Well, if they made me register an account and agree to a ToS, I think it changes things. I have now signed an agreement, and the data is only delivered through an authenticated manner. But if it's publicly available, like a blog post, I don't see how you can place any restrictions on me. I think you are speaking about ethics, and you can try to convince me that my ethics are inferior to your ethics, and I can try to convince you that my ethics are better than your ethics, but that becomes a parlor game. Surely, a blind person has a need to display the data retrieved differently? Perhaps your ethics change for the disabled?

I've gone off topic, but the point is, if the ad-supported business model is failing, that's a problem for business to solve, not pleas to my "morality".

I'm solely challenging your assertion that you have zero ethical obligation to a content provider because of the mechanism by which they provided you content. I don't think your digression into meta-ethics is very interesting, so I'll focus what seems to be your concrete point.

> Well, if they made me register an account and agree to a ToS, I think it changes things. [...] But if it's publicly available, like a blog post, I don't see how you can place any restrictions on me.

What if there was no authentication mechanism, but just a heartfelt request in the text of the content which asked you kindly to whitelist that site in your ad blocker?

What if they didn't explicitly request it, but you simply know that that's what they would want?

What I'm trying to get at with these questions is this idea that web users are freed from the obligations of fairness and honest dealings due to the technical mechanisms of the internet.

Let me shift the conversation, and say that by the time you are trying to save an industry by arguing about morals, it is effectively doomed. A simple technical fix (installing an adblocker), a fix which is not illegal and in fact hundreds of millions of people do, renders the whole discussion moot.

I think what many adtech companies have done is immoral. Excessive data use, tracking, distraction, and so on. But that's my opinion. Whose really in the "right" here? Does it matter? A new model will have to emerge, or at least a tweaked one. The adtech industry destroyed trust and angered people, thus motivating people to find a solution. Now businesses are springing up, like Brave, to solve the issue.

Can you outlaw ad blocking? No. Can you force me to use a certain web browser? No. So what are you going to do about it? Whine on HN about unethical assholes like me? I think innovation and creativity will have to crack the nut.

I'm sure you make a lot of good points here, but I'm more interested in the ethical calculus of the individual ad block user than the market forces at play.

In my opinion, there is no ethical question to answer regarding general content I receive via an HTTP request. There's no expectation on my part other than the server provide me a valid response, which I will make use of as I choose (within the law, of course).

The technology to implement a paywall is well established, and while it may be annoying to have wasted time making the request, I'd simply learn to ignore certain domains. If that becomes unmanageable, I'd look for, or write, something to filter the blacklisted domains.

I already do this for forbes.com and Wired, among a few others, and my life is not measurably poorer as a result. It's a slight annoyance that Google, for example, returns these sites in my search results. Perhaps I should campaign the major search engines to implement custom filters for me.

Really, I don't care much if the current ad-fueled ecosystem of adutorial content and click-bait thrives on the Internet, as long as I don't have to see it.

Implicit agreements for everything are a side effect of our idiotic and corrupt legal system.

Imagine going to a car lot and having a salesman walk up and say "our TOS say by walking onto a lot you have to buy something, you owe us. Didn't you read them? they are behind that dumpster over there duh. Its on page 53 paragraph 10"

Its really shady to link to some other resource on your domain in small print that is full of legal mumbo jumbo and pretend that constitutes any real agreement between you and somebody else. And yes I understand that all those Judges and lawyers who make a living off of making this crap up disagree with me.

For what ifs - What if you sending me a document without charge or explicitly asking for payment first did not imply that I "have" to download some other document that will annoy me and possible infect my computer.

I think this is a red herring. Yes, there are a million absurd examples of "implicit agreements" that one can think of. There are also many legitimate examples-- for instance, you shouldn't go into a bookstore and take pictures of all the pages in a book even though you haven't explicitly agreed not to and the store owners allowed you onto their premises.

So, is "if you're going to use my website, don't block ads" absurd? I don't think so, and if it's not then your comment is irrelevant to this discussion.

I'm not trying to create a law, I'm trying to discuss whether the individual ad block user bears any moral or ethical responsibility to the content provider. The argument offered here implies their interaction with the content host exists in a completely neutral moral plane because it's mediated by technology. I'm not convinced.

There have been a number of sites that have popped up as submissions here on HN where the site rendered without an adblocker loaded so slowly as to be basically unusable. Rendered in lynx, however, it was both readable and extremely fast to load. Does that count as an adblocker, or a TOS violation? What about curl + an html viewer (without JS capability?)

The moral calculus is complex, I'm not drawing a bright line. I'm simply challenging the assertion that, because of the technical architecture of the internet, a person's interaction with a content provider is not subject to morality at all.