Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because it seems to me that your model is "I get free stuff, fuck everyone else". No, that's putting the cart in front of the horse. The World Wide Web was built for users by users, not for publishers by publishers. It's nice that publishers, who are themselves users, can make use of it. Good for them. If they can support themselves, even better. However, any user has the moral right to filter any content delivered…
The internet does not belong to the users . It's an inter net - a large collection of networks that have decided to interoperate using common protocols. The internet belongs to the people who own the networks. Hence the whole "get your own internet" argument is begging the question. We're all in this shit together, and we need to give content providers the ability to earn money off that. At the moment most of us get…
Right. And my network blocks advertisements. Deal with it.
> We're all in this shit together, and we need to give content providers the ability to earn money off that. At the moment most of us get away with being parasites, but it's not sustainable if we want to maintain quality content. The moral obligation, if any, is 'play fair'. If someone asks that you see an ad along with the rest of the content, then the moral answer is to view that ad if you want to access the content. It's 'play fair', not 'play selfishly'. If you don't want to play fair, then either don't consume the content, or don't pretend you're being moral.
It's not really a moral issue. There's a moral obligation to spend 2 minutes trying to punch the monkey or whatever ridiculous thing they're doing now? Give me a break.
The rest of that doesn't hold water, either. People will pay straight away for quality content. The pre-internet movie, music, and publishing industries are proof of it. Quality content will survive because if people have to pay for it they will.
There's a ton of shit on the internet these days funded via advertisements, and I won't mind if most of it dies.
> Also, just because you can access certain content streams with technical trickery doesn't mean you're morally clear to do so. A clear example is private data. Just because I might be able to get someone else's private data with a few http requests doesn't make it moral for me to do so.
If a company has private data publicly accessible to the internet then the moral thing to do would be to tell them so that they can fix it, not for everybody to close their eyes and pretend there's not a problem.