<i>You don&#x27;t get a free pass on ethics just because ethics are inconvenient for your business model.</i><p>I think calling this an ethical issue is quite a stretch. In many cases, we&#x27;re talking about visitors who are not only enjoying the content from someone else&#x27;s site completely for free, but also employing tools that actively modify the intended presentation of that content to the detriment of the host site&#x27;s operators. And now you&#x27;re saying that not only should the site operators make their content freely available and accept that some visitors will circumvent possibly the only way they have of generating revenue, those operators should also be actively responsible for vetting any third party content they incorporate within their site in case the third party is hostile and those visitors know enough to run ad-blockers but not enough to run anti-virus software? That seems a very short-sighted and one-sided position, entirely in favour of the party who isn&#x27;t actually contributing anything in this scenario, and I see no ethical basis for that.<p>Edit: For those who are downvoting, please consider that I did <i>not</i> disagree with the original premise I quoted. Obviously unethical business models are still unethical even if the ethical ones are inconvenient.<p>What I&#x27;m asking is why we should consider it an ethical requirement for someone who is already generously offering their content for free <i>and</i> accepting that a significant fraction of visitors will circumvent their intended ad-funded model to <i>also</i> go to unrealistic lengths to vet any third party content they include for safety against arbitrary unknown threats that could change at any time without notice, all for the benefit of a visitor who is offering them nothing. I&#x27;m not sure whether someone operating a web site really owes their visitors <i>anything</i> in this scenario, other than perhaps a basic &quot;good citizen&quot; principle of not negligently serving up malicious content, and I don&#x27;t see how operating within the same infrastructure as a huge number of other web sites could reasonably be considered negligent in this respect.<p>Unless you think we should also close down all third party CDNs, image hosting services, caching services, web font services, and so on, the web is fundamentally a linked medium where sites can usefully be built by combining resources from other services, and naturally those other services will retain control of what they are hosting themselves. Making Joe Blogger responsible if some massive service&#x27;s CDN version of jQuery got hacked doesn&#x27;t seem like a good way to encourage Joe Blogger to spend their time sharing their writing with the rest of the world.