I think that would be more valid if paid versions could actually be relied upon to not track or advertise as opposed to being complete greedy morons who think "People willing to pay to not be advertised to? That must be a valueable target to market to!". I seriously wish that was just a strawman.

As long as "merchants" have the option of claiming both it undermines the idea of paying as an alternative which also undermines the paid plus data option. To use a crude but apt simile paying for an escort is paying for silence and discretion - that is why they are more expensive. (Regardless of client and worker sex and/or gender.)

Piracy was a decent demonstration of the hard facts of the (illicit) market - all of the draconian enforcement and DRM didn't make a dent in demand but improved distribution and fairer prices did. Just like how most people don't change their own oil from it being a hassle iTunes and Steam did more to reduce illegal downloads than any enforcement efforts.

> Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume".

You are consuming content from me this very moment, I charge you zero dollars for it. Believe it or not, the web actually was like that at some point: not connecting producers to consumers but connecting human beings, who could produce or consume as they pleased. This was before the people with things to sell arrived.

This kind of shooting-the-shit content is a small subset of what makes the web useful. You are not spending time and money investigating anything of consequence and then reporting it for free, are you? Few people are. We all need to make a living, and a lot of things cannot be done by amateurs alone.

And the beautiful thing about the internet is that you have the control over your own hardware to do something like this. You’re entitled to click, not click, delete, block whatever element on whatever website you want.

The argument for me is "I can pay for content with money. It can be zero money or nonzero money but I want to pay with money."

Sure, and thats fair enough. I support a youtuber on patreon for quite a bit more than my share of ad-revenue. His patreons may be a very low percentage of his overall viewers, but even that low-percentage pays more than ad-revenue of all of them

This would be great if sites you could pay for actually exited. Ad ran sites monopolized the internet.