This doesn't seem to follow from the example at all. What you're saying would be true if people only visited sites repeatedly, knowing what they were going to g

This doesn't seem to follow from the example at all. What you're saying would be true if people only visited sites repeatedly, knowing what they were going to get. But much of Internet browsing is just following links, with text indicating you're going to get a story about topic X, only to arrive and see that, no, you get a autoplay video about topic Y, possible at 1 in the morning when your wife is in bed next to you trying to sleep. Imagine you ordered a book through the mail, knowing the book vendor offered it for free, but not knowing how, only after the fact finding out Toyota paid them to give away promotional pickup trucks, except you had to pay the shipping expense for a truck to go through the mail. Is that theft? How is bloating the web with unrelated content a user has to pay for without knowing in advance they'll be getting it or even how much they'll be getting any different? This is quite a bit different than all previous forms of advertising, which were directly embedded into the content media and added no cost to deliver. There was no way to order a newspaper and be delivered a video. Analog television streams were broadcast, with airwaves publicly allocated, not paid for by the consumer (you paid for the right to decode them).