Honest question: Would you be ok if a website blocked your access because you were running those, since they interpret it as stealing, by denying them the data that makes them money?
Only if they achieve the blocking by not sending me the data in the first place. If you send me a multi-megabyte page that relies on Javascript to prevent a redirect to an "enable cookies" page or to remove an overlay, you're an asshole.
Honest answer: it's already happening in a way since I do run an Adblocker and Noscript and a custom hosts file etc. like many others do. This leads to minor inconveniences already. But it's an acceptable trade off.
I don't consider it "stealing" because there is no explicit agreement that I benefit from contents in exchange of my data. Yeah, it's somewhat hypocritical, but both sides are.
If YouTube for instance blocks me tomorrow because I block its ads? I think I would consider a subscription if offered and if it lets me to keep using my blocking devices.
Sure, no problem. But I'm typically testing various VPN services, using pfSense VPN-client VMs. So I would just fire one up, and route a LiveCD VM through it. The site could collect whatever data it wanted. But it would mostly be noise.
So your "no problem" isn't really "no problem, I'll respect that", it's "no problem, I'll just work around it".
IMO - it goes both ways - if I want to use blocking software, it's not reasonable to disregard the wishes of sites who won't show me content if you do. They didn't publish that content in anticipation of getting no return from it, so if they state [via site policy to block blockers] that it's not ok to do so, then how could I justify ignoring that wish?
To me, crossing that line means crossing from a principled stand against trackers over to consuming content that's not mine to consume.
On the web, fine print policies don't matter in the end. You can fuss about them in court, but ultimately what matters is whether you send the data the other party requests.
If you as a user let your user agent send identifying information to sites that request it, you bear some responsibility for that. If you as a server operator configure your server to send content without first requiring identification and authentication, then you're putting it out there for the public to consume.
Any trusting of the other party (client trusting the server to not abuse information collected, server trusting client to also fetch and display ads from third-parties) is going to be imperfect. The servers have largely proven themselves to be untrustworthy in general, but they still mostly trust the client. As users wise up and start exercising their power over their own computers, the server operators will have to compensate by first squeezing the most value they can out of the users who are too trusting, but then by actually charging money. There's simply no other end-game possible unless someone figures out how to prevent servers from being untrustworthy in the first place.
If anyone is on shaky moral ground here, it's sites that are tracking visitors and selling information about them to unknown third parties with unknown goals. That's awfully near CFAA territory, as I see it. Also, dishonest contracts are invalid and unenforceable.
Sure. Honestly I wish I could allow more reasonable ads, and just block e.g. animated ads (there was a time when you could do this by blocking flash, but html5 seems to have taken over that space). I don't want to block everything. But there are too many sites that I only visit once, and it's not worth my time to see which ones are decent about their ads and which ones aren't.
Many websites already do this (sorry, I can't think of them off the top of my head). For me, it hasn't affected my browsing. If anything, it serves as a warning that those people are shady about privacy and respect for their users.
The major(?) new(ish) tech news network in Norway (https://tek.no, formerly hw.no, also have gamer.no) is a funny example. Their writers are crap compared to something like Anadtech, and they mostly aggregate/regurgitate tech news, like most aggreagation sites -- adding little value (well, to anyone that reads English, which is pretty much anyone interested in the subject matter in Norway, with the possible exception of very young gamers).
They used to be one of the few sites I'd occasionally click through on ads -- hw.no (a hardware reviews site, reviews in their only "original" content -- and while not as good as dpreview/anadtech etc -- sometimes worth reading) had very well targeted ads: your read about hardware, Norwegian companies advertise hw for sale. Obvious match.
Then, due to the web being the web, I started using an ad-blocker -- partly to get rid of ads (gets in the way of reading, ie: gets in the way of the value the web provides me) -- and mostly as an anti-virus/malware thing.
Then tek.no launched a "premium" service, and started blocking access to those using adblock -- showing a "please enable ads or subscribe to read without ads" pop-up. Perfectly fine. I now rarely read tek.no -- their product isn't good enough that it's worth anything to me. That might change if there was a viable micro-payment solution -- but just the effort of subscribing (ignoring the actual cost) is too high a price for me to pay for their content.
The real question, is would I pay for other content? There are a couple of newspapers I might consider subscribing to -- some Norwegian, and eg: The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian -- but generally I'm not convinced any of them have a good (enough) digital product.
I'd want a) no ads, b) no tracking, c) no pdf/rich-media crap, d) no drm, decent RSS support and off-line reading (epub might be a great choice of format, or "least worst") c) decent typography (hello: CSS3: p { hyphens: auto }).
Does anyone know of anyone that provides this? LWN is probably the closest I know of -- and at the top of my list of "subscription todos". If they had more content, and more stuff along the lines of Dr. Dobbs and Byte, I'd probably have already subscribed -- but I assume that'd demand at least a doubling in price (which would be fine by me).
[ed: as for tracking -- it makes no sense to have an opt-out standard. An opt-in standard might make sense -- but that'd probably just mean the end of (legal) tracking -- who'd really want to opt-in?]
Which is completely fair - I do however. In theory one could make pretty PDFs that allow for decent cut and paste, work across all screensizes, work both in single-and-two column view, allow for full-screen viewing of images -- but I think it's much easier to pull that of as an epub (essentially html+css).
