I say this as someone who runs an adblocker, installs them for family, and doesn’t derive income from hosting ads, so I’m not pro-ad; I just realize that while it’s not a crime for me to dump the whole bowl of waiting room candies into my backpack, that’s going to be frowned upon.
If I run a search engine which potentially links real human eyes back to you, then should I pay the "ad" toll as well?
I don't believe so.
I do believe there is an agreeable middle-ground, but Google walked away from that conversation years ago.
That being the case, any argument founded on "but advertisements" does not hold water.
While you may have a point, that point just doesn't matter within the context that we're talking about. Making companies money is not my responsibility.
Consuming the content means agreeing to the premise that the content is paid for using ads.
If you disagree with said premise you may happily browse another website.
Malware is already illegal to install and you are free to sue the website for damages.
I don't like ads either but trying to justify that their should be a choice of browsing a website without the ads it hosts is ludicrous.
It is in fact not this way, because the content arrives with or without the ads. In the EU EULAs (the dystopian construct that you'd expect to enforce that bit of lunacy) that purport to apply to content you have already accessed are not legally valid. Leaving the legal interpretation aside, me doing one thing doesn't mean consent for something else. Believing otherwise is both unethical and amoral, stances I don't hugely feel like interacting with.
But that's simply a technical implementation detail.
If the articles you read had first party ads or videos with embedded ads in them, that choice wouldn't exist like it already doesn't when you watch TV.
> Leaving the legal interpretation aside, me doing one thing doesn't mean consent for something else. Believing otherwise is both unethical and amoral, stances I don't hugely feel like interacting with.
Yes and you stealing content (consuming without paying for it) is somehow moral?
It's easy to find all kinds of free content, should it be music, movies or series but lets not kid ourselves in thinking that it is some great human right to have access to things we didn't pay for.
I could not do this for any of other several large sites advertising used trucks, like commercialtrucker.com, truckpaper.com, and machinio.com. I kept bumping into artificial javascript and captcha limitations that were not worth my time to try to work around.
The thing is that I will probably find what I want on a craigslist site that I can scrape, I'm getting a lot of great info from them, and I'm not going to bother with any of the ad-based sites, it takes to olong to run all the manual searches. They have effectively done a disservice to their (presumably paying) customers who want to sell their vehicles.