Your mistake is in assuming that just because you form a construct around payments, rights, and obligations of the receiver of an HTTP response, everyone else will agree with you. I'm not doing anything "without paying" because there was no "paying" agreed to by me. Content sites and advertisers just made that up from whole cloth. As if they just show up on the playground and get to make the rules now.
The playground rules were simple: you prop a server that responds to HTTP requests, and in response you send an HTTP response that generally contains content. That's it, those are the rules. If someone wants to make money from this system, that's on them, not me. If they can't make money, well what did you expect from a playground where everything is freely given? Creating straw man "rules" around payment and moral obligations is futile. If the responder has issue with what I do with their response, perhaps sending content using HTTP is not the proper medium for what they want to accomplish.
In summary, just because you want to march in and monetize shit does not mean that any of the rest of us have any legal or moral obligation whatsoever to play along.
I think publishers broke the moral contract first by making the distribution of malware and supporting Internet scams their primary business model. Once they broke the moral contract, we responded by developing ad blockers to protect ourselves from their maliciousness. I think if publishers stopped distributing malware, misleading ads, and Internet scams, then there would be far less demand for ad blockers. They created the problem, it's up to them to fix it.
Unlike a subway ride, it's impossible to tell whether a website has ads or not before you visit it. So I can't know whether I've violated the morals you're talking about until I already have done it.
I think publishers are welcome to create adblock-blockers, and I don't have any interest in working around them. I suspect it's not a feasible business model, but that's their problem, not mine.
You see, there is a problem calling website pages "content", unless I know what that articles contains there is no way for me to know if it is of any value or not. Serving malicious ads and slowing down my internet speed just adds insult to the injury. I don't think it's okay to block adblockers, this is equivalent to discrimination IRL (e.g not letting someone into the restaurant because of their religion or skin color etc). If they want to get payed by the readers, there's always subscription model (lock it behind the paywall), don't discriminate me because of the software I'm using.
> I don't think it's okay to block adblockers, this is equivalent to discrimination IRL (e.g not letting someone into the restaurant because of their religion or skin color etc).
Oh my god it's not even close I can't believe you said this.
If I start a news website, and I give you 2 options:
1. Pay $1 a month to view my content without ads
2. View ads
And you block ads without paying, i'm going to block you. You seem very pragmatic about what is best for you and your PC, well this is me being pragmatic about it as well.
If you block ads, and don't pay a subscription, you give me no value. It only costs me money to serve you content. So you aren't getting served content if you are going to be blocking ads.
It's not "discrimination" any more than a movie theater only letting people that pay in is.
> If you block ads, and don't pay a subscription, you give me no value.
If you implement it on your backend, without me needing to run your adblocker blocking js code, which I will block. I'm okay with that if you implementation is based on your servers, you just can't decide what software I will or will not run on my machine. So even you implement some form of Digital Restriction Management one would still find a way to circumvent it (against the law in many places), actually one should do it as a form of civil disobedience. People should control their own technology, not the other way around.
Because "The custom and practice of the web has always been that publicly accessible pages are served without payment"
The publishers are not offering content subject to a fee (which I am not paying). They are offering content for free, and also offering ads for free.
Accepting one of their free offers, and rejecting another of their free offers is not the same thing as "just consume ... without paying"
Some news sites do offer their content subject to a fee, and if they were interesting enough then I would pay that fee. But, because none of those sites (that I have encountered) are worth it, in comparision with the freely-served pages of the net, I choose not to pay those sites, and forego their content.
But if they are not explicitly charging a fee, then we fall back to the default custom and practice, which is that they offer content for free, and ads for free, and I have the right to accept as many, or few, of those offers as I like.
>Accepting one of their free offers, and rejecting another of their free offers is not the same thing as "just consume ... without paying"
There's a bit of mental gymnastics there, but I get what you are saying. I still don't agree, but I get it.
I just feel that if you asked, 99% of content creators would not see it like that, in the same way a store isn't "offering you a product, and the chance to pay for it".
I just feel that if you asked, 99% of content creators would not see it like that
<insert obligatory quote which allegedly originated with Upton Sinclair> Of course they don't see it like that. Would you happen to have a less biased source? Say, just about anyone whose salary does not rely ads?
In my country, there are a couple of newspapers distributed for free in train stations. These newspapers are purely financed with ads. Is it my moral obligation to read every ad in the newspaper to make sure they stay profitable?
I used to watch satellite TV when I was a kid. Most channels I watched were privately owned and purely financed with their (extremely long) ad breaks. Is it my moral obligation to sit through every single ad break?
My answer is no, that's ridiculous. If a company decides to offer content for free, it is not my obligation to make sure their business model stays lucrative. It shouldn't be anyone's obligation to consume every last bit of content someone offers only because it's given away for free.
A free human being should have the right to choose the information that goes into their mind, without that right, how can we make free decisions? If it's an all or nothing deal, then your information is clearly lacking intrinsic value, I can find that elsewhere.
>Why is it that you morally think it's okay to just consume content others have created without paying?
If I write a poem, make 7 billion copies, and mail it to everyone in the world, I'd be silly to think those 7 billion people are morally wrong for not paying me.
Monetary payments are based on the assumptions of scarcity and contractual agreements between two parties. Neither of these two things exist for public facing websites.
If they wanted me to pay, they should charge for access. Other people don't have a moral right to execute code on my machine as a result of an HTTP request--including my browser.
Why is it that you morally think it's okay to just consume content others have created without paying?