Unethical, sure, but there's little the law can do to prevent people from agreeing to such things.
Maybe a requirement for certain disclosures to be made more prominent (like for cigarettes)?
Methinks the broadcasters would pounce down like a ton of bricks and their lawyers would use every loose corner of the law to bury you perpetually `a la Aereo.`
Even if it is replacing ads, to argue that it's illegal seems to require saying that ad blocking is illegal (adblock plus has been sued for this, but so far not successfully).
Also https://brave.com/ uses basically the same technique.
I'm just wondering if there was a particular moment when people's intuitions about where you could expect to see ads on television changed.
True, iff the customer was adequately informed about the offer in a way most people will understand. Contracts are not supposed to be a "gotcha" with extra terms buried in the fine print. If the installer only featured the "bait" and mentioned the adware behind a dark pattern UI or deep in the text of the contract, a judge could (and should) void that part of the contract.
> Maybe a requirement for certain disclosures to be made more prominent
At a minimum.
That said, the issue isn't really with the person that installs the software. There isn't a contract between the adware scammers and e.g. Target or Wikipedia.
There's a difference between voiding a contract that no longer obligates people, and voiding a contract to make actions taken under it illegal. I'm not sure there's good precedent for the latter.
>There isn't a contract between the adware scammers and e.g. Target or Wikipedia.
They're not touching Wikipedia, they're running on the user's computer and manipulating their local served page of Wikipedia. I don't see why anyone else would have a case.