No one on the internet is entitled to ad revenue, especially when it robs me of my right to decide what does and what doesn't get run on my own personal machine.

Theft requires taking something someone already has, not just going out of my way to avoid giving it to them. Anyway, my user-agent, my rules. That should really be the end of the argument.

I don't have to instruct my computer to display everything you decide to send to it. Period. That's the end of the moral argument.

I'd have more sympathy for this argument if ad-tech didn't consistently run roughshod over my preference not to be tracked. If ad-blockers are theft, trackers are stalking.

Ad blocking is analogous to paying someone to cut advertisements out of a magazine you ordered before you read it.

You request something which is when sent to your house. Sure it is via http, but that is irrelevant. It could have just as well been via snail mail.

You are absolutely allowed to remove the ads from your copy of a magazine, whether you do it yourself, another household member, a visitor, or even someone you pay.

Even if someone does it without your consent, the dispute is with the copy owner not the magazine publisher.

This would be an issue if an unauthorized party took it from your mailbox, but that still has nothing to do with the publisher or content.

Precisely my point.

Thanks, that was not clear with the commentary about "paying someone" and "before you read it" that make it sound like something normal people wouldn't do and should be wary of.

I am not responsible for the mistaken assumptions underlying other people's hopes for their business models.

If you argue that from the site's side then you can bring up that ads are taking up data, bandwidth(thus time) and battery (insane JS "game" ads) on the client side no?

I'll consider this if publishers and adtech vendors consider the fact that stealing my personal data, bandwidth and processing power (= battery life on mobile) could also be unethical.

Publishers and adtech might not like the fact that I am in control of what happens on my device and do things they dislike, but then they seem to do exactly the same when it comes to controlling how many ads are displayed and what personal data they collect.

Maybe if the industry can come to an agreement for a reasonable amount of ads, respecting privacy and taking responsibility for the ads they serve (aka compensate the user in case of scam or malware) then people might be more inclined to consider it.

I mean, do you consider it theft if you don't look at a billboard? Fuck these assholes for trying to spin it as if we are stealing from them.

“Hey, viewing this ad is the price of getting this product I’m offering” “No thanks, I’ll just take it”.

I don’t think it’s an incorrect argument. We’re free to seek out ad-free content, or paid content, or whatever, but unilaterally rejecting the implicit terms of an interaction is ethically grey at best imo.

Edit: this would mainly apply to sites that detect and block ad-blocking. Other sites are a little less clear imo.

I'm personally annoyed by ads so I block them.

But I see the point in the sentiment. People pay for advertisements to be seen. On the other hand, a good businessman calculates this into the cost - like if someone prints 1000 flyers, they are sure not every single one of them is read. Like it's part of the flyer business that many go into the bin without being looked at.

People find all sorts of arguments that are both logically and morally unsound to justify their behaviour, and it isn’t going to change.

For a while I thought they might notice that they are hurting themselves just as much as they are hurting the publishers, since ad blocking is part of the reason the time of freely reading thousands of high-quality sources is coming to an end. But there is really zero appreciation for the work of journalists. Local papers are already gone in rural areas and it took maybe five years until nobody remembers what they’ve lost.

I would take this argument more seriously if paid subscriptions didn't also include ads.

If piracy isn't morally equivalent to theft, then I'm not sure how adblocking would be.

Personally I think there is a stronger argument that dirtying up the Internet with advertising is more immoral than piracy.

Don't forget the invasion of privacy. These ads include tracking.

If the site owner views it that way, they can detect my adblocker and put up a paywall.

And if they're afraid that a paywall will cause people to bounce, then deep down they know what I already know: their content isn't worth paying for.

This is probably the best take. If someone says that ads are part of the deal, fair enough. I can go somewhere else, or I can honor the deal. Otherwise, seems unethical to me.

What "deal"? They are providing publicly accessible information, I'm choosing to only download a portion of it. If this is affecting their bottom-line, maybe they should rethink their business model. Not my problem.

I block ads to save myself from buying things I don't need, to save myself from being tracked over the internet, and because they are often annoying and sometimes contain malware. I see nothing wrong with this.

I'm not the one that is abusing some sort of "deal", in my opinion.

it is no more theft than smelling the cooking of a restaurant.

I don't think it's theft but I also don't think it's really equivalent to that either. After all 1,000,000 people can smell what the restaurant is cooking for another customer and it doesn't cost the restaurant any more than if 0 people did because the restaurant is letting the scent go out either way. On the other hand if 1,000,000 people watch a 100 MB video and block ads it certainly costs the content provider a lot more than if nobody did.

Not really. Imagine a restaurant which says, hey, here's this sample, it's free if you watch an ad while you eat. And then you eat, and specifically don't watch the ad. That's not just smelling the cooking, just like how reading an article is incurs traffic on a website, which the provider has to pay for somehow. Not to mention the procurement of the article.

Obligatory: http://www.marilynkinsella.org/Fabulous%20Folktales/theft_of...

Nice website/stories.

It's as morally equivalent as muting the tv/changing the channel/averting your eyes or attention when a commercial comes on.

It only gets fuzzy when you start to argue about how surveillance capitalism let's them deny payment when ads are avoided on a Web browser but not when they are avoided with television. But "I don't get paid because they spy on you and the process more effectively than in other mediums" is already far more morally dubious.

And at the end of the day, brand or product awareness is only one part of the reason for an advertisement to exist - and the reason to pay for someone to run your ad. Another big part is an expectation that users will click on the ad, that they may buy the thing. So I take even more moral umbrage with content creators who show ads and argue that users should have to view them and are bad for not doing so even if they knowingly will not click or buy them; the content creator tacitly acknowledges that they are fine with only delivering part value to the advertiser while receiving payment in full. At that point it becomes "I am mad at my readers/viewers for being parasitical with me instead of helping me be parasitical with the advertiser" and any arguments about morals have become bunk.

So... unless they also demand that every user should fully read each ad and at least click on them in good faith with an open mind to open the wallet, I see it as a bit hypocritical to question the morality of Adblock users.