Yes, exactly this. Advertising in all forms is explicitly attempting to co-opt your decision making capacity. My company wound it's way to being an ad-tech company (started as saas) before we sold and it just felt totally icky.

I've been advocating for heavy regulation of the advertising industry, not just online but everywhere, for the last few years. Not just industry and entertainment but the entire political system and journalism have been co-opted by advertising and sales practices.

Yes and as a side-effect some of the brighest minds in the world may end up working on more pressing issues than getting people to click on links.

I'm good with this.

The only rebuttal I ever hear is, well, how are your favorite websites going to stay up if they can't be free? Will you pay for them all?

And the funny thing is, the websites I use fall into three categories:

1. Free, and super cheap to host, unlikely to be affected by loss of advertising revenue at all (e.g., my hobby blog)

2. Free, and I can live without them easily, because the entire commercialization scheme is inherently destructive to a positive experience(youtube; facebook)

3. Free, but have other commercialization schemes underway or provider their owners with some other sort of value, and would very likely remain viable in their current or similar format without advertising (Penny Arcade; SMBC Comics; Stratechery-ish; H-N; RP online)

4. Non-free (Netflix, medical journals; various patreon-based fora/discord channels/etc.)

1 & 4 are the primary sources of value for me. 2 could disappear overnight and I would barely notice. 3 would either adapt to survive, or die, and the total loss of value to me would be non-zero, but small.

So by all means. Kill off the ads. Don't give me any bs about the value of the free internet. It's worth what I paid for it.

What harm?

Of the top of my head:

* Journalism no longer prioritizing truth, but eyeballs/clicks. * Immense user frustration * Waste of bandwidth (energy costs, etc)

I bet there are many more.

Even without targeted advertising journalism would still use advertising, they'd just make way less money.

I agree with your first part, but the second part isn't true if it were prohibited to do targeted advertising for everyone.

It's an arms race, you only earn less without targeting when your competitors are targeting. When all advertising is equally poorly targeted, everyone's getting their fair share of the available advertising dollars.

The collection, purchase, sale, and distribution of sensitive user information without the users consent.

If it had a bigger clearer warning - like the cookie banner, then there'd be no harm?

Insatiable consumerism and discontentedness