heck yes i would
you're right about the second part i guess. not everything is intended for a public audience (like some cringe video clip with friends from a few years ago). with everything else (cinema, music etc.) i'd argue that my need for entertainment is more important than making sure some billionaires make 20 bucks on my purchase, especially if i can't afford it.
personally, i pirate everything and pay for stuff made by independent creators (foss devs, indie artists etc.) that i really like. perfectly moral
As long as you accept that things like walking into a restaurant bathroom and taking a roll or two of toilet paper or going to a bank to take one of the pens don't constitute theft under even the most strained comparison. Using an ad-supported site with an adblocker is imposing costs on a service provider by abusing a service provided under certain assumptions that you're knowingly and deliberately violating.
Under your reasoning, I’d just argue that ads are a blight on the web, and steal from me by deliberately and knowingly wasting my computer’s resources and attempting to serve me malware. What do we do now? Whose right not to be stolen from wins out?
Serving a page costs money. Whether a physical good is exchanged isn't particularly relevant.
>I’d just argue that ads are a blight on the web, and steal from me by deliberately and knowingly wasting my computer’s resources and attempting to serve me malware. What do we do now? Whose right not to be stolen from wins out?
Ads are a blight on and off the web, but the advertisers generally aren't trying to serve you malware (though they don't always try hard enough not to). But claiming that the ads are theft is far more of a reach then claiming ad blockers are. If you don't want ads, stop requesting pages with ads.
[citation needed]
It’s exactly the same. The electricity used to render the ad (which sometimes will contain video, animations, crypto miners, and other undesirable garbage) costs me real money. If they don’t want me to block ads, stop serving me ads with garbage in them.
> advertisers generally aren't trying to serve you malware
My friend, you are commenting on an article about an advertiser deliberately serving malware.
Ah, yeah, just a little harmless negligence. In that case, I’ll keep blocking all their ads, and feel 100% morally and ethically in the right.
Edit: and in the case of this article, the ad service is Google, and the site serving the ads is Google.com. Not a great look for a trillion dollar company.
For a company of this size, not taking steps to prevent all malicious ads from being created before they’re even served once is a deliberate choice they’ve made, which I would argue amounts to Google deliberately serving its customers malware.