Out of curiosity... Rather than blocking ads, why not block sites that have ads? This way you comply with their implicit wish not to have you read their content without some sort of monetary return.
Honestly, it's a bit of a gray ethical area for me.
On one hand, what you say makes perfect sense.
On the other hand, I like having my cake and eating it, too. It's like having a buffet dinner where the host tells you: "sure, you can eat this juicy steak, but you also have to eat the surrounding shards of glass that I've put there to feed my thirst for human dignity".
If I particularly like the host I might do it, otherwise I'll just take the steak and leave.
I don't love ads but that is a pretty poor and dramatic analogy... It's more like eating a free buffet and the host asks you to listen to his annoying friends while you eat... Some of them write notes about you and share it amongst themselves... I'm not sure this is really an ethical grey area for you or just rationalizing it into grey area. If the website you are reading completely relies on ad revenue to pay its employees then it is pretty black and white that blocking the ads is not "ethical." If you really object to the ad model then you should do as the parent said and block websites which are ad-driven.
I've also worked at multiple publishing companies and I can tell you that although their owned and operated websites were run with ad money, none of the people involved had a thirst for human dignity. It is more like, we all wanted to make a living and enough people simultaneously wanted to read the content AND didn't mind the ads enough to click away. Any time I've seen subscription or pay per content tried at publishers I've been with it fails dramatically because the percentage of willing readers is just too small unless you are a very niche and valuable or very large and famous publisher.
I see adblocking as ethically justified because at the end of the day, I am only using my browser to ask for a resource from the content provider, and it is up to my computer, or by extension, the user controlling that computer, what to do with that resource if it is then provided.
If I put a piece of electrical tape physically over the ad on my monitor, I am effectively blocking the ad, but in this case the content provider gets to lie to their sponsor and say the ad made an impression, which just pushes the cost onto the sponsor. The ethics haven't really changed yet it is absurd to suggest that I am not free to put tape on my monitor.
I think it is hard to say that I am ethically obligated to pay attention to the ad just because a content provider unconditionally gave me something I asked for. The choice for content providers then, is to be like the WSJ, and simply quit giving away content unconditionally. If the content can't support itself that way, well, so be it. If no one was willing to pay for the content, doesn't this necessarily imply literally nothing of value was lost?
When you put something on the open web, you put something on the open web.
It's up to me to decide how and with what software I want to view the content.
If you do not want your stuff on the open web, stop putting it on the open web.. It's really simple
>> This way you comply with their implicit wish not to have you read their content without some sort of monetary return.
I make no promises about the way I'm going to render your site when I request data. I'm just requesting some data from the server.
I might be reading it in lynx, or over a slow connection with images turned off, or on an ancient browser, or whatever.
I prefer explicit to implicit - if you wish to enforce my rendering method, you shouldn't give me the data. I would even be happy with sending a flag in my request - XWillNotRender or whatever, so that you can filter me out easily if you wish. But once I have the data my device can show it to me however I wish.
For me, its because the open web came first: people posted websites, you request delivery of websites, they send you the page/content, everyone was happy.
Then people started using it to do naughty things. Javascript came along. Tracking cookies. Tracking pixels. Crosssite scripts, etc. Oi vey! But they didn't come along all in one go you see. We kept going to sites, and every now and then we noticed people slipping in little bits of naughty that we didn't explicitly ask for or expect when we visited their website.
So the technical amongst us kept up things as we always did, using the open web, but we just wrote a thing to block the naughty: say entries of particular servers into host files.
Then someone started packaging these things up into programs and lists of all the bad things people were doing on the web, and we realized we didn't have to do it ourselves anymore. So we just set ourselves up with our privacy keeping program, our cookie/javascript blocker, and our ad list, and kept on surfing the internet, just as we'd always been doing for years.
The thing to understand is: i've never seen an ad on you-tube not explicitly because i'm trying to screw youtube over, but because we were here first, we surfed the web, sharing content and when bad players appeared, we stopped/blocked them. Many of us just organically reached this position by taking action against things that made that the web experience worse...bit by bit. People started serving us things we didnt ask for, so we just blocked the scripts and servers for the things we didnt ask for.
It seems to me arse-backwards to ask why we don't block sites that have ads: its because the web and users and authors were here first and then the commercial sites and practices invaded. Why would we co-opt our behaviour and our communication to serve the needs of the immoral, the user hostile, the dishonest and the underhanded? So they can sell things? Oh please!
The web is not here to serve businesses and ads.
THEY IMPOSED THEIR VISION ON US! not the other way around!
I'm not spending my time to individually cater to the whims of invaders of the open web. I essentially just have automatic blocks of bad players and behaviours my computer won't talk to and won't participate in.
/incidentally, my blockers do automatically block a number of sites now. news.com.au is automagically blocked, presumably because its gotten to the point where its content to ads/hostility ratio is so low that asking it to serve up content is now indistinguisable to my blockers from a site being genuinely bad/hostile.
but youtube, etc is free to put up a wall or blocker any time they want to stop serving material on the open web. And if you serve something on the open web and people download it, i have the world's smallest violin here to play for you...
