[enraged_camel]

I think the damage this causes is far greater than setting up two tiers of advertising.

This is a shining example of how those with money are able to influence the system by corrupting the very mechanisms that were implemented to protect the "regular people" in that system.

If Google had paid a politician to exempt itself from certain laws, we would call it bribery. For the exact same reason, we should take issue with them paying Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads.

[kbenson]

I think this is exactly reversed. Adblock Plus is helping people to be exempt from certain "laws", and Google is paying Adblock's extortion fee.

Remember, people have no inherent right to the content they are consuming it, they are getting it because Google is presenting it to them with some expectation that it will benefit Google. That benefit is usually revenue through advertising, in the cases where it's present.

[enraged_camel]

The TV networks tried to make the exact same argument when they sued TiVO, but got shut down by the courts.

Bottom line: nobody can be forced into seeing ads.

[mahranch]

I can't find anything about the Tivo case being settled. On the wikipedia page for commercial skipping, the only court case is one with ReplayTV, which didn't finish due to the company going bankrupt.

[kbenson]

I can't seem to locate this lawsuit. Do you have information on it? I'm interested in seeing exactly what the decision was.

[recursive]

And no ad blocking service can be forced to block all the ads you want them to.

[dchichkov]

I'm finding your argument to be a bit on the ridiculous side. There are no "laws" that state that you should consume ads with the content. You are free to ignore ads in any way you like.

[gtirloni]

I can't find these "laws" that you mention, do you have an URL?

[kbenson]

"Laws" was in quotes to insinuate it may not be an actual "law", beyond the implied social/moral/ethical/(legal?) contract you enter when retrieving content from a site.

Beyond the ethical considerations, which I think can be clear but aren't always (depending on the type of advertising, such as pop-unders) I'm not convinced there aren't legal considerations as well, which is why elsewhere in this thread I asked for more information when a lawsuit was referenced.

Beyond pop-unders and similar advertising that I think can be clearly defined as outside the bounds of acceptability (see my other post that mentions pop-unders for details), I think this is very clear. When media is presented to you under the condition that you view their advertising, whether inline or before access, refusing to do so clearly removes your rights to the content as well. You have no implicit right to the content, only what they grant you, and under their conditions.

I have yet to see an argument otherwise that sways me in the slightest.

P.S. To be clear, I also occasionally do and have bypassed ads, circumvented authentication to content, and used copyrighted material without right. This doesn't negate my argument, it just makes me a somewhat of a hypocrite when I do so, which everyone is at some point in their life. I just refuse to bury my head in the sand and act like I'm entitled when I do, and I feel bad about it (to varying degrees, depending on circumstances) when I think about what I'm doing.