People will pay for good content, they did for a long time before there was an internet or a surveillance industry. There were books, films, subscription TV services, paid for audio. There were also steady streams of novel manuscripts, demo tapes and screenplays that went straight into the bin because they were rubbish. Now the rubbish hangs around on a webpage surrounded by trackers, luring people in with clickbait titles and lies, and multiplying beyond the ability of even google to sort out.
Yes, people paid for content prior to the internet but there were also problems — many good things went unnoticed because not enough discovered them while plenty of garbage got tons of attention because the creator had some personal connection to publishers, reviewers, DJs, etc. One of the things I loved about the rise of the web was that it provided so many opportunities to find things which weren't going to run in my local newspaper, be stocked by the local book or music shops (if you weren't lucky enough to have good indie options), or the pile of mud a lot of the big radio stations were often playing (this got a lot worse in the 90s when Clear Channel started buying all of the radio stations so questions about what got mainstream coverage in many markets came down to what one guy in Texas wanted).
I don't want to lose that — whether it's counterpressure to the huge race-to-the-bottom advertising market for more selective sponsorship, something like Apple/Stripe Pay to make it super easy for people to get paid for their work, etc.
Paying people for good content doesn't fix the problem. The internet is still cluttered with awful content drowning out the useful stuff. Not because people are trying hard and learning or just plain love their awful guitar playing even if nobody is watching, but because they're getting paid by surveillance. What we need is the absence of that incentive.
This is one of those cases where the free market would actually fix the problem if there was some sensible regulation applied. Sadly it'll never be quick enough to catch up with the technology.
The big thing we need is some kind of action against Google: they currently are the best positioned to penalize operators of sites slowed by ads but the search team isn't going to cut into their ad business and Chrome is going to continue slow-walking attempts to make browsers restrict ad networks. It'd also be nice if there was liability for malware delivered by ads — something like they have to pay a fine up front and try to recover it from their advertiser, forcing them to actually vet people first.
What I'd like would be publishers self-hosting ads — forcing them to take more responsibility for the security risks — and more effort into alternative payment mechanisms. I liked the idea of Google Contributor but one big challenge for that is that even a less half-hearted version probably wouldn't generate enough money to be viable because most people consider ads a reasonable cost for free content.