Amazon follows Google and Apple and bans system-wide ad blockers on app store
IMO there&#x27;s a moral problem with ad blocking, which is that it&#x27;s basically stealing.<p>Like it or not, many popular websites and services online gain income from advertising. By using them while blocking their ads you&#x27;re basically getting something for nothing by gaming the system. It&#x27;s probably against their ToS (but who reads that right?). It probably says: We serve ads. If you don&#x27;t like that don&#x27;t use this site.<p>One might say that ads are distracting, annoying, resource heavy, and sometimes downright malicious. I think so too. However that is essentially the &quot;price&quot; of ads, and this price is known in advance. Blocking ads for these reasons while continuing to use the sites is not unlike eating at a restaurant and leaving without paying because you think their prices are exorbitant: It might seem morally justified but it&#x27;s theft because the prices were known in advance.<p>I think one of the main reason people don&#x27;t dine-and-run (yet install adblockers) is that it&#x27;s hard to do a moral wrong so close to the source, e.g seeing the waiters, being there in person, risking an unpleasantness drama, etc. (This is well known psychological phenomenon which name I can&#x27;t recall.) In contract installing an adblocker is fast and feels totally unrelated to the 2nd party. It makes it easy to feel like you&#x27;re fighting the bad guys (ads and the terrible ad-tech) and forget whose revenue you are withholding for your own benefit.<p>Personally I resisted installing adblockers for a long time though eventually I caved in (ad-tech got really bad). I honestly don&#x27;t know what the solution is.