> You are confusing the ability to filter the content with the right to filter that content.
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.