Companies post ads because because they believe that some people will read them, and that promise is enough to generate money. That valuation is between them and the clients to whom they are selling ad space, and places no obligation on me. If at some point that business model becomes unprofitable, they can pick a different one.
And spam email is unsolicited, as in email you receive without consent from an entity you've got no relationship with. Not sure what argument you're trying to make, but requesting a URL that then serves ads does not qualify.
Also, by blocking countermeasures to ad-blocking, we've gone from gray area to illegal because of the anti-circumvention laws. This is going to be fun.
What a huge sense of self-entitlement. Your rights as a publisher do not extend to my computer and what I do with the data after you send it to me. You may request that I run some software with a <script> tag, or request that I download an image with an <img> tag, but if you want to guarantee any of those things you better get me to agree to a contract first.
It isn't vandalism when someone modifies something you gave them. Vandalism is a criminal charge - are you also going to claim I'm a criminal if I use some scissors to cut ads out of a magazine after receiving it in the mail?
> illegal
What law, exactly, are you claiming is being violated?
A script that detects if I don't download an ad is not DRM, and a TOS posted somewhere on the website is absolutely not a contract.
But the content itself isn't yours. You are not entitled to view that content. The creator put it up with the expectation that people would/will be viewing the ads right along side the content. It's that expectation and assumption that supersedes everything else.
It seems like this whole debate has been boiling down to semantics and "technicalities". The anti-ad people are looking for anything to justify their entitlement. I say it's load of rubbish. The content creators (publishers) are the ones who get to dictate terms, end of story. You're not paying anything to consume that content and you didn't create it, so your "rights" are minimal (if they exist at all). You're entitled to absolutely nothing.
Let me ask you a question: If instead, a website says "I have this content you want to see. In order to view it, you must view this ad first. Click "Yes" to accept and view the ad. Click "No" to go back to Google.com." is that any different to you? It shouldn't be. Also, that's where the internet is headed if more people adopt your entitled mentality. If I'm a publisher, I'd be doing something similar. No, if I were a publisher, I'd be trying to get all the big name publishers/advertisers to do that too. They need to remind our entitled generation just how content subsidization works. :P
That's a strawman argument.
> What law, exactly, are you claiming is being violated?
A good summary is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention
> A script that detects if I don't download an ad is not DRM
Except that such a script is DRM by definition.
Now when we get down to the technical level with HTTP, yes, you can make requests and the server can answer them. The basic idea of ad-blocking must be OK, I think. I mean you can't force someone to ask for images from an ad server. running a hosts file and so forth must be fine, in my opinion.
But that's not what we're discusisng now. We are now talking about tampering with a server's software that it's trying to use to see if you block ads, in order to trick the server into serving you contents that, based on the fact that you are running an ad-blocker, the server has chosen not to serve you. I really do think this is too much.
And as you point out, I must first request the information. So I request a URL to a webpage and receive and HTML+CSS+JS document, containing more URLs which, via adblock, I decide not to follow or make more HTTP requests to. Similarly, the page has JS code which my browser may decide not to execute, or CSS elements which the browser may, at my request, decide not to display. Pretty sure all of the at is well within my right.
