It wouldn't be quite as bad if the owner actually chose the advertisements shown, suitable for the article or service shown (like they do in a newspaper or magazine).

The owner might get subtle ads for tailored shirts, while I get animated punch-the-monkey¹ or some dumb freemium game.

1: Not sure if these are actually still around. I usually don't last five seconds before installing an ad-blocker.

Sites have complete control over the types of advertising that appears on their pages, down to whitelisting only specific brands or even specific ads- but most sites don't care beyond, "no adult products."

That's not how it works at newspapers and magazines (at least the ones with any sort of journalistic integrity).

The editorial and advertising departments are firewalled from each other - for good reason. You wouldn't want journalists to be pressured by advertisers into favorable coverage.

The people writing articles have no idea what ads are going to run next to their articles, and the advertisers have no control over the content of the articles. The owner of the publication might set limits on what advertisers to accept, but they're not choosing which ads run next to what content.

Website’s can recommend showing me advertising all they want, but it needs my computer equipment to render. Auto playing video adds are both unsolicited and consume significant amounts of expensive cellular data.

It’s quite simply theft of resources.

You're visiting the site - you agree to it. Words have meaning and it's not theft, just like a store requiring you to wear a shirt isn't stealing from you, you have to buy the shirt.

A store requiring you wear a shirt isn't theft. A store seeing you walked into the store, and without telling you in advance that this is the deal, picking your pocket for $20 and forcing a shirt on over your head is theft, even if they afterwards claim that the $20 is for the shirt.

I'm not sure I agree with the advertising is theft analogy, but this is a bad counter example.

This doesn't seem to follow from the example at all. What you're saying would be true if people only visited sites repeatedly, knowing what they were going to get. But much of Internet browsing is just following links, with text indicating you're going to get a story about topic X, only to arrive and see that, no, you get a autoplay video about topic Y, possible at 1 in the morning when your wife is in bed next to you trying to sleep.

Imagine you ordered a book through the mail, knowing the book vendor offered it for free, but not knowing how, only after the fact finding out Toyota paid them to give away promotional pickup trucks, except you had to pay the shipping expense for a truck to go through the mail.

Is that theft? How is bloating the web with unrelated content a user has to pay for without knowing in advance they'll be getting it or even how much they'll be getting any different?

This is quite a bit different than all previous forms of advertising, which were directly embedded into the content media and added no cost to deliver. There was no way to order a newspaper and be delivered a video. Analog television streams were broadcast, with airwaves publicly allocated, not paid for by the consumer (you paid for the right to decode them).

By reading this comment you agree to pay me 100$. Except that’s not how contracts work.

A website is easily capable of requiring users to accept an actual agreement to see the content, but simply adding it to HTML isn’t a contract any more than listing it in some TOS somewhere is.

It is not a contract and there exist a very similar arrangement that has existed for way longer:

commercial radio

I don't incur additional costs for listing to a radio station that decides to play 30 second HD audio ads between segments. Unlike going to a blog to _read_ something and being forced to watch (and pay for the bandwidth) a 30 second HD video. I asked for a few hundred kb of data. They send me what could amount to several hundred megs of data.

Many places in the world still are subject to metered data.

What do you mean of course your endure costs - you're paying for the electricity running the radio, and the wear and tear on your device.

At an effectively constant rate independent of content.

Also a broadcast stream where users pay exactly the same amount for the airwaves (nothing) regardless of how much content gets sent out across it. This is not like an IP stream where you impose a quite literal cost on the receiver by sending more data than they expected.

Commercial radio doesn’t cause me to connect to third party services.

>You're visiting the site - you agree to it...

Do I, though? If I've never been to the site before and don't know what's on it, my simply visiting the site for the first time isn't consent to display an auto-playing video.

More specifically, you are choosing to render that content. You could use an ad blocker to be more selective about which content you render

By that logic anyone failing to secure their servers are actively inviting hackers to do whatever they want. After all they connected to the internet.

This is not how consent works.

Its not theft its you paying for the service of the website. What la la land do you live in.

Just to nitpick. What has the first to do with the second? If I finance my free-to-eat restaurant by stealing bikes, the first part (free-to-eat) does not justify the second (stealing). One could even argue, that If I am upfront about this and tell everybody that I steal bikes and that you have to agree to this practice to eat at my restaurant, the situation does not change much.

I suspect, your point is that If I only steal bikes of people eating in my restaurant and I ask for permission if they are seated(1), then this is not stealing. Because of the permission. I would argue. It is an incredible.... bad deal for the one eating in my restaurant and it seems to be in bad faith.

It is even another story, if it is the only restaurant or food source in town. Then it goes well beyond stealing…

(1) And I certainly use all (bad/dark) tricks you can think of to get their permission.