[vitd]

It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.

Let's do a realistic thought experiment that's actually fair:

Imagine you have a movie that you love. It's showing tonight on an over-the-air channel that inserts ads throughout it. You decide to record the show and watch it later.

Do you skip the ads?

[hsod]

> It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.

This is why I said a "giant barrel", because serving web pages does have marginal cost to the server owner, and from there you could imagine a situation where your page view does diminish the number of page views left for "paying" customers.

I might fast-forward through the ads, but I wouldn't feel good about it or try to defend it philosophically.