> The entire distinction here is that as a website operator you wish to serve me ads

While this is sometimes the case, it’s not always so.

For example Fediverse nodes and self-hosted sites frequently block crawlers. This isn’t due to ads, rather because it costs real money to serve the site and crawlers are often considered parasitic.

Another example would be where a commerce site doesn’t want competitors bulk-scraping their catalog.

In all these cases you can for sure make reasonable “information wants to be free” arguments as to why these hopes can’t be realized, but do be clear that it’s a separate argument from ad revenue.

I think it’s interesting to split revenue into marginal distribution/serving costs, and up-front content creation costs. The former can easily be federated in an API-centric model, but figuring out how to compensate content creators is much harder; it’s an unsolved problem currently, and this will only get harder as training on content becomes more valuable (yet still fair use).

I think that a free (as in beer) Internet is important. Putting the Internet behind a paywall will harm poor people across the world. The harms caused by ad tracking are far less than the benefits of free access to all of humanity.