I see this more as you technically having the ability to do this, but what makes it your “right”?
That doesn't mean I have the right to use a website that decides they aren't good with me doing so without the ads or other portions I may block.
I don't believe I have any moral obligation to make that choice myself. Simply put, I have the right to block ads, and the website has the right to block usage to me if I don't load said ads, trackers, etc.
Let’s assume I agree that you have been tricked into following a link that is infested with terrible ads and that I agree you have the right to block those ads.
Isn’t it then your obligation to never visit that site again?
You understand that ads are how the website has chosen to make money. You don’t like how they have chosen to make money so you simply never visit the website again, right?
It’s like if you found out a restaurant didn’t accept cash and still kept going to eat there when you only had a credit card, knowing in advance you can’t and won’t pay.
Not really. As long as your site is public, I can enter. If you don't want that, make it private, or subscription only.
> It’s like if you found out a restaurant didn’t accept cash and still kept going to eat there when you only had a credit card, knowing in advance you can’t and won’t pay.
It's more like going to a public museum that accepts donations and not making a donation. The place is public, and I decide if I pay or not.
As a publicly available resource, it is like browsing. I can browse many brick and mortar stores without exchanging anything of value. And like a store, if a website decided they did not want people browsing without a purchase, they could block access.
Even using your method, the website will transmit information about me to several ad networks without my consent about retargeting, about which sites I'm visiting, which sites I visited before (via referrer header) and will fingerprint me. Even with their (mostly non-compliant) GDPR cookie banners, information is still transmitted.
As far as I'm concerned, no website owner has ever given me a choice of "just using the back button".
Only ad-blocking is enough to stop this from happening.
This will become more funny with We assembly. There review isnahrder and even if it is free software it will be ages to verify the code the server delivers matches the source.
There is a fundamental control issue where a license debate is irrelevant detour. (For me this is the biggest flaw in the FSF - they haven't grasped that yet, while smart ideas would be needed)
The question is whether it is auditable and improvable. This is what free software is for.
That's why the FSF takes a stand against what it calls "software as a service substitute". Technically, they are correct, for the reason stated above. An Internet that is pure protocol, with clients for remote services being local apps, is not difficult to imagine; in fact, that's how it started and that's how it still works.
What's different is the friction of running an embedded blob from a webpage is negligible compared to installing a package on your OS, therefore the "distribution" phase of the software lifecycle is effectively factored out, making the opportunity for user choice minimal. (Unless you run NoScript or LibreJS by default, which I support.)
Economically, SaaS is the path of least resistance. You deliver your product through the same platform that people use to browse cat pics, and it works invisibly enough that users never question whether it's doing the right thing. This creates ample opportunity for externalities to be dumped onto the end user, as we observe with the nascent privacy crisis.
Perhaps such an externality is of a sufficiently complex or speculative nature that users may not be able to identify it, or willing to care. But that doesn't mean it's ruled out; at least in theory, integrating with the existing legal system by way of distributing your code under a Libre license seems like a good way to nip possible shenanigans in the bud. (As far as your code is concerned, of course - as opposed to everyone else's non-free code out there.)
Of course, everyone is free to do what they think best, but it's good to have the FSF's radical evangelism as a point of reference - it's quite possible to do meaningful computing in this way, although maybe not as part of an organization that ignores the ethical underpinnings of its methods! (And that's what computers do best nowadays: algowashing.)
Sadly, I find the FSF's approach to the Web somewhat misplaced - for software that is neither locally deployed, nor accessed as an opaque service, but remotely delivered on-demand, focus should be on the delivery chain being auditable, and source maps being available, in the case of WASM and minified JS.
Instead, we get LibreJS, which is, as far as I can see, a license-based whitelist - regardless of the fact that non-minified JS is open-source by definition and never compiled to a binary form. The GPL doesn't make a whole lot of sense for embedded scripts, powerful as they are. It would be more relevant for WebAssembly, that's for sure.
FSF could benefit from catchier nomenclature, even the "free as in blah blah" is too complex for the knee-jerk thinking cultivated in consumers; why couldn't they have called it "freedomware" or some such, I can't help but wonder; it was born in the same epoch as "shareware", "freeware", etc.
"Libre" is cute but causes associations with communism in the American public - same core userbase that is happy with shooting people in the name of "freedom", and would be proud to promote "freedomware", unlike today.