> I have the right to render your bits and bytes however I wish.
Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't. By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.
> By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement
No.
By replying to my browser, they're entering into an agreement to not waste my time, and give me lots of money. Oh, not that either? Hmm. Several sites detect that I'm using a malware blocker. I make no effort to obfuscate this. Some websites will ask me to turn it off, others will block me if I do not. That's fine - I've no obligation to them, they have no obligation to me. Neither of us entered into any kind of agreement.
Keep in mind - I'm even happy to unblock and click ads relevant to my interests and follow relevant affiliate links - to stuff I'm actually interested in. Webcomics in particular are my jam.
So I would likely not even bother with ad blockers if site owners were not routinely acting as a proxy for criminals in (attempting to) serve me malware, extortion-ware, pyramid schemes, and other scams - or peddling horrifically low quality untargeted advertizing that doesn't respect my time (think "same 30 second unskippable ad plays 5 times in a row" utter and other absolute garbage.)
> Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't
If you want to talk ethics and morals, just how ethical and moral is it to leave your computer open to joining a botnet - imposing so many externalities onto other parties not privy to your "agreement" in the form of DDoS attacks and proxying to obfuscate the origins of such criminals? I think these concerns far weightier than the ethical or moral concerns of depriving a website owner a few cents for selling my time, my attention, my browsing history, etc. (even if they've outsourced that messy work to an ad company who does so on their behalf.)
You can't block ads in Facebook's native mobile app.
Their communications are probably encrypted and their ads are probably served on the same connection as everything else. Which means that either now or in the future you won't be able to modify your /etc/hosts to solve this problem either (assuming you have a rooted phone or tablet of course).
The only option you'll have will be to crack Facebook's client and modify its behavior, which will be copyright infringement.
So how long do you think it will take for either (1) everybody moving to native apps where ads can't be blocked or (2) courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement. After all, isn't opening a website just like installing an app? I don't see a difference really.
Don't get me wrong, I now have ad-blockers installed everywhere I can.
But let's not kid ourselves, you didn't have an implicit right for that content to begin with, by blocking ads you won't reward the good actors (i.e. GroundUp, featured in this article) and the future isn't bright.
> The only option you'll have will be to crack Facebook's client and modify its behavior, which will be copyright infringement.
It wouldn't be. You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer, you just don't have the right to redistribute all of those bits.
Copyright is about distribution, not about modification (well, it is in part, such a modified work would be classed as a 'derived work' and that is why you can't redistribute it, just like you can't redistribute the original).
> courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.
That's utterly wrong. Copyright infringement is about distributing content, not about forced consumption of content that was freely given to you by the rights holders or their agents and associates (the ad networks).
And rights holders have plenty of options here:
- sell ads directly rather than through networks
(and serve them up from the same server)
- charge for their content
- deny you access if you use an adblocker
No court will ever rule this as copyright infringement.
For using apps in general you need to agree with an EULA, which can be upheld, otherwise EULAs wouldn't exist.
Of course you can't sell your soul in an EULA and there's always this gray area where users might not be held accountable for selling their souls with a single click on "I agree".
But you're saying that copyright law refers to distribution, but well, you can't have that binary distributed legally unless you agreed to that EULA. And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.
The other problem is that most users won't be able to crack their own binaries and distributing or even downloading cracked binaries from the Internet will be copyright infringement.
Even so, lets assume that an easy to use tutorial will be provided, such that somehow users aren't violating any laws. Well, this is why the industry is pushing for DRM, which ends up getting used not only for encrypting media, but also for protecting binaries. And in some parts of the world it is already illegal to crack DRM.
And if not, I see the industry winning this argument and pushing for legislation protecting them, because truthfully they can point to people that crack binaries in order to freeload and pirate stuff for free - even if such arguments will be morally and factually wrong, they'll win by those arguments with the right lobbying power being exerted. It has been happening for some time now.
> You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer
Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.
There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.
You keep using the words 'copyright infringement' but you really have no idea what they mean.
> And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.
No, it really isn't.
Breach of the EULA does not automatically translate into breach of terms-of-use for the service and neither of those translate into copyright infringement.
They would have a case to terminate your right to use and maybe they'd sue you for damages if you cause any but copyright has nothing to do with it (in this case, there are edge cases where copyright might be invoked but this is not one of those).
> Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.
Yep.
> There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.
Well, the company won't like it and may sue you but they will still have to convince a judge that you caused them damage. And suing a private individual for pennies in lost ad sales is just not going to happen.
It would only be copyright infringement if you distributed your modified version of the Facebook app, or the modified content you've caused your browser to render.
Fortunately, Facebook seems to have some standards for ads: I don't see the porn/Russian brides/make money fast ads on Facebook like I see elsewhere. (except for a few real world friends involved in some MMF scam who use their personal status to advertise - not Facebooks' fault there though)
I do judge publishers by the quality of ads they accept. You cannot advertise a borderline illegal MMF scam and be considered legit. So when I see such ads I assume the news is at best a twisting of the truth, at worst completely fake. Quality editors will take less revenue to ensure that their advertising is not a scam.
Sure, I agree about quality, but if we continue blocking ads, then how are we going to end up rewarding the good actors?
I mean, this GroundUp site decided to drop Google's ads in order to improve usability for users and because the gains aren't worth it.
But this change won't get noticed by users having ad-blockers installed.
And if they'll decide to push high-quality in-house ads in order to survive, all it takes is somebody submitting a new rule in uBlock's or AdBlock's repository and then that revenue will be lost, with no discrimination.
Again, because of the status quo I too have ad-blockers installed everywhere, phone included. But it's not a win-win situation and that bothers me.
> all it takes is somebody submitting a new rule in uBlock's or AdBlock's repository and then that revenue will be lost, with no discrimination.
Anybody is free to disable their blocker on any site. If you want a site to be funded by mean of ads and you are fine with the ads served to you, just disable your blocker on that site.
Even better. Just checkin to FB once a day on your desktop (assuming you have one of course). Then you can use FBPurity to "cleanse" your FB experience.
> You can't block ads in Facebook's native mobile app.
One of the many reasons I don't install every dick and jane's mobile app. In this context, I don't even have a Facebook account.
> Which means that either now or in the future you won't be able to modify your /etc/hosts to solve this problem either (assuming you have a rooted phone or tablet of course).
It's trivial to proxy your own HTTPS traffic even on unrooted phones for e.g. debugging or corporate MITM. Short of cert pinning - which is going to block some corporate users as well - it's not going to be a problem. Facebook would be able to detect I'm not consuming their ads, of course.
> So how long do you think it will take for either (1) everybody moving to native apps where ads can't be blocked
You'll want a working website if only for the search traffic. I also consume most of my content on desktops or laptops - native apps are barely a thing here (anymore.) Even for phones, Google has a powerful incentive not to let apps break the web (which would deprive Google of all that juicy search traffic) and are already penalizing e.g. "intrusive interstitals". And even for phones, I will go without sooner than I will go with people's terrible native apps.
> or (2) courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.
Has that stopped pirates? And reminding consumers that adtech can be regulated might not be the smartest move as well... that goes both ways after all.
It's also giving ad blockers powerful incentive to obfuscate their tracks. Right now, adtech has the option to detect and request you disable your ad blocker, or refuse to serve you content if you don't. They lose that option if ad blockers have to obfuscate their tracks as a matter of routine, just to continue operating.
> But let's not kid ourselves, you didn't have an implicit right for that content to begin with
Agreed.
> by blocking ads you won't reward the good actors (i.e. GroundUp, featured in this article) and the future isn't bright.
That doesn't follow. Several blockers have e.g. "acceptable ads" policies. Those that don't can still whitelist sites (either because they asked nicely, or because the website breaks without doing so), and you will likely not remain whitelisted unless you and your advertisers are good actors. If anything, ad blockers are about only rewarding good actors.
There's also native advertising, doing a bit for one's sponsors in a podcast or video stream, etc. which tends to be of infinitely better quality, impossible to embed malware into, actually vetted by the content producers, and which generally nobody bothers to even try blocking.
And for all GroundUp's good intentions, part of the reason they seem to be ditching google ads is because they were not being good actors by running said ads. Are you sure this is an example of a darkening future instead of a brightening one?
I used to feel that way, and still have absolutely no problem with ads in and of themselves. But they are the ones who breached ethics and morals by tracking me around the web, tracking my search queries, running all sorts of terrible JavaScript, and generally being dicks. So I don't feel bad anymore.
It used to be the case that all content was Hollywood or newspaper created. But now, 99% of the content I am using is discussion threads such as this one, Wiki articles, arXiv papers and blogs.
From the people, to the people! I don't even need movies and articles - well, I still keep a 1% interest in them, but that's all. I am sorry about them but they are so derivative and dishonest at times that I can't watch them any more.
How many times did you find more value in YC comments than the linked article?
Exactly. On HN, I click to view the comments to see if it's even worth reading the linked article. It seems to be about 50/50, which is as good is it gets I think.
By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.
C'mon, you know better. What agreement? If your answer contains the word "unspoken", I'll let you in on the real definition of that word in this context: "non-existent". I didn't sign anything, no notice was posted. The only agreement I have is that I ask for data, and should your server deem me worthy, it will send me some. That's what I signed up for low those many years ago. If you and advertisers would like to change the "agreement" after the fact, well, good luck with that upstream swim.
You don't like ads, I get it. You take without compensating because you want to. Don't just shrug and say, "no notice was posted." Own it. Say, "I felt like taking this so I took it."
I'm sorry but it isn't that black and white. To be honest, I wish there was a way to put in my HTTP request headers the fact that I'm going to use an ad blocker - then your server has enough knowledge what to serve me exactly - if you wish, the text without adds, if not, then a notice saying that the text if for pay.
That'd be perfectly fine. Many sites already do this - detect my adblocker in javascript and then deny me access to the content. This is also perfectly fine - I fully agree that circumventing this forcefully is immoral/unethical.
In essence - the seller (content provider) should have the option to not give me content if I have an ad-blocker. If this is possible, then I don't see anything immoral about me using an adblocker. Do you?
And in fact, it does seem to be possible - wired for example does this. And I certainly don't try to circumvent this.
Many sites manage to work around and still show me ads. I dearly wish there would be some way for me to indicate "I'd rather be denied access to the content than be shown ads." Unfortunately that doesn't technologically exist easily yet.
It's more like content-mills like adverts, so they give content for free, attach adverts and hope it sticks.
Don't just shrug and say "we have to do this". Own it. Say, "we sideloaded non-relevant content to you for profit through pipes you're paying for because we didn't want to bother building a different business model".
Society does have many unwritten agreements, but this is not one of them.
Did you ever get those "march of dimes" solicitations that include a dime? I know people who believe that there's an unspoken agreement of reciprocity - they sent you something of value (even though you did not ask for it) so you must give something back. But no such social contract, spoken or unspoken, exists.
Similarly, there is no such contract with respect to ads. Personally, I never watch TV live, even when the schedule is convenient, because I like to skip all the ads. Courts have held time shifting to be a right, so I can assure you I am in the right on this one, although there is zero practical difference between my fast-forward ad blocking (which is sometimes automated), and running uBlock Origin.
You could argue that the society has an unspoken agreement about views vs ads, but that agreement includes limitations on what kinds of ads are considered acceptable - and guess what, most of the sites are violating that unspoken agreement.
Adblockers didn't happen by magic, they are a reaction to advertising trampling all over the implicit social contract.
And this isn't an unwritten agreement that this member of society is even aware of so... so much for that aspect of society. Or as my grandfather used to say, you can wish in one hand and crap in the other, one of them will fill up faster. That unwritten agreement is worth everything its written on.
What exactly am I taking by not viewing ads? I view it the opposite, ads take away my attention and time and worst of all are generally using psychology to influence my behavior. If your site is using them to monetize, I'll be blunt, tough shit. I dislike the advertising model of shoveling malware javascript from dodgy ad companies and if blocking ads is the way to get that changed, so be it. Consider this societal protest over a business model I disagree with on its very premise. All the way back to Edward Bernays I think advertising has a rotten core by encouraging things like women to smoke, and passing off one of the most common elements off as some sort of rare thing amongst numerous other ethically questionable tactics.
But what theft has occurred when ads are blocked? What have I taken from the ad companies? From the publisher? What alternative has been given? If anything the only thing I have taken away is encouraging them to pursue better ways of monetization that doesn't treat my attention as some fungible thing for their own benefit. This company made $200 a month, donations alone could easily recoup that cost with 40 people doing $5 a month.
Also, if I go to a website and read content without viewing ads due to having an ad blocker. Well oops, but not like there is a giant banner over each hyperlink that says I can't click it without hurting someones feelings or bottom line. Block me if you want, but ironically you'd be cutting of your own nose to spite your face. I'm willing to pay for no ads, but no site is wanting to engage in what that truly means.
Point me to the ethical problem with ad blocking and maybe I'll buy your argument. But if your fundamental premise is that you need ads to publish, you're not going to convince me with $200/month arguments.
My computer is controlled by me, ads come through a programmable rendering engine, nobody owes ads the right to render unconditionally.
All that being said, the irony is I pay more out via patreon than I'm probably worth in ad revenue to all the websites I've ever visited. I do this because I hate the current model. I'm supporting the content producers that have realized this fact and are embracing it. What are you doing to change things for the better?
I hate the ad model too, but you're stealing bandwidth and hosting. Delivering those pictures and text comes from somewhere, and ads are how they're hoping to pay for it. Justify it to yourself how you want, but it's true.
It's not stealing, because you request the resource from the server and the server explicitly decides to fulfill your request. And this isn't exploiting a bug or security vulnerability. The server is deliberately programmed to fulfill requests regardless of whether the requester's client.
If running an ad blocker is stealing, then so is disabling JavaScript or using curl.
There are other comments (including one by me) discussing this. I'm totally fine with it. Others have said that most advertisers won't pay for these ads due to an inability to audit and track users.
Well, they were happy to pay for them in the past that way and likely will be happy to pay for them again if the only other option is not to be able to advertise at all.
The target of a link could still be redirected, this would not allow the ad agency to track visitors but would allow them to track the effectiveness of a campaign.
That's about as much as they should be getting anyway.
But it would kill most RTB schemes and it would get rid of the majority of the tracking, which would be a good thing.
It wouldn't even kill RTB - it's just that the RTB response would include the actual ad to be displayed, and we'd be back to Nielsen style outfits figuring out how many of those ads were actually displayed.
And the world is likely to be a better place for it.
I think the companies who rely on tracking, auditing, and preying on vulnerable users aren't typically those who would benefit from billboard or TV ads.
The companies who do advertise in more traditional forms of media tend to be larger and more brand focused. They don't rely on manipulating their customers in very short term, impulse situations. They rely on visibility and try to generate goodwill through elaborate PR campaigns.
The ethical problem isn't ethical, but existential. If everyone acted on only their immediate self-interest, ad-supported business models would fold. Then, we already have all lost out, because people currently obviously prefer ads to paywalls. Even if you decide to pay for a few sources of information, you will never again have access to the breath of journalism you have now.
If paywalls don't catch on, it's game over for he current model of societies. Because even if my contribution of a vote every four years seems quite small, it's still the currency that democracy depends on. And without an informed public, their decisions tend towards randomness, and are no longer a factor in the decision-making process.
All this isn't a new mechanism, it's basic tragedy of the commons. "It's my boat, and I'm gonna go out tonight, and fish as much as I want to. Nature belongs to me as much as to anyone else, and nobody has the right to tell me what to do, especially not in international waters".
There's nothing really wrong with that argument, except that many a fisherman has made it, and seen his haul cut to almost nothing when overfishing had decimated the population.
The public's attention span and patience is a commons, too. Advertisers have engaged in a vicious, scorched-earth campaign to target the most vulnerable (read: gullible) people out there. Needless to say, this has done catastrophic damage to the commons.
The media deserve their share of the blame. Besides participating in this unethical ad market, they've cranked up the emphasis on sensationalist, click bait garbage at the cost of real journalism.
To continue with the fishing/aquatic analogy: don't blame people for filtering their water or buying bottled water after all of the toxic waste that's been dumped into the river.
If everyone stopped watching ads, of course the ad-supported business models would fold! And what we would have lost out on is a business model that is apparently not liked by enough people anymore.
Who's to say paywalls will end up being the norm? And what happens if the paywall is abstracted away behind a Spotify-like news interface?
In the Netherlands there's an online subscription-based news and magazine service, it's doing quite well. It seems quite succesful in engaging their readers more than the traditional media.
I do also see that we live in a more chaotic time than say a 100 years ago. I think much of it can be attributed to the rise of fast information transport systems, computers and the Internet, but that does not mean I have an obligation to support a business model I find immoral, because it might in some way indirectly benefit journalism and democracy in general. Perhaps abolishing the advertising model will make space for interesting other models, like community-curated news, patronage, paying for archives/more in-depth articles, etcetera.
It's not a tragedy of the commons if the only "victims" are a few companies. Companies are not "the commons", or humans for that matter. Companies fail all the time, and that's OK. Business models are not sacred cows that can never be slaughtered. If one business model stops working, companies will adapt and find new business models.
On the other hand, it can be argued that advertisements can have a negative influence on their viewers in many ways.
> people currently obviously prefer ads to paywalls
I don't think this claim can be made on the basis of site traffic. You would have to compare how many people actively support the ad system vs actively support the paywall system.
Assuming people that use adblocking software, support the paywall system as a default alternative, ~22% of internet users use adblockers[0] and (let's say) support a paywall system.
I would guess that of the 78% of people that don't use an adblocker, the majority of them don't know about them, rather than make a conscious decision to not use them.
Ad revenue model is winning on traffic because of three reasons
* lots of people don't know about adblockers
* the default configuration for browsers is to not do adblocking
* most people don't change defaults
I couldn't find any studies that have specific estimates of how many people dont know about adblocking software or know and don't use.
>hen, we already have all lost out, because people currently obviously prefer ads to paywalls.
Fallacy of the excluded middle: among the choices you did not accept we have the option of returning the internet back to the laws that originally governed it, that is nothing commercial.
I don't personally want this across the board, but I am not convinced that the world wouldn't be better if that rule held for non fictional content.
There's an unwritten agreement that sites won't serve stuff that tries to infect me with malware, but, well, here we are.
Could you please answer the question: are you accepting actual legal liability for users' computers you infect with malware from ads? If not, you have lost any moral argument.
Does your site take responsibility for the ads it displays? Will you compensate me for the time and expense in the event one of your unvetted ads infects a user at my company with some kind of drive-by malware?
No?
Then I guess this "agreement" isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.
Give me two examples of unwritten agreements that are not laws and will get me in more trouble than "some segment of the population will think less of me".
Twist it however you like, but just saying things like they're a fact does not an argument make. Making your case without accusations would be a good place to start.
I'm definitely entitled not to let your document which you chose to send me on request cause my hardware+software to do things I don't want it to, like make any ol' network request it pleases without my say-so.
Would you say the same about changing the font size or the color contrast?
For years I had "flash click to play" for usability reasons (I always have 20-50 tabs open), before ad blocking was a thing - but as a results, ads wouldn't play or show until I clicked on them. Do you think back then I had the obligation to click-to-play the ads?
It is exceedingly simple. If you don't want me to see content without ads, don't serve it to me without ads. If you don't want me to change the font size, serve it as a png so I can't change it.
Sure, it's called "manners", or "social behaviour". Of course, as time goes on, many informal social rules have been made into law, because someone always figures he can live with the disapproving looks.
As just one example: If you've agreed to meet with a friend and they don't show, without notice, you'll probably inform them that they are in violation of your unwritten agreement.
(I'm not actually in favour of this line of argument, but I believe it's pretty obvious that unwritten social norms exist, and often serve a purpose)
If you argue with that kind of unwritten agreement, I'd argue that ad providers should also adhere to the agreement not to track me, manipulate me or to infect my machine with malware. Which they evidently don't. So I don't feel very motivate to respect theirs.
When you enter a physical store or the house of your neighbours, you are also entering into an unspoken agreement that far exceeds the minimum requirements set by law. You didn't sign anything and no notice was posted, yet you abide by the rules.
When they clearly and openly change those requirements, for instance by hanging advertisement banners from the walls, then you have the option of leaving. You are certainly not entitled to remove the banners from your view, not even using magic shades. The may ban magic shades in the stores or the house.
That technology makes certain things possible, even easily, does not make it an entitlement. That the other party is invisible, instead of mom and pop behind the counter of the store, does not mean you are entitled to ignore their wishes.
But you certainly are entitled to use magic shades, unless of course the homeowner bans them. Likewise, a server is free to deny my browser's web request for any reason. The fact that the server does not deny my browser's request makes it pretty clear that using an ad blocker is analogous to using magic shades in my neighbor's home and receiving no complaints from the neighbor.
This analogy breaks down because it's my browser and my hardware. You're essentially putting both the web site and the viewer in a room together that happens to belong to the people who own the site. Whereas the reality is that each party owns his own end of a connection. My house is connected to their house/store. Neither party's rules apply outside their own domain, no pun intended. I can't remove the banners from their store, without permission and they can't display them in my house without permission.
We're not that far from achieving that, from a tech point of view. Augmented reality with something like the Hololens could hide these things away, image recognition has become good enough to deal with most real world ads panels/posters. The main showstopper is size of equipment and battery life.
The day AR allows me to use a headset untethered to a desktop computer with enough battery life to last a day will be the last day I ever have to watch an ad in the real world.
How can you debate the finer points of whether accessing a website and rejecting ads is moral or not, when you haven't built a moral case for urging and tricking people into buying stuff that they don't need?
You say "visiting a site" should be enough to "enter into an agreement" with a site to agree to view their ads.
Surely the same should extend to the site, such that "visiting a site" is enough to "enter into an agreement" with the visitor to agree to show only ads that are relevant, non-intrusive, and do not contain malware.
The main short-term incentive for ad networks is to show more ads, make them more intrusive, and sell them to whomever pays the most. It's simply not in the long-term interests of a website, or a website visitor, to be part of an ad network.
I'm more frustrated they're wasting my bandwidth, slowing down load times. If their ads were text-only and not running trackers to follow me on the internet I wouldn't bother with ad-blockers/tracker-blockers.
Again: if they choose one you’re not happy with, you’re free to decide not to read the content. Otherwise I don’t see how the situation is different from not paying for a meal in a restaurant if you’re not happy with the payment methods offered.
Actually, if the restaurant only accepts payment by credit card, you are free to not pay. That's the concept of legal tender - if they want to demand payment of a debt (i.e. after you finish the meal) from you with backing by law, they _must_ accept legal tender. If they only accept credit card payments, they can't use the law to make you pay.
> This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services.
Emphasis added is mine. US coins and currency are valid offers of payment for debts, but for most other purposes a vendor can choose what to accept. The uniform commercial code, §3-603, then states:
> If tender of payment of an obligation to pay an instrument is made to a person entitled to enforce the instrument and the tender is refused, there is discharge, to the extent of the amount of the tender, of the obligation of an indorser or accommodation party having a right of recourse with respect to the obligation to which the tender relates.
Unless there are other statutes that apply (I'm not any kind of expert in this area), it sure sounds like if I make a valid offer of legal tender to an authorized agent of a creditor, and they refuse, I have satisfied the terms of the debt. So, if I owe someone $10,000 I can legally offer them one million pennies, which are legal tender under the Coinage Act of 1965 (perhaps I also should provide some form of proof that there are one million pennies in the truck so there's no dispute about that). They can also legally choose to reject it, but if they do then I no longer owe them anything.
That doesn't contradict what I said. If I pay up front, the restaurant can accept/deny whatever they want. If they want to recover a debt, they have to accept legal tender.
From reading the responses and thinking further on this: is this a culture-divide issue? Do you pay for meals in advance in US restaurants? If so, I've misspoken.
It depends on the type of restaurant. Table-service restaurants generally do not require payment in advance [if you look like you can pay]. Take-out, delivery, and counter-service restaurants generally require payment in full before fulfilling your order. Buffet restaurants are split: some require payment as you walk in the door, and others require payment on your way out.
This leads to the somewhat paradoxical situation where you cannot buy a hot dog on credit, but you can get a porterhouse, lobster tail, salad, baked potato, and a beer and not be expected to pay until well after the food is already beyond recovery.
So I started looking into this, because it's interesting.
So, merchants can reject cash for purchases[1] because cash is legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues, and a purchase is not one of these.
The Wikipedia page [2] for dining and dashing states that ordering a meal is a contract debt, since you are given the food before the transaction occurs, with the understanding that you'll pay for it afterwards. Thus, if the merchant, after giving you the food, informed you that they only accept credit card, that would not be allowed.
It's completely true. If I finish my meal and don't have a credit card, the restaurant will be annoyed. I offer them cash, and they refuse the payment. I therefore leave without paying. The restaurant takes me to court for non-payment and I agree to pay. I pay in cash. From the link in your sibling comment:
"This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor"
If I sat down in a restaurant, finished my starter, and was then brought a bowl of vomit for my main course, I wouldn't expect to have to pay for the starter. I would get up and leave. If the restaurant had a big sign outside saying "vomit for main course", I wouldn't feel entitled to leave without paying.
Consider the following: If you pick up a newspaper or magazine, is it wrong to skip the ads? What about changing the TV channel or radio station while commercials play?
>Consider the following: If you pick up a newspaper or magazine, is it wrong to skip the ads? What about changing the TV channel or radio station while commercials play?
Apparently when I take a piss during a commercial break, I'm not just voiding my bladdder... I'm breaking the social contract.
Sorry, but if you put up a website, I can render it with whatever browser I please.
Or alternatively, content providers can embrace a holistic view of their site - ads and all... just don't cry when someone tries to make a case that your malvertising is a CFAA violation :)
I think it'd be wrong to hire a dude to clip out all the ads before I open the paper in the morning. I think it'd be wrong to mod my TV and car radio to change the channel when an ad starts playing.
According to your logic you are obliged to watch the ads on TV. Because by watching a film you made an agreement that watching the film is only free because you watch the ads.
The TV and Radio ad argument falls a little flat when you consider people have left radio for competitively priced streaming music that is ad-free and people have left TV for competitively priced streaming movies and TV that are ad-free.
Newspapers have just struggled to find and adopt a similar model, I hope they find it. The common thread is that we live in an advertising saturated world and a lot of people are tired of it.
Drive down a street or highway... Ads, signage, billboards, Turn on a radio... Ads, Go online... Ads, Open a newspaper or magazine... Ads, Watch a movie... Product placements. I am waiting for them to print ads on the individual sheets of toilet paper on a roll.
Some advertising is fine but when it ruins landscapes, deafens you as you watch TV or ruins a perfectly good site layout whilst tracking and eavesdropping on you then something is wrong.
>The TV and Radio ad argument falls a little flat when you consider people have left radio for competitively priced streaming music that is ad-free and people have left TV for competitively priced streaming movies and TV that are ad-free.
Not ad free - different types of ads. Services like Netflix have product placement.
(Which troubles me a bit since while traditional ads were irritating, at least there was disclosure.)
Isn't this what clippings services provide? I don't see Obama (because Trump only watches TV) wasting his precious time reading the ads. He has people literally picking the wheat from the chaff.
That has to be a first: arguing for the morality of the advertising eco system. I've seen quite a bit of it from the inside and let's just say that if there is an argument for morality it lies with the consumers, emphatically not with publishers (who have conditioned their audience first that everything should be free) or with advertisers (and that's even before we get into the content of the ads, see TFA).
> By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.
That sounds like a legal argument to me, about which you earlier said you have no idea. Let me summarize my answer: you're wrong. By visiting a site you do not 'enter into an agreement to exchange your adviews for content'.
> Doesn't feel right to me.
That's ok, you are entitled to your own feelings.
So you don't get to install an adblocker. Have fun with spyware, malware and being tracked from here to kingdom come.
If it was just ads, on the page itself and without any further trickery the ads would work just fine.
>If it was just ads, on the page itself and without any further trickery the ads would work just fine.
I really want this to be true but the elephant in the room is auditing. Without the ad network performing tracking, advertisers have no way to independently verify ad performance and corresponding payment to publishers for CPC ads. For CPA ads, the publisher has no way to independently verify the advertiser is paying out correctly for sales conversions.
You need a third party in the middle to arbitrate. AFAIK, the only way to do that at scale is with cookies from an ad network dropped in and tracked via a beacon.
I guess the only solution is for a new, non-commercial advertising network to spring up (sort of like an NGO) with a strong enough charter and ethical approach that end users (or browsers themselves?) trust limited tracking from ads served through that network. The problem is, who funds it? Not the advertisers or publishers as that would destroy the impartiality of the network.
Edit: and problem two is if such an ad network came in to existence and was successful, it would end up a de-facto monopoly for on-line ad distribution. Apart from the headwinds it would attract from Google, there are obvious issues around free-speech, mono-culture etc.
Edit 2: or maybe the "internet" agrees what an ethical ad network should look like and then any one is free to set one up but must submit to regular auditing by a new internet body to make sure they are sticking to the agreed "charter". That way the ad network could be operationally funded by publishers/advertisiers but still retain user's trust. A little like the CA market for SSL certs. If an ad network started misbehaving, browsers themselves could block/de-list them (like they do when they revoke root certs from rogue CAs)
They could audit the effectiveness by catching the clicks on a redirect. That way they can't track but will still know the number of visitors as a result of the campaign.
A 'sample audience' such as used in TV that would willingly be tracked could then be used to extrapolate impressions.
The sample audience might work for CPC campaigns on large sites but difficult to see how it would work reliably for the millions of smaller sites out there (or work at all for CPA campaigns where conversion % can vary wildly depending on the action being paid for and the geography of the end user market being targetted).
I'd personally have zero problem with a strongly audited third party tracking me during transition from a publisher site to arrival (or checkout in the case of CPA) on an advertiser's site.
What I do object to is that same tracking info being used across every publisher and advertiser on the ad network (and tracking info persisting for months).
If there was an ad network that enforced a strict set of simple, inert advertising formats and ensured tracking was ephemeral and unique between each publisher/advertiser pair (and not capable of being used to parallel construct my browsing across the whole network), I'd happily accept the compromise. Doubly so if I knew the browsers held a nuclear option of "de-listing" the network in the event of bad behaviour.
Well, for CPA the only thing that matters you already know, then it's up to you to decide who you want to run those ads and if they agree with you and find you trustworthy. That's a 'solved problem' in the sense that for a long time such situations were dealt with using outside auditors. It costs a bit but not so much that it would make CPA impossible, merely less convenient.
Interesting part I got from this discourse: there is no 'one size fits all' when it comes to what is acceptable and what is not. That's yet another problem to be solved.
Sometimes when I click a link I get to a site I never visited before and I don't know that before having got there. They could have ads, they could not have ad. They could use JS to display even text content, they could not use any JS at all. They could serve malware, they could fingerprint me, they could run some bitcoin miner in the JS they serve. They could be totally honest. I really don't know. In some cases they don't know too.
That's why I'm adblocking everything and I visit sites with NoScript, Self Destructing Cookies, DisableWebRTC among the others. Better safe than sorry.
And about the right to render bits and bytes however I wish, I use Stylish for those few sites that do really wierd things with their layout.
By the way, a browser renders bit and bytes as it wishes, starting from the html file and maybe stopping there or going as far as precaching linked pages.
No. You can not force "agreement" on me that easily. By visiting the site, I am visiting the site. There is no agreement between us whatsoever about anything.
The good thing about morale is that it doesn't have to be the same for different people. It's not an absolute value. You can live up to your high morale standards and watch ads (which sounds a bit odd). Other people think differently.
Other people like me think we are morally bound to ignore ads as much as possible because we think they destroy a healthy capitalism and are misused to track people and distribute malware. Therefore I use an ad-blocker.
But that's only a side note. In the internet your argument is invalid because I don't know in advance whether a website uses ads or not. To discover that I would have to visit that site without an ad-blocker and let them serve ads without warning. And that would be unacceptable.
The solution for that problem is the various websites either use paywalls or detect ad-blockers and don't provide content when one is in use. In this case we really have an agreement. If I turn off my ad-blocker I'm allowed to watch the content, otherwise I'm not.
But I never ever had the desire to see content which has been hidden behind an ad-blocker blocker.
I agree. It's just like any other kind of piracy. If the content isn't valuable enough to see with ads enabled, then the ethical answer is to not view the content at all.
It turns out to be the other way around: the site owner claims that the ads Google served up were of such low quality that they "polluted" the content of the site:
"For about R20,000 a year, it isn’t worth it to pollute our content with get-rich-quick adverts featuring Patrice Motsepe, Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey (see image at top of article)."
Moreover, the author states in the comments that their non-profit is sustained by donations, not by ads. If someone had visited this site with an ad-blocker turned on before the author stopped using Google ads, it would have improved the content (by the author's own stated standards) without endangering the site's source of funding.
Granted this may be a special case. But I think special cases are often worth the read, or at least not "just like any other kind."
I read newspapers without looking at the ads. I use highways and public transportation without looking at the billboards. I don't see how it's any different.
I would say it should be arguably illegal to resell content with ads removed, but how something is rendered in my brain or inside the confines of my home is upto me to decide. There's nothing illegal about ripping out the ad pages before reading a magazine at home.
There is a big difference between print and web: by the time you rip the ads out of the newspaper you have already made it to the ad statistics (“our newspaper sells X copies daily”). On the other hand, with an ad blocker an ad load is never recorded. In the first case, the publisher still makes money, in the second he doesn’t.
Along with several other factors, this is what makes advertising online more valuable, as far as I can tell. Online ads can be far better quantified, in terms of impact, can appeal more to their target audience, can more easily provide a service alongside their advertising content, etc. Advertisers were given a magic wand, but decided to break it over their collective knee and carrying on waving their empty hands about instead.
In the first case you are also screwing the advertising entity for the gain of the publisher, in the second case you are not pretending to see ads to profit for someone in the ecosystem on the expense of someone else.
Unless your friend asks you to cut ads out of their newspaper. Ad blockers operate with explicit permission, so it's not as if anyone who wants to view ads is being deprived.
Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't. By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.
Doesn't feel right to me.