@drq Oh, come on. Ads are not the problem. Paid access is not the problem. It all existed before. Magazines and other press, entertainment, various facilities like parks and toilets... It can be free, it can be paid, it can be sponsored.

The fucking problem we have is how ads and data mining got out of hand. I have no problem with ads themselves - but not tracking ads. I have no problem if some website (or real life facility) asks me to register - but please don't fucking fingerprint and track me without my knowledge and consent. It is like having hidden cameras installed everywhere. I have no problem if some service costs money - I might buy it or not but please make the deal clear and upfront. No hidden fees, etc.

Imagine all of this is effectively banned. No more tracking ads, no more profiling, no more data brokering. It just doesn't exist anymore. Will the Internet fall apart? No, it will not. It will be more like what we had twenty years ago. Maybe Facebook will become premium service. Maybe Cloudflare won't be free anymore. Maybe you won't be able to get TERABYTES of storage, unlimited videoconferencing and shit for free.

But the Internet will be there. And it will be nice enough.

I beg to slightly differ, people pay online stuff with money, see Patreon and Twitch subscriptions. However they are discriminate in what they’re paying for. The reality is that we’re churning out more content than what people are ready to pay for. On the other side, marketing departments are showered with money because it’s hard to link campaigns with actual results, so there’s an arms race between companies. So there’s a natural fit between content creators starving for money and moneyed marketing dept. starving for content.