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> 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.

>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 ?

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.

> 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.

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.

I did not and will not agree to see ads, nor am I obligated to clutter my mind with crap just because I viewed a webpage. You can't just claim that people agree to things because it's convenient to your business model.

What kind of bullshit self-entitled nonsense is this?

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.

No, I'm not claiming I have an inalienable right to view a webpage. People are free to put up ad-blocker-blockers and I'll happily leave them alone. I'll even leave a site if they simply request that I view ads to use their site, because I won't view ads (although this rarely happens).

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.