No? I'm not sure that's the gotcha you think it is - I also don't read random web pages that I'm not interested in, and I don't sit and 'read' adverts on pages I am reading.

I guess I assumed too much, then -- where's the dubious morality come from?

Because the implicit agreement of a site with adverts is that the content's available to you with the adverts on it. If you don't like that you don't have to read it, but if you remove them automatically then I think it's hard to argue you aren't breaking an implied agreement.

Three thoughts about this:

* This implicit agreement is too open to exploitation. Many people don't understand the depth of the tracking/ad ecosystem. If the full cost were explained to them, they might not agree to that exchange. I think I do understand it (well, probably it is worse than I expect, but whatever), but if the ad companies get to interpret this implicit relationship in the way that benefits them, then why can't I? I think the agreement should be explicit, and some sites do make it explicit -- they block people like me. Fair game! I'm sure they won't miss me, I can be quite annoying.

* I'm not sure I believe in this implicit agreement anyway. From the beginning, the design of the internet has been that information is sent to the browser, and then rendered in line with the client's needs. If I use elinks, lynx, or some graphical browser without javascript is that morally dubious? What if I'd like to minimize the amount of javascript I run, but selectively enable it as necessary, like umatrix?

* The underlying goal of the people placing the ads is not just to get something rendered on a screen somewhere, right? Their goal is to capture some attention. As you say, you don't read the ads. I could browse a while and train myself to ignore them too. At which point... the person who placed the ad still doesn't get what they wanted. At least if I block the ad, there's at least some chance that they'll detect that, and maybe the poor fool who paid for the placement can get a refund.

There's also the implicit agreement they won't malware you, but they already violated that one good and hard.

At least with the physical spam, I can use it in my woodstove as a firestarter.

Why do you feel you deserve free kindling?

Not sure where you've gotten that idea from? I don't think anyone is arguing that. They say they're burning it if it's sent to them, at which point it's their property.

> at which point it's their property

This is a big part of why the implicit deal argument doesn't really make sense. If a website sends me information then the information is on my device just like a letter, so I should be able to do what I like with it. The framing of this as an agreement between the user/publisher that we accept or reject skips over the question of whether it is even possible or moral in the first place for a website operator to try and offer an unsigned contract that removes user autonomy/rights, and whether it is moral in general for us to normalize that kind of contract.

The way that online advertising gets phrased sometimes is that you have something free that's being given to you, and consumers with ad-block are going out of their way to take more or to change the content of the webpage. But that's not really what's happening -- what's happening is that something is being given to me for free, and then the person serving that content is asking to come into my house (computer) and they're saying that they should be able to tell me what to do with the content after it's entered my house. Adblocking is the same as throwing out the spam mail from your mailbox without opening it, and anti-adblocking normalizes the idea that it's acceptable for a business to guilt or pressure people into reading junk mail.

If an industry did ever start trying to guilt people for not opening every single physical letter that was sent to them, it would be good to push back against that industry even if the industry was only trying to make a moral argument and not trying to pass laws. Some implicit contracts are so inherently invasive that they should be rejected at a conceptual level -- not merely rejected by turning down the contract, but by vocalizing, "I refuse to normalize or acknowledge the concept that a remote operator in another state has any moral claim whatsoever in any situation over what a user-agent does with information that is in my home." So we reject the concept of a website delivering content in exchange for delivering ads not because we deserve anything for free, but because we don't believe website operators have any authority (legal or moral) to set up this kind of contract, and we think it is borderline immoral/invasive for them to assert that they do. Even allowing their expectation to alter browsing behavior or treating it like a contract we have to reject gives it more legitimacy than it deserves.

It's the exact same reason why we all reject the implicit social contract where advertisers expect people to leave their volume turned all the way up for commercials, or for screen readers not to skip ads during navigation around the page to different sections. Remember that advertisers are actually the people paying for this content, and their implicit contract with users is based around actual attention -- not for allowing code to run, not for rendering the ad on the page. Advertisers have an implicit contract with us where we alter our purchasing behaviors and pay attention to their products in exchange for free content. But by and large, all of us (including anti-adblock advocates) reject that agreement and say that advertisers have no moral authority to demand that. We all kind of recognize that accepting this contract with advertisers and shaming people for walking out of the room during a TV commercial would be infringing on something vaguely sacred -- people's rights to consume content how they wish within their own homes and to pay attention to what they want to pay attention to.

But then anti-adblock advocates try to draw a line saying that it's OK for a user to ignore advertising unless a user-agent helps them. That just doesn't really make any sense, it doesn't make sense to say that pressing a button to mute a TV is morally better than having the TV press the button itself; both outcomes are exactly the same. The only place to draw that line that stands up to scrutiny is around the users "home" -- to say that once content enters their network, be it physical junk mail, or TV commercials, or online ads, users are then free to do what they wish with it even if it's to burn it and never open the envelope -- and no one has the moral authority to dictate what users do with that information or to force them to read it regardless of how much other stuff is being given away for free.

I think you're exaggerating my point of view.

Do I think it's fine to walk away during an advert break on a US TV station or to mute? Yeah that's fine.

Can you cut up your magazine and reconstruct it with the advertising pages removed? Yeah fine.

Both are different from advert blocking because of the automation and the specific targeting of the workaround. I think that's where it crosses into not as morally reasonable.

I think it's also just a huge faff to run custom software in your browser just to avoid seeing some adverts.

> because of the automation

I think that's a really arbitrary line. Screenreaders skip ads. Scrapers/apis skip ads. There isn't a clear division between an automated tool and a tool with manual intervention.

In some ways this feels like the same legalism that popped up in spam phone calls where to get around auto-dial rules businesses would have someone on their end sit in a room and press a button over and over to complete the call. In the exact same way, we could imagine a version of Ublock Origin where every time the page loads it comes up as a blank screen, and then I hit a button on my keyboard, and then the screen renders without ads. I don't think that advertisers would see a difference between those systems.

Remember that from the perspective of the advertiser -- the person actually paying for the content -- you walking out of your room during a TV commercial and a piece of software skipping the TV commercial are the same thing. The advertiser does not see a distinction between those actions because the advertiser is not paying for content in exchange for the privilege of streaming data to your computer, the advertiser is paying for content in exchange for your attention.

It is weird to me that people are able to latch on to the idea that ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts, but don't view circumventing advertising through other means as stealing money from advertisers. The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that when we say that it's fine for people to block content manually but not using user agents, what we are effectively saying is that it's fine for them to ignore ads as long as they're not particularly good at ignoring them. But even that isn't a great argument.

Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages? What if I make a machine with image recognition that does the same thing? It just doesn't make sense to say that ad blocking is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient, and then it becomes immoral.

> I think that's a really arbitrary line.

Yeah - we're talking morals!

You won't find a mathematical equation to define the moral line.

> ad-blockers "steal" content from web-hosts

Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing, I just think it's morally dubious. I didn't say anything like I thought it was criminal.

> Is it fine for me to pay an assistant to cut up my magazine after I take it out of my mailbox and reconstruct it without the advertising pages?

I think so yes.

> It just doesn't make sense to say that something is moral right up to the point where it becomes efficient

Well yeah, again it's morality, it's human and fuzzy.

Automation is often a line for morality. Some people think automated (as in drone) weapons are immoral but a soldier acting on the ground is ok. Some people think automated speeding cameras are unfair but a police officer with a speed gun is ok.

This isn't some kind of new idea.

> Some people think automated (as in drone) weapons are immoral but a soldier acting on the ground is ok. Some people think automated speeding cameras are unfair but a police officer with a speed gun is ok.

Not for arbitrary reasons though, there are tangible effects from automation that we worry about in those systems. We draw distinctions because there are parts of the manual process that we can point to as valuable.

We worry about automated weapons because they take a safety check out of the system. We kind of are saying what I mentioned above, that we want killing to be kind of difficult and emotionally hard to do. But that doesn't map to ads, unless you're saying that one of our goals is that we want blocking ads to be emotionally draining/difficult. But I don't think that's what anyone believes about ads.

Similarly, people don't oppose automated speed cameras because they think automation is a moral line, they oppose taking humans out of the decision making process for whether or not someone should get a ticket. But this doesn't really map to ads unless we think it's important that humans have to consciously decide to skip content, which... why would we think that? Some people also don't trust the automated cameras to be reliable. This also doesn't really map to adblockers, because adblockers aren't being used by other people to make decisions about you.

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> Not sure who you're quoting there but it's not me. I don't think it's stealing

I should phrase this differently, that's totally my bad.

I can't think of any way of defining an implicit social contract between website operators and consumers that wouldn't also define an implicit social contract between consumers and advertisers themselves. It is weird to me that people think it's morally dubious to do things that deprive website operators of profit, but that it's not morally dubious to do things that deprive advertisers of profit.

If we say that advertisers don't have a right to ask us to look at content, I'm not sure why website operators should be different.