> If you are using an ad-blocker by definition you are intentionally breaking the intended behavior by the creator of any given website (for personal gain), in that context any discussion about robots.txt or any other behavior that the creator expects is a moot point.

I'm not asking if you believe ad blocking is ethical, I got that you don't. I'm asking if it turns my browser into a scraper that should be treated as such, which is an orthogonal question to the ethics of the tool in the first place.

I strongly disagree that user agents of the sort shown in the demo should count as robots. Robots.txt is designed for bots that produce tons of traffic to discourage them from hitting expensive endpoints (or to politely ask them to not scrape at all). I've responded to incidents caused by scraper traffic and this tool will never produce traffic in the same order of magnitude as a problematic scraper.

If we count this as a robot for the purposes of robots.txt we're heading down a path that will end the user agent freedom we've hitherto enjoyed. I cannot endorse that path.

For me the line is simple, and it's the one defined by robotstxt.org [0]: "A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced. ... Normal Web browsers are not robots, because they are operated by a human, and don't automatically retrieve referenced documents (other than inline images)."

If the user agent is acting on my instructions and accessing a specific and limited subset of the site that I asked it to, it's not a web scraper and should not be treated as such. The defining feature of a robot is amount of traffic produced, not what my user agent does with the information it pulls.

[0] https://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html