> This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.

I can't wait for the future where I need a burner phone and a robotic arm just to browse the internet.

People need to just take responsibility and pay for shit.

Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking.

People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.

When I do pay for services, they can just add ads anyway to get more money. Look at Netflix or Amazon prime for this, or even cable.

How do I pay for something with a guarantee they'll leave the ad money on the table?

I pay for Ars, I pay for YouTube, I pay for discord nitro at the highest tier. Notice that all of those services are still ad funded?

The same principle applies: You would have to leave the service when it starts introducing such things.

As a market-driving force in the real world, basically an impossible task for the collective. However, occasionally consumers do successfully band together to abandon a service due to some perceived slight.

I don't know about ars and discord, but netflix, prime, and yt all have ad-free and ad-subsidized options.

There is also the degree to which people consider something ad free. A character using an iPhone in a show could be considered an ad to some, and not noticed to others.

I feel like it is actually payment pages where I see these kinds of bouncers the most, though. click fraud is inefficient, but payment fraud can actually ruin a business.

The currently mainstream payment solution hurt privacy even more than the current ad tracking. We'd need something like GNU Taler for that. I wonder what the world would look like if the Chaum E-Cash - Microsoft Windows cooperation had worked out.

There is nothing in US consumer rights law that prevents any of this being done to someone who pays.

As such, companies do all this to consumers who pay.

> People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.

If that's what the business really believed, they'd put up a paywall instead of literally giving away their content. Some businesses do believe that. Most of them realize it's more profitable to sell data about you instead. So screw 'em and screw this victim-blaming "well we wouldn't need all this invasive tech if it weren't for those pesky adblockers, you'll need a TPM to browse the internet because you didn't play along with my bad business model" nonsense. The internet existed before big adtech, and it will exist after. Long live free computing.

> Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking.

This is a punk stance but somehow the argument is "be punk and whip out the credit card?" My argument is "be punk and adblock."

>you need to be the one kicking

...by giving rent-seeking corporations more money? The internet was always "free". I've been using Adblockers since decades and will continue to do so.

The internet was never free, it was just people other than you carrying the cost. Those people are the ones who control the internet, not you.

Wrong :)

"It's people's fault that these tech billionaires are just scraping by!"

I beg to differ.