Furthermore, it misses that we might be somewhere better than here had we not had ads. (I'm not saying it's a foregone conclusion, just one of many possibilities not mentioned.)

It's fun to think about how it could have all been different. No more sites designed to game search result rankings, designed to waste your time to maximize eyeballs on ads, designed to keep you on the site in a garden instead of surfing the web.

ISPs should have bundled hosting with internet access. Give everyone the possibility to generate their own site. It would be like a large insurance pool where your monthly bill might subsidize the costs of hosting another user who's site gets millions of views, just like how your monthly insurance premium ultimately covers the salary of someone else's surgeon, nurses, anesthesiologists, and keeping the lights on in the operating room. You can still ask for donations or even paid subscriptions if you wanted a well off full time staff.

Instead, we leaned on advertisers to fund our websites, middle men working tirelessly to come up with new ways to extract comfortable profit out of the system. Leeching resources that could have otherwise gone straight to the publisher had we designed the internet to be a little more federalized, a little more universal, with the costs shared among the users of the internet who are already paying for access anyway.

> There's a fallacy in your argument, but I don't know what it's called.

“False dilemma”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma