It feels to me like this could be legislated based on profiting on others' copyright.

The issue here is one party making money, without consent of any form, based on another party's published materials.

> The issue here is one party making money, without consent of any form, based on another party's published materials.

So, google’s search engine business?

That's an unfair comparison. A three line snippet is hardly the same thing as taking an entire page. Not to mention that all search engines do this.

There is at least an opt out to Google, there is some benefit to showing up on Google search, and there is a significant transformative action both in aggregating and summarizing, and in providing web-pages based on a keyword search.

That said, there is an argument to be made here. One that's included in the disputed EU copyright directive in the 'link tax'.

The web server freely provides that content, it's not like the browser is stealing it. If they really want to protect their content, they can put it behind a paywall.

It shouldn't be illegal to not request certain parts of a site, and it shouldn't be illegal to choose not to render parts of a page. What should be illegal is taking credit for copyrighted material, and that's not what going on.

I think it should be illegal to profit from showing other people's work neigh verbatim. For example, taking their content, stripping out some stuff, and placing ads there.

The issue here, as opposed to just stripping ads, is that a totally unrelated party is making money with ads.

> That response might well require that browsers display pages exactly as the publisher intends.

IANAL, but I highly doubt that the government will mandate what browsers people run on their computers. Outside of North Korea, of course.

Wait for it; there will be mandated software on 1st-world machines in our lifetimes. Root on your machine is already a bit of a fiction because of government action (the cpu management engine); look for that to become more explicit after the first really big blackout/other catastrophe caused by a computer security failure.

Unrestricted mathematics are too dangerous to be allowed to normal people.

They won’t mandate a specific browser, but they can regulate functionality.

Piracy is already considered theft. Viewing webpages without ads is basically “stealing” web content. I would not be surprised in the slightest if some big advertiser runs with this idea and lobbies for strict legislation. And they likely would succeed, quite honestly. Congress doesn’t understand adblocking or the internet, but they have a vague idea of digital piracy.