It's fair to believe that ads are 'ok' - it's also possible that people in general don't want them. Hosting low-traffic websites on a smartphone with cellular data is just-about-feasible now.
Rather than inventing very technically clever ways to continue on our existing path, as Apple and Google are doing, I think it'd be pleasant to simply move beyond the advertising model of content on the internet.
If asked, I don't believe people would want to be tracked or have ads mixed into their content.
Could we make it cheap enough to host a personal blog and/or wiki on a smartphone for, say, $10 a year?
The economics would be very different as sites scale up their traffic (compare with, for example, The New York Times).
I think the (relatively) small number of high-traffic sites would be able to find revenue streams to support their hosting - perhaps those would be where subscriptions would be effective.
This may of may not be good, but I’m a bit concerned that destroying the adtech industry may have ripple effects that end up being worse than some middle way like FLoC
Yeah, in that world, ads would be ok with me. Sure they're pointless because I won't click on them - but not really worse than having a blank spot in the page because of an ad blocker.
While I have no problem with the concept itself of advertising, I do have a problem with modern implementations of ads. Almost invariably, they are loud (vocally and visually), intrusive, obnoxious and almost coercive in their use of language. They are intended to dumb down the target audience, rather than enrich their targets' lives.
I do have a problem with everything that attacks my ability to think freely.
If blog or similar can finance part of their cost with Ad's, why not.
Sure on slow internet it's a somewhat different matter.
Anyway Ad's okay, but tracking for me is spying and should be treated like that, i.e. it should be illegal.
There are ways to have personalized ads without it, like local learning which then selects to get an add for a specific topic, with that a side could still track which ads you got, but it would be much less useful as FLoC, and then you add additional steps to even further decrees any chance of tracking.
Companies still get implicit feedback by what adds get selected more then others.
People can explicitly blacklist annoying (or offensive) adds making sure they don't see them ever again and if enough do so in turn making that app not seen much more at all etc. etc.
But the FLoC cohorts are WAY to small/identifiying to not allow you to be tracked fairly easy with it. Just combine it with other identifying aspects of browsers (there are a lot) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's often allows a 100% unique identification.
And given that you likely wont be able to "ad-block" FLoC this makes it way worse then the status quo.