How is breaking the mechanism that makes the internet free be producing tons of fraudulent clicks "awesome" in any way?

You see, the main reason I block ads isn't because I disagree with advertising. Advertising itself is fine.

I block ads because:

- They are often bloated with CPU-intensive JavaScript that makes my web experience less than smooth. I demand that scrolling and other UI actions be imperceptibly fast, and 90% of the time I find it's ads that are the culprit in making them perceptibly slow.

- They are often loaded with tracking and fingerprinting spyware. I blocked Facebook ads as soon as they started showing me stuff that I had searched for on eBay and Amazon. Like, WTF. Big nope. I was fine with the ads, but not that level of tracking and sharing user data across companies.

As such, I block ads in protest of the above. But if I establish a mechanism that clicks the ads in the background, they don't have to know whether it is me or a robot that clicked them -- as far as they are concerned my residence is a black box, and there are some intelligent beings inside this black box that click the ads, some of those intelligent beings are made of silicon and some are made of carbon, and they don't need to know the chemistry of what being caused the click. At some point in the far future of civilization and humanity, I expect biological chemistry to be abstracted out, and laws in place to not discriminate on the chemistry of a being, and economies will have to be rebuilt around that assumption. I'm just living that future now, and as far as the big companies are concerned, they can start thinking about new monetization models now that better align the collective incentives of my blacxbox with theirs.

Traditional ads don't influence my purchasing behavior much either. I'm not their typical consumer. So it wouldn't have made a difference. My purchasing decisions are based more on a combination of first principles and friend/coworker recommendations.

Now there's the issue of how ads might drive revenue, and that's how the internet is kept free. Sure. But I think there are other ways to drive that than the current iteration of ads. Social-media-ify it, gamify it, make it fun, and I'll actually want to interact with the ads. Make me have to play a game to get a $1 Starbucks discount, and I might play -- and go to Starbucks! You see, carbon-based lifeforms love coffee, and love games, so the possibility of a discount on that might actually make me want to play the game.

But none of this tracking-spyware-CPU-bloat-while-I'm-trying-to-do-something-else please. Plain <a href="foo"><img src="blah"></a>, no megabyte-sized images, and no cross-site sharing of user data? If they can agree to that, I'll stop blocking.

You are replying to someone who depends on ads for money. Hard to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on it and all that, he's all over the thread crying but not actually refuting any points of the comments he replies to (such as yours).

Do you also use other services and then impose your will on how payment will be made? Maybe grocery stores would be better if they worked on subscription. Do you also think it would be justifiable to run out the door with all the shit you want then mail a check later?

Nope. Those are physical goods. They hand me an avocado in return for $1.50. Actual ownership of that avocado is fully transferred at that cost.

How my system renders code, or renders a webpage, and which instructions it chooses to run or not run, are upto me, as the owner of the system. Nobody else has the right to control over my hardware. They can only make suggestions, but the final decision about which lines of code are allowed to run are mine. No transfer of ownership occurs.

Nobody is trying to control your hardware, you agreed to receiving ads as a part of the terms of service, and then willfully violated those terms.

To use a non-physical example, how is this any different than signing an agreement with a lawyer to give you legal advice, receiving said legal advice, and then refusing to pay?

> you agreed to receiving ads as a part of the terms of service

No, for 95% of the sites I read, I don't need to accept any terms of service. Hell, even the ones I do, often don't mention anything about ad blocking. I can't see anything directly prohibiting ad blocking here on the Facebook ToS, for example:

https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

> how is this any different than signing an agreement with a lawyer

ToS and a contract with a lawyer are very different things. It is not generally a crime to violate a ToS, but rather, merely a breech of agreement, and they can refuse service in return. If I violate a ToS, they can block me from using the site, and that's about the most they can do, unless I intentionally harmed the company (e.g. hacked other user data or compromised their servers).

(In the particular case of Facebook, it would also probably not be in their interest to block me, because I post a lot of original content to the platform that causes other users to spend more time on Facebook, and my presence on the platform is highly likely a net positive for them cash-wise.)

Is your viewpoint on the morality of agreements that it is morally justifiable to break those which are not legally enforceable, but not morally justifiable to break those which are? Or to state it a different way, the law defines morality.

I think law and morality are two totally separate concepts.

I operate by morality, but my risk tolerance is bound by legality. For example, for any human rights issue X, will I speak out for X in a place that has free speech but not yet legalized X? Absolutely. Will I speak out for X in a place that I might get a $100 fine? Probably. Will I speak out for X in a place that I might get jailed or beheaded? Probably not.

In this case though I don't consider it immoral to violate certain ToS terms, especially when they track and sell user data and don't offer a clear opt-in/out option to that, and perhaps even doubly on the sites that I actively contribute useful content to the platform in good faith, and the legal risk is extremely low.