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The obvious answer is that ad-block block already exists. There are plenty of sites that simply do not work if you have an adblocker on, and you can't access them at all. I have no objection to adblocker-blocker - if you don't want me to consume your content on your terms, you can exclude the vast majority of adblock users (there are a small minority of a minority looking at things like adblocker-blocker-blocker but this is not a large number), and most people do not. Attention is still worth something even if it doesn't come with advertising attached, as it happens. That probably wouldn't be true if everyone used adblock, of course, but I'm not a Kantian to begin with. Your behaviour is worth examining in the context exists in more than it's worth examining under some hypothetical categorical imperative.
I accept this has vibes of 'well just because I'm not paying for security doesn't mean I can be stolen from', but I think it does reveal something about the victims of adblock. Most of them don't care enough to invest in anti-adblock technology, which makes me wonder how much harm is done, if any.
The other side of this is that why should it be up to me to examine every single content provider's advertisement policy and decide whether or not I'll read this piece of news based on whether Channel 5 in bumfuck Ohio has pop-unders? It's an unreasonable expectation in a world of content, especially in one where ads are sometimes malicious and often bloated to the point where they slow down my (admittedly older) laptop to a crawl. Why is it incumbent on me to wait for horrifically bloated ads to load and slow my computer down?
I think this argument proves too much. Imagine a counterfactual where some sites maxed out your computer mining bitcoin (wave away the technical problems for the moment) whenever you went onto them, lowering the lifespan of your machine and costing you some tiny amount more on your energy bill. Would that still be incumbent as a moral price of doing business for our hypothetical mining-supported sites? Would MineBlocker also be a moral negative? I feel intuitively that it wouldn't be and that impositions on your time and energy can be intuitively rejected (you have the right to request my browser load the ad, you don't have the right to make it actually load it) where this is no prior or implicit agreement between people.
Excellent discussion-provoking post by the way, it's frustrating to see it downvoted.
They also make it deliberately complicated and cumbersome to tailor your preferences, if they offer the option to "choose which ads you see" or "this is who we share our data with". You have to go through lists and lists, individually ticking each box, and not at all guaranteed that the next time you open the browser page it won't just re-populate it with the same things over again.
If the companies so desperate to scrape our data were more willing to act in good faith, it would be easier to trust them. As it is, I'm sticking with any method to throw them off.
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