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by sanswork 3471 days ago
No, that isn't what I said at all.
1 comments

What you said is not meaningfully different. You imply there is some implicit relationship between the person who clicks on a link and the person who made the content behind the link.

No such relationship exists.

There is a relationship though or else there would be no communication.

You want something, they have something. You communicate your desire and they provide you with something. That is a relationship.

You are using the concept of "relationship" with two different meanings.

When I click a link, there is a relationship between me and some entity in the same sense that the term is used in computer science to describe relational databases.

This is not a relationship in the legal or ethical senses. By clicking a link, I did not agree to anything at all. All I did was react to an announcement that there is some resource somewhere, and deciding to take a look at it. If I decide to do it from a terminal and read the HTML directly without rendering, that is no one's business and my actions are not unethical in any way.

The advertisement industry is starting to behave like the music industry in the early days of the web. They are willing to destroy the best tool ever created for global human communication and knowledge sharing for the purpose of protecting an obsolete business model.