amount would be "small" with nothing contractually binding them to that.
Ad blocking, in my view, is analogous to muting your radio. The content provider delivered the ads, how the user interacts with them is up to each individual.
While cutting the ads you'll get such a good look at them, ads companies will be thrilled and beg you to do it :-)
> If I mute my radio while ads play, am I a thief?
The behavior of people watching TV or listening to radio is well studied. Here's some facts:
1. even if you change the station, you'll still see or hear some ads, especially if you want to get back to what you were watching, as people keep changing back and forth — and those ads are for brands mostly, therefore it's enough for you to see Coke's logo for you to pick it in a store as the "safe" choice
2. many TV and radio stations synchronize their ads breaks
So are you committing theft when skipping commercials? If you use automation for it, the jury is actually still out and there have been several lawsuits already.
Also skipping ads might be legal still, but there are always legal loopholes. For example circumventing DRM is not legal and it's only a matter of time before media networks wise up.
And note there have been other doomsday scenarios in the past. For example the rise of VHS was a similar event, allowing people to record shows and skip ads. But even so, ads kept being efficient and publishers and media networks survived. However this time the automation has reached a level unprecedented in history.
What do you think will happen if companies start going out of business due to ad blockers? They'll start lobbying of course and lobbying works.
Yes, if it's part of the content and they want more of that content. But they have no obligation to want that content.
> in the manner that the content provider dictates
They don’t dictate how you consume ads, they try to predict it and adjust for it, but they don't dictate your actions
>And if so, how should this be enforced?
Legally it shouldn’t be. The advertiser can do whatever they want to their content to get you to consume ads, but they shouldn’t be able to do anything past the boundary of their content.
The real truth is nobody really cares about how much money these people are losing. We're looking out for ourselves because companies won't. Just because you're serving some content I may or may not be interested in doesn't mean you get to rape my ears with loud autoplaying videos I don't want to watch.
It is very rare that I will use such strong language, but to anyone who truly believes such things: fuck you, and I very much hope you will be the one someday tied into a chair and unable to escape with your eyelids forced open to watch and listen to a barrage of unescapable ads and answer questions correctly about everything you were forced to consume before being allowed to consume the actual content itself in the same way. Because that's what you're implying the world should become --- literally a form of torture and mind-control.
Do we really have to replay all the arguments we had during the Napster days about the difference between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods?
These analogies to real-world objects never work. If you have a case, it's not going to rest on "you wouldn't steal a car" type arguments [0].
[0] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-its-a-crime
Edit: well this is hilarious:
However blocking ads (especially when done by prevent them being fetched) directly damages the 2nd party at a known price. Each individual pageview has a cost to serve it, and a revenue gained from it (via ads). In that sense what we're stealing is actually pageviews, which have (IMO) more in common with physical real-world objects (rivalrous) than a digital copy of a file.
Now what if I use ad nauseam and "click" on every ad on the site? Is that theft too? What if I'm blind and use a screen reader, am I stealing from the site?
Finally, if the answer is yes, why is stealing the other way ok? I don't recall any sites paying out victims after serving ads containing malware. What about sites (or ads) stealthily using my computer's resources for bitcoin mining? They're stealing measurable resources from me and I am not being compensated.
In a previous comment you called malicious ads "the price of ads" that is "known in advance". This doesn't seem fair. Why does the end user bear all the responsibility for keeping the ad economy afloat and healthy while the sites serving the ads bear none?
Edit: One last thing. If ad blocking is truly analogous to retail theft. Content providers and ad networks should be regulated just like retailers are to make sure they are not ripping off their users by serving malicious or harmful ads or using their data in ways not agreed to in advance (i.e. effectively charging users above and beyond the stated price).
In that case, it seems like adblockers are _not_ theft, but more compared to a plate of cookies with a sign that says, "donations welcome".
A business model does not entitle you to force people to adhere to said business model.
These websites are free to ask me to contribute to them via patreon or via donations or a subscription service.
Every step in this process is voluntary:
- What if I decide I don't want to make requests to the advertiser's servers just because an html document suggested it?
- What if I decide I don't want to render an ad, just because I downloaded it from somewhere?
Contracts, like the one you're proposing here, are agreed upon by both parties. I agree to download your ads, if you agree to provide me access to the site. Paywalls work like this, ads don't. Ads are a polite suggestion that I'm free to ignore.
- it costs very real money to produce, and
- it costs very real money to be served and to remain online.
These costs may be covered by ads, by subscriptions, by sponsors, taxes, voluntary contribution or anything else, but the they still need to be paid for.
[edit: fixed formatting]
I am not supporting that, just saying that it is more complicated than so.
Like it or not, many popular websites and services online gain income from advertising. By using them while blocking their ads you're basically getting something for nothing by gaming the system. It's probably against their ToS (but who reads that right?). It probably says: We serve ads. If you don't like that don't use this site.
One might say that ads are distracting, annoying, resource heavy, and sometimes downright malicious. I think so too. However that is essentially the "price" of ads, and this price is known in advance. Blocking ads for these reasons while continuing to use the sites is not unlike eating at a restaurant and leaving without paying because you think their prices are exorbitant: It might seem morally justified but it's theft because the prices were known in advance.
I think one of the main reason people don't dine-and-run (yet install adblockers) is that it's hard to do a moral wrong so close to the source, e.g seeing the waiters, being there in person, risking an unpleasantness drama, etc. (This is well known psychological phenomenon which name I can't recall.) In contract installing an adblocker is fast and feels totally unrelated to the 2nd party. It makes it easy to feel like you're fighting the bad guys (ads and the terrible ad-tech) and forget whose revenue you are withholding for your own benefit.
Personally I resisted installing adblockers for a long time though eventually I caved in (ad-tech got really bad). I honestly don't know what the solution is.