Price discrimination is harder to scale than ad targeting.

... they engage in price discrimination when they do ad targeting. You know it doesn't cost an advertiser the same amount to target people in India as it does over here, right?

Yes. Perhaps consider reading comments in the light of, rather than in order to snarkily make, the obvious points.

To be fair, advertisers are significantly less likely to complain about price discrimination than end users.

The point is that targeted ads are a small price to pay for services like google that are so instrumental to the lives of most people. The reach that this model provides probably outweighs the benefits from being purely subscription based anyway.

> The point is that targeted ads are a small price to pay

That's your personal opinion, and that's ok. However, others may and do have a different opinion.

Why is Google instrumental? I can use the internet without Google. Search engines like DuckDuckGo are free. Other email like ProtonMail is available for free. You can run free services and use different ad models, they don't have to be spyware based.