You do own your browser but you don't own the sites you visit or their content. To me when someone argues for being able to replace ads on a website that's almost the equivalent of saying "I am entitled to take ownership of and alter anything I lay my eyes on". Some people counter by arguing that if it's not alright to replace ads then it's not okay to use custom CSS rules or plugins or apps designed to enhance readability. The fundamental difference between those things is that site owners want you to read their content and almost universally happily accept people using custom CSS and readability type plugins but replacing ads is different in that you are making a choice to put someone else's content on their site to the site owmer's detriment. If I were running a site that relied on ad revenue I'd almost prefer plugins that stripped out the ads altogether to one's that replace ads with one's that someone else will profit from. In the case of the former you could reasonably assume the visitor wouldn't be clicking any ads anyway but in the case of the latter that user may still click and youd get nothing.

Imagine there was an eyeglass company that sold glasses that would replace certain things you saw with other things that they decided on. I know this is far out but just follow me here. Now imagine owners of these glasses walk into a mall and the glasses replaced window signage and ads with ones from the eyeglass maker's preferred partners. The shop owners in the mall would be upset but the maker of the eyeglasses would claim they're just giving their customers the deals they want. And then a certain portion of the people who wear these glasses say "I own my eyes. I may choose to replace anything I see with whatever I want".

In 1996 I was 10 years old and grew up from that point on with the web. Ads were annoying for a time but the people posting and creating them learned really fast that their strategy wasn't working and from then on ads have been pretty polite. They mostly just sit in their grid positions. Sometimes they're animated and sometimes they have sound but it's off by default. I don't get why people hate online ads so much. They're easy to ignore and rarely if ever become intrusive these days. But that's a whole 'neither topic. My main point is that suppressing ads is one thing but to replace ads with others that deprive a site from the CPC revenue is unequivocally wrong. It may be legal but it's wrong.

I use AdBlock and selectively whitelist domains that I support.

For my own part, I don't mind text ads; but animations or movement of any kind completely kill my ability to read. It's just the way I'm wired. I can't focus with movement or animation in close peripheral vision.

I also have no time for pauses or delays. I can't watch TV or listen to the radio at all any more because of ads. I just can't do it; an ad break comes on and I just want to turn the thing off and do something different.

Eh... I certainly wouldn't mind if I could buy a pair of glasses that blanked out ads, although replacing them with alternative ads would be pretty much equally scummy.

This is exactly what I feared: a generation who grew up not knowing any better somehow deciding that simply because things were a certain way when they were 15 that it's wrong to change them. It is not.

The web is a communications protocol. It is not a way of life, the meaning of the universe, or written in stone. There are lots of communications protocols.

I can create content (interactive) or not and surface it on the web for others to consume. How, when, or why they consume it is none of my business (aside from perhaps wanting to control access to my content to certain people).

Look at it this way: who is in charge of my consuming your content? If I am blind, would you require me to listen to ads before my text reader started browsing the site? If I had difficulty seeing, would you prevent my browser from scaling the text so that I could see it better even if it ruined your layout? If I were busy, would it be a crime to have my secretary read relevant parts to me over the phone?

It's clear. I, and only I, control how I consume your content once you make it available. Now you might want me to go to some seminar where they'll hard-pressure me to buy timeshares before you turn on access. Fine and dandy. But once the port is open, I might telnet in and read the whole thing one byte at a time for all you care. Content providers are perfectly free to own and control access. They are not free to determine how I consume their content.

You know, there might be a lot more interesting and effective business models for folks interacting on the internet. Simply because we picked one back in 1995 doesn't make it the optimum for all time.