Re:The other end of the "Social Contract" (Score 1)

There is no social contract between myself and the 3rd party web server that is serving advertisement on the web site that I am visiting. When I visit CNET, I'm looking for technology news, not content from doubleclick. When I read articles at other news sources, I'm not looking for scripts linking poorly selected keywords in the copy with mostly irrelevant extraneous party material.

Any argument for a social contract based on the convention of following all content links mentionned in an HTML document is flawed on two fronts. First, historically, originally, in the text-based Lynx and predecessors worlds, no link was ever followed unless the user specifically chose to do so. Second, the convention to download all content mentionned in a modern HTML document is based on the web client needing all content to properly render the page for the user, not on any feeling of responsibility towards the host.

Adblock, when it comes down to it, is a fine-tuning tool for Firefox - it allows me to be selective about which URLs I'm going to follow, instead of blindly following all the links on a page, reclaiming a portion of the choice that did exist in the past.

As an Adblock user, I may be breaking TOS for some "free" web based email accounts. Actually, I probably am. And I probably am costing some people some money. But not many - having sworn off credit cards, my total online purchases remain at nil. So when it comes down to it, I'm doing my small part to reduce the bandwidth charges to some large advertizing companies!

Oh, and Adblock has recently been hacked to add support for whitelisting sites, which lets you let through ads from the sites you want to see ads from:
http://aasted.org/adblock/viewtopic.php?t=1824