[alex_young]

> The litmus test for stealing here is breaking an agreement.

This sounds fine, but how can you break an agreement you haven't conceded to? I cannot see how the simple fact that an ad was offered alongside other content constitutes any agreement from the receiving party.

No one owns your attention.

[dragonwriter]

> This sounds fine, but how can you break an agreement you haven't conceded to?

That's quite easy to do.

The question is why it should matter that you did so.

[darawk]

> This sounds fine, but how can you break an agreement you haven't conceded to? I cannot see how the simple fact that an ad was offered alongside other content constitutes any agreement from the receiving party.

Indeed this is the question. If you haven't meaningfully entered an agreement, then I don't believe you're obligated to abide this term. However, that's sort of the question. What constitutes entering an agreement? How explicit do they have to be exactly to make it enforceable? I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems to me that there ought to be some standard by which you can be considered to have agreed to some sort of service-terms.

[stepvhen]

as a baseline, to constitute entering an agreement, each party must have a reasonable idea of what they are agreeing to, as well as the capacity (mental, emotional, physical, rational, etc) to actually make such an agreement. to enforce an agreement, it must be recognized that some term.has been broken by some party.

ad providers, as a collective (that is, no single actor is responsible by themselves, and not every actor is at fault) began breaking the terms of the implicit agreements with Pop-up ads, ads with sound, ads with visual motion, ads with full video, ads that look like real articles, ads that block actaul content from the website you are visiting, dishonest or misleading ads, targeted ads without the users consent, ads that are significantly louder than the video you are watching, ads that hijack your mouse, etc.

each of these phenomena were introduced after previous terms were implicitly agreed upon, that is, they were introduced without informing the user beforehand. and so, as a collective, ad providers have broken the agreement much more and morw often than users who wholesale block ads. in this moral economy then, the users have the high ground.

[mirimir]

If sites want to force the issue, they can block ad blockers.

Also, with GDPR, this argument is about to become perilous.