You can't be taken seriously if your argument is to loudly change all the definitions to fit your worldview. Show me a better world that actually works.
I don't think that is completely out of line. An ad's purpose is to convince me to part with some amount of my time or money. And even when they don't managed to do that, they still have an impact on my environment. It ends up cluttered with animated banner ads and auto-playing videos and tasteless billboards and sudden jumps in the audio volume coming out of my radio. It fills my mental space with memes that are deliberately engineered to harm my mental health by convincing me that I'm too hairy and smelly and old and bald and bored and overweight and under-penised and any number of other things that I wouldn't be the slightest bit worried about otherwise.
Which isn't to say that there aren't ads that I appreciate (shout out to Metromile for running the most recent subway ad to get me to buy a product), but they do seem to be a relative rarity in the grand scheme of things. That's coming from someone who deliberately tries to occupy a low-ad environment by avoiding things like live TV, though, so there's my bias.
What do you mean? Of course you get to do that. That's exactly what ad blockers do.
> A news article with ads is paid for by those ads, and if you want to go to their website to read it you are implicitly agreeing to see those ads.
You have no case to say I'm "implicitly agreeing" to see ads when in fact I am explicitly running software to prevent me from seeing them. This "implicit agreement" argument is the worst anti-adblocking argument. It would be like me ordering a pizza, picking off the olives, and being told that I have to eat those since I implicitly agreed to olives when I ordered the pizza. Nope, the act of picking off the olives is as explicit as I could possibly get that I don't want the olives.
That's the same thing as saying that buying a lockpicking kit is the same as being given permission to enter private property. You are using an outside exploit to get around the terms that the provider laid out in order to see their content.
You are confusing the ability to filter the content with the right to filter that content.
> It would be like me ordering a pizza, picking off the olives, and being told that I have to eat those since I implicitly agreed to olives when I ordered the pizza. Nope, the act of picking off the olives is as explicit as I could possibly get that I don't want the olives.
This is a completely ridiculous and useless analogy. You bought that pizza, and you own it. Period. When you go to a website, you are not buying or owning anything. You are requesting a set of data and refusing the price that comes along with it.
>You have no case to say I'm "implicitly agreeing" to see ads when in fact I am explicitly running software to prevent me from seeing them.
This completely disregards the fact that the website has little or no power to stop you from doing so. You are implicitly agreeing to it, and then you are failing to hold up your end of the deal. If you cannot see that, then you are just being self-entitled close-minded to the obvious truths that inconvenience you.
You are starting from the premise that you have some inalienable right to view a webpage, and no one including the legal commercial owners that provide that webpage are allowed to determine the way in which you do so.
You are using their resources for a service that someone else is providing. And you are acting like a petulant child when they attempt to provide this in a sustainable way. Grow up.
I'm old enough to remember when people put things on the Internet because they wanted to, and people still do that. I'm also happy to pay for services. But until I view a webpage, I have no way of knowing whether it's one of those pages, or whether it's one that's going to ram a bunch of crap down my throat. The idea that I can agree to a business transaction without even knowing it just by viewing a page is ridiculous.
Let it be noted that only one of us has resorted to name-calling in this conversation.
What about parental controls, schools and libraries filtering proxies, corporate firewall and proxies and all other kinds of filtering software ? what about services such as readability ? Is there a difference between using flashblock so flash ads will only load after being clicked and not having flash installed preventing flash based ads altogether ?
There's a whole industry or two based on filtering internet content.
I have every right to put a firewall on my network to filter out all that I want to keep out, I could even mangle packets, replace words, remove or add content or turn the whole thing upside. There's even a browser provided user style mechanism that has precedence over the author's.
> You bought that pizza, and you own it. Period. When you go to a website, you are not buying or owning anything. You are requesting a set of data and refusing the price that comes along with it.
Now the pizza joint has one less pizza in stock made from materials that costed money, hence the attached price tag. When I visit a web page it doesn't disappear from the website because a digital copy is transferred to my computer at close to zero cost and this copy is mine to do whatever I want with it. If this webpage is not monetized or monetized with ads it is gratis and has no monetary price attached to refuse other than of having a computer and network hopefully not of metered kind or you would actually pay to be shown ads quite ironic isn't it ?
As much as you would like it to be true, it is a wrong assumption expecting an imaginary implicit agreement to hold true. Your ethical conundrum is actually the other way around:
…the question should not be whether ad blocking is ethical, but whether it is a moral obligation. The burden of proof falls squarely on advertising to justify its intrusions into users’ attentional spaces—not on users to justify exercising their freedom of attention.
Yes, there is an obvious and fundamental difference. Those are filtering and modifying the product, not the "cost". If you don't want to load explicit content, that is fine. If you want to change the formatting, so what?
But what you are talking about is cutting out the cost. It is like eating at a restaurant, and "customizing" your experience so that you never receive the bill.
>the question should not be whether ad blocking is ethical, but whether it is a moral obligation. The burden of proof falls squarely on advertising to justify its intrusions into users’ attentional spaces—not on users to justify exercising their freedom of attention.
I'm sorry, what? You CHOSE to go to their website. If you don't want "intrusions" onto your "attentional space", then don't go to their website. They are the ones paying to provide the service. They are not "intruding", you are.
I bought my computer and my internet access. I then sent a request to another computer on the internet, and the owner of the other computer had every right to instruct the computer to either deny or fulfill my request. The request is explicit and the successful response is explicit, without any condition that I go on to make other requests that may be described in the response body. These network interactions are well-specified and explicit. The computer fulfilled my request, period, and I have no reason to believe the computer was unintentionally programmed to fulfill my request. I am fairly certain I have violated no laws (unlike your poor analogy to trespassing), and even more certain that I have no moral qualms over my actions.
To say that my initial request for an HTML document constitutes an agreement on my part to parse the response body and make all subsequent requests and execute all code described within (recursively, perhaps) is frankly ludicrous. The response body could contain descriptions of requests for unwanted, offensive, dangerous, or even illegal content. It is ridiculous to claim that I have agreed to these things, especially when I couldn't possibly know what I was "implicitly agreeing" to.
Of course you do. That's a big part of the success of the web. curl + grep for a very basic example, wallabag, hosts file, firebug, flashblock, disabling images, disabling scripts, disabling animations, opera's content blocker to cite a few others.
You can't tell if a page has ads until you get there, and some ads may be injected in every pages by your isp, your browser or various malwares so basically what you're saying is do not surf the web at all. Sorry, not sorry the actual solution to not be invaded by ads is to use and adblocker.
It is a very broken assumption that people implicitly agree to see ads. It is actually the other way around historically, when reading a newspaper or a magazine and encountering ads I can skip them without even looking, I could even cut away the couple pages that I've interest in. Actually it's not even limited to ads, it applies to the whole thing. If an article doesn't interest me I will just turn the page.
As you said the news article is already paid by ads so there's no need to see them. Until you factor in tracking that is. In a newspaper the advertiser paid the newspaper to print ads along with articles and that's about it because there's no way to track what user look at in a newspaper. On a website, advertising is just the visible tip of a huge tracking iceberg.
Once again "your failed business model is not my problem". If you hoped you'd make money and you don't because you made bad assumptions, how am I concerned ?
Try teleporting back to the 20th century and experience the internet in its full glory. Without advertising.
The first couple of years were a glorious outburst of creative kookiness and cultural insanity.
Then the spammers, scammers, and MBAs moved in. And here we are.
On the web side I remember back to at least 95 pretty well and there were banner ads everywhere. I had a homepage with like 3-4 web ring banners on it + the ads from Geocities themselves.
A quick look says the first banner ads appeared in 1994 and the first paid ads in 1993.
I think you're probably looking back with rose tinted glasses.
We're talking about everything before the dotcom boom here. The internet was a lot bigger than WWW, and Macromedia Flash (and Doubleclick) were initiated in 1996. That covers less than 5% of the 20th century. Also, Flash wasn't (ab)used right away for advertising, and if one didn't have it installed not much was missed. Perhaps an online Flash game or two didn't work. No big deal. There was spam on Usenet (the first spam coming from Digital Equipment Corp or was it SUN in the early 80s) and IRC, but it wasn't acceptable.
There was acceptable advertising on usenet too in the form of signatures.