Who would ever connect their monitor to the internet though?

They make it required to see your screen

any time a brand does this, everyone who bought those products needs to immediately get a refund & tell all their friends/family/coworkers to avoid that brand so they lose out on future sales.

companies will only stop doing this when it hurts their pockets.

Defective, returning it.

Are you sure direct internet access would be required? IIRC, DVI has a data line in there somewhere. Probably displayport as well. Couple that with a “smart” device driver and the ads could be piped in that way.

Sorry, consumer protections were rolled back for being communist, and the monitor is functioning as it should. Requiring network connection is needed to fight terrorism.

This is the way. It also requires a cooperative driver (meaning vendor driver plus an incompetent os and admin). HDMI even had an Ethernet option and lots of new screens have USB / thunderbolt docks.

(meaning vendor driver plus an incompetent os and admin)

I just had a look at ethernet over hdmi. AFAICT, if the rig requires an incompetent OS and admin, then it seems it would also require an incompetent manufacturer. A competent manufacturer would design the ad-pushing screen to be dysfunctional when HEC is not detected or the server is unreachable. They ship a HEC-supporting HDMI 1.4 cable and a closed-source proprietary driver that requires Internet. If the driver is not used or if a pre-hdmi 1.4 cable is used, then the screen could refuse to function and simply display an “check your Internet connection” message. The competency to overcome that would require a FOSS driver that implements a user-controlled HEC network with fake/imposter ad system. But that would also rely on cracking the cryptosystem between LG’s server and screens.