The profusion of privacy-violating web trackers invalidates the already-shaky theory that ad-blocking violates an implied contract
@marcoarment http://www.marco.org/... @choire : All the dudes who made a great living off publishing (or republishing!) are now gunning to kill indie media - http://www.marco.org/... Ethan Marcotte / @beep : “All of that tracking and data collection is done without your knowledge, and—critically—without your consent.” — http://www.marco.org/... Matt / @mattbuchanan : man who made and sold a product that stripped ads out of other people's work dislikes ads http://www.marco.org/... Chris Taylor-Davies / @ctd : Web publishers and advertisers cannot be trusted with the amount of access that today's browsers give them by default http://www.marco.org/... Felix Salmon / @felixsalmon : “I've never been tempted to run ad-blocking software before — I make most of my living from ads. But...” http://www.marco.org/... Trent Walton / @trentwalton : “Web publishers & advertisers cannot be trusted with the amount of access that today's browsers give them by default” http://www.marco.org/... Jen Simmons / @jensimmons : Yes. THIS. http://www.marco.org/... Let's redo advertising on the web. Make it useful and worthy. And STOP with the privacy invasion! Bbh Labs / @bbhlabs : ‘Ads have always been a hopeful gamble, not required consumption.’ On the ethics of adblocking http://www.marco.org/... (via @craigmod) Jonathan Abrams / @abrams : “web ad quality and tolerability have plummeted, and annoyance, abuse, misdirection, and tracking have skyrocketed” http://www.marco.org/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The piece lands mid-fight over ad-blocking ethics: Marco Arment's argument that a 'prolusion of privacy-violating trackers' voids any implied contract between reader and publisher drew support from Ethan Marcotte's point that tracking happens without knowledge or consent, and pushback from critics who note the irony of an ad-stripping product's maker lecturing on ads. The deeper issue is whether publishers ever held the moral authority to demand unblocked ads.
Later coverage shows the argument aging well: the industry's flagship self-help tool, the DAA's AdChoices opt-out, proved hollow because its cookie-based mechanism can be undone by the very trackers it targets, and Apple's ATT changes helped produce a junk-ad epidemic rather than cleaner advertising. The consent problem Arment flagged became the industry's central legitimacy crisis.
First-order effects
- Publishers and advertisers lose their strongest ethical counterargument to ad-blocking: if tracking proceeds without user knowledge or consent, the claimed 'implied contract' has no consenting party left.
- Users and toolmakers like Arment gain a defensible rationale for blocking that rests not on preference but on the publishers' own behavior having broken the bargain first.
Second-order effects
- Self-regulation tools like AdChoices cannot repair the trust gap, pushing enforcement upstream to platforms: Apple's ATT restrictions and Google's tracker-blocking plan show gatekeepers stepping in where publisher restraint failed, with Google's move even feeding the US antitrust probe as publishers cried foul.
- As consent-free targeting gets curtailed at the platform layer, advertisers shift budgets toward walled gardens with first-party data, reshuffling pricing power away from open-web publishers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry moves from implied contracts and voluntary opt-outs toward explicit consent regimes enforced by platforms and regulators — though proposals framed purely around privacy risk entrenching big platforms further, a tension competitors like Stratechery argue policymakers routinely get wrong.
- Open-web publishing's funding model weakens structurally: a web where unconsented tracking is both normative and increasingly blocked leaves independent publishers squeezed between gatekeeper ad markets and degraded direct revenue.
The trend: Consent-free web tracking is dismantling the industry's ability to govern itself, transferring enforcement of the reader-publisher bargain from voluntary codes to platforms and regulators.