I agree with you in some cases but not in others.<p>I&#x27;ll give you a recent example: there&#x27;s nothing wrong with servers running ad-block detectors and not serving content to people running ad-blockers.  It&#x27;s within their rights.  It&#x27;s not &quot;within their rights&quot; for people to circumvent these and try to see the content anyway.<p>Since on a technical level the content owner&#x27;s web server is both serving the content to you at their expense, for which your browser makes a request, and also is specifically serving copyrighted content, and finally on a moral level has created that content at their expense, I consider it absolutely, 100% within their moral, legal, technical, and decent rights to throw up a TOS saying: &quot;Our business model is showing you advertising, and you agree to load and not block ads.  Click &#x27;I agree&#x27; to proceed&quot;.  It&#x27;s in my opinion within their moral, ethical, technical, and legal rights to detect and block people using ad blockers.  It&#x27;s not a technical &quot;arms race&quot; for people installing plugins that let them trick the server into serving them content even though they&#x27;re not displaying ads, while the server chooses not to display them content.  Even if there is NO such click-through TOS being thrown up, the server by running ad-detection algorithms makes this relationship abundantly clear.<p>I wrote this here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11458626" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11458626</a><p>All of my contributions were downvoted, which is fine, but people were also extremely rude.  They didn&#x27;t understand my bakery analogy, and focused on something irrelevant, the TOS.  (This is like saying the bakery didn&#x27;t have a sign up saying you couldn&#x27;t reach behind the counter and take something.  I mean, the fact that the server is actively running ad-block detection and wanting not to serve you isn&#x27;t enough?  It&#x27;s also irrelevant because it takes one line to add that to a TOS so it&#x27;s not a real response.)<p>So here is an example of a fine contribution in which my view is correct and HN groupthink is completely wrong.<p>untog pointed out that my comment was correct by stating &quot;Seems telling that you&#x27;re getting downvotes but no replies explaining how your comparison is wrong...&quot;<p>Going forward, of course I will not be using that analogy..  Indeed I won&#x27;t post on any ad-block related subjects.<p>Of course, this doesn&#x27;t mean I don&#x27;t expect people not to run ad-blockers, just as the existence of copyright doesn&#x27;t mean I don&#x27;t expect people to torrent stuff.  I just mean that they&#x27;re not morally in the right, they shouldn&#x27;t act righteous about it, and servers that refuse to serve people content when those people are running ad blockers are in no way (not even a tiny way) in the wrong.<p>I&#x27;ll probably be downvoted for this, I just wanted to give you an example of something that I wouldn&#x27;t post.  I literally wouldn&#x27;t be posting this now except as an example of something people will downvote.