> The best parallel I can draw is to the Napster era when pirating music cut off the head of the chicken in the industry.

I don't think this comparison holds up. Napster was a peer to peer network where publishers of the works being downloaded had no control over who was able to download what. By contrast, web publishers have extraordinarily fine grained control over distribution of their works.

For example, when I connect to nytimes.com to read some news, I politely ask the nytimes.com servers for access by saying:

  GET /some/article HTTP/1.1

The NYTimes, or literally ANY publisher on the web, have the option to say no right there for any reason. They are under zero obligation to give me access to content I'm requesting.

If publishers are upset about people reading their content without displaying ads, maybe they should stop giving it all away for free.