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by bryans
3955 days ago
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As I've said a few times now in different ways, if you received the content as the creator intended and then removed the ads, you would have a perfectly legitimate argument. But that's not what you're doing. You're preventing them from being delivered at all, while still consuming the content at the direct financial expense of the content creator. You are taking advantage of the technological ability to access content without paying the price of admission. It is absolutely immoral behavior, no matter how you would like to spin it. |
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What if I have a specific ad agency they happen to employ being blocked in my hosts file? Is it my fault they use Google AdSense instead of Yahoo Listings?
The crux of your argument rests on the user knowing what they are requesting before receiving it. The problem with that is they don't know what they are requesting until they have already obtained it. The page they are requesting could be 200kb of plaintext or it could be 26MB full of high-retina images and javascript.
Since they do not know what a page contains until after they download it - it's within their place to preemptively block things like images, javascript, and flash to save bandwidth or for security reasons.
Furthermore, ads are almost always hosted by a 3rd-party. When I visit example.com I am under no obligation to download anything that does not originate from example.com as my intention is to visit example.com not googles-invasive-ad-network.google.com. If I wanted to visit googles-invasive-ad-network.google.com, I'd enter that URL into my browser in place of example.com
I do have some issues with your reasoning for why a user is morally obligated to perform certain actions however.
>You have paid the price of admission by accepting the document as the creator intended. But when you prevent the other content from showing up in the first place, you have entered into the world of immorality.
If downloading what the content creator has on their site is my moral obligation; am I morally obligated to download malware/viruses if they are included on the page? If the answer is "no", why not? [0]
>if you received the content as the creator intended and then removed the ads, you would have a perfectly legitimate argument.
So if I wget/curl the page then remove the ads by editing the .html file before viewing the file, I'm morally in the clear? AFAIK wget/curl does not count as an ad impression for popular ad agencies. I am willing to accept that I could be wrong on this, as I couldn't find any information on it and am relying on years-old memory.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading