A store requiring you wear a shirt isn't theft. A store seeing you walked into the store, and without telling you in advance that this is the deal, picking your pocket for $20 and forcing a shirt on over your head is theft, even if they afterwards claim that the $20 is for the shirt.

I'm not sure I agree with the advertising is theft analogy, but this is a bad counter example.

This doesn't seem to follow from the example at all. What you're saying would be true if people only visited sites repeatedly, knowing what they were going to get. But much of Internet browsing is just following links, with text indicating you're going to get a story about topic X, only to arrive and see that, no, you get a autoplay video about topic Y, possible at 1 in the morning when your wife is in bed next to you trying to sleep.

Imagine you ordered a book through the mail, knowing the book vendor offered it for free, but not knowing how, only after the fact finding out Toyota paid them to give away promotional pickup trucks, except you had to pay the shipping expense for a truck to go through the mail.

Is that theft? How is bloating the web with unrelated content a user has to pay for without knowing in advance they'll be getting it or even how much they'll be getting any different?

This is quite a bit different than all previous forms of advertising, which were directly embedded into the content media and added no cost to deliver. There was no way to order a newspaper and be delivered a video. Analog television streams were broadcast, with airwaves publicly allocated, not paid for by the consumer (you paid for the right to decode them).

By reading this comment you agree to pay me 100$. Except that’s not how contracts work.

A website is easily capable of requiring users to accept an actual agreement to see the content, but simply adding it to HTML isn’t a contract any more than listing it in some TOS somewhere is.

>You're visiting the site - you agree to it...

Do I, though? If I've never been to the site before and don't know what's on it, my simply visiting the site for the first time isn't consent to display an auto-playing video.

More specifically, you are choosing to render that content. You could use an ad blocker to be more selective about which content you render

Just to nitpick. What has the first to do with the second? If I finance my free-to-eat restaurant by stealing bikes, the first part (free-to-eat) does not justify the second (stealing). One could even argue, that If I am upfront about this and tell everybody that I steal bikes and that you have to agree to this practice to eat at my restaurant, the situation does not change much.

I suspect, your point is that If I only steal bikes of people eating in my restaurant and I ask for permission if they are seated(1), then this is not stealing. Because of the permission. I would argue. It is an incredible.... bad deal for the one eating in my restaurant and it seems to be in bad faith.

It is even another story, if it is the only restaurant or food source in town. Then it goes well beyond stealing…

(1) And I certainly use all (bad/dark) tricks you can think of to get their permission.