Is it moral to conflate "advertisement" with code running on my device without my express permission? Tracking my behavior across the web? Selling their profiles to entities with which I have no direct connection? Dog wagging by changing what I see across sites to get better conversion rates?

Doing what I can to prevent all that doesn't present me with any moral quandary. Advertisers certainly don't follow any sort of moral imperative.

Advertising is not inherently bad but modern web advertising is ridiculous.

Morally, blocking ads is equivalent of having your butler cut the ads out of the newspaper before handing it to you.

Free newspaper I want to add. Nobody is forcing companies to publish their content freely accessible.

I don’t know how many of you people remember the Internet around 2000. People actually paid to be able to publish their stuff on the Internet. Because they wanted to. Without any intent on getting revenue. Unthinkable, I know!

After stealing the newspaper?

Browsing the web is equivalent of your butler shouting to another butler to please GET /some/page, and the other butler then kindly replying with a document.

Theft requires the action to not be voluntary, but a web server replying with a page is free to reject my request. It is entirely moral.

The torrent accepts my clients request.

My mp3 player will play that song you downloaded as well.

It's like your butler downloading a torrent with a song played to you.

I won't argue pirating is not moral. But it has the same morality as blocking ads.

I agree that copyright law does not make sense

Is it amoral to turn the volume down during radio ads?

I don't think it's amoral just the same as pirate movies.

It's the same.

Stealing a free newspaper?

Newspapers like the New York Times?

The free ones they hand out in subways contain 80% ads. If you cut the ads out you will have nothing left to hold onto.

Ads are inherently immoral and it's ok to watch a movie for free as nothing is stolen in that case. Ads are immoral because the website gets access to the biggest distribution channel in history - the internet, access to the financial system, a huge educated society and all this for free, and for this opportunity it sneakily builds a profile of visitors and sells that info to whoever pays. On top of that it dares to annoy visitors with tasteless visuals. Imagine someone wants to start a business and is given an opportunity be seen by hundreds of potentials clients: they come to his party curious to see what's there, but he secretly takes pictures of all visitors, records who talks to whom, takes photos of contact lists in their phones, and then sells all that to the highest bidder. On top of that he suddenly starts loud tv ads on a huge bright lcd screen to feature some junk paid by nobody knows who. Only then, after wasting everyone's time and profiting off their personal data, the host dares to pitch his business idea. So yeah, if a website treats me like trash, I'll do the same in return.

Was it moral from advertisers to pervert the web protocols so that advertisements can be forced upon us? HTTP still allow us to choose not to fetch content based on the URL. If advertisers do not like it they are free to invent their own web. Advertisements cannot be the price to pay for the modern internet because the old internet had more value.

So, an adblock should blank the entire page, no, scratch that, back() me immediately? That actually sorta makes sense. Not talking about morals, just practically.

That would create a subset of "no attention stealing" web.

But actually ads placed in separate elements are convenient in a way . It would be much much worse if the ad industry switched to a sponsored content to invade that area.