> And now you're saying that not only should the site operators make their content freely available and accept that some visitors will circumvent possibly the only way they have of generating revenue, those operators should also be actively responsible for vetting any third party content they incorporate within their site in case the third party is hostile
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's unethical to have ads with malware on your site. I didn't propose a way not to have malware on your site.
The way you propose, by vetting ads, has been used successfully, but it's not a particularly imaginative solution. What about donations, freemium, PWYW, subscriptions, grants? Or what about giving your work away for free and using that reputation to get jobs?
> Making Joe Blogger responsible if some massive service's CDN version of jQuery got hacked doesn't seem like a good way to encourage Joe Blogger to spend their time sharing their writing with the rest of the world.
It's utterly ridiculous to claim this is about Joe Blogger. Joe Blogger is quite often happy to do his blogging as a labor of love and let blogspot/livejournal/whatever reap all the ad revenue. And small-time bloggers who do make money are frequently more sensitive to their readers' complaints and explore alternatives to big add networks that serve ads. The problem is big content providers who are under shareholder pressure to produce growth each quarter, so they try to squeeze out every bit of ad revenue with no concern for users. They're also too risk averse to try alternative monetization strategies to ads. It is well within the capability of those players to provide ads without malware, but they don't because it doesn't hurt their bottom line enough.
Serving up malware to your users and readers is unethical. I'm all for supporting content providers; I donate to NPR and to artists on Patreon frequently. But if you can't run your business ethically, then you should shut down your business.
If you really think serving up malware to finance content is okay, then why don't you propose that content creators just hack some small percentage of their users and sell the data online? The effect on users is the same, but it cuts out the middlemen so it's more efficient.