How will ad-supported sites function without ads? Government subsidies?

Hopefully they will just go away; much easier to understand the value proposition of some content if the owner has had to put an actual price tag on it. Yes, people will end up consuming less media - but given how precipitously the quality of news and news-like publishing has dropped, I'd be glad to have fewer, better sources of "journalism".

If you don't like them then don't visit them or visit them with an ad blocker on. Don't deprive users from the content and don't deprive staff from their jobs.

This is just like the "I have nothing to hide so I don't mind tracking" argument.

No. It's really not. It's "I would gladly give person A the thing I have X for the thing they'll give me Y but you won't let me because you don't want to do that".

It's more like the minimum wage argument or something like that but you don't really need an analogy.

Not that simple. Even for paid media (Netflix, for example) advertising is starting to creep back in, because consumers have no way to resist it. Companies which don't gather ad money and just rely on actual value-transfer transactions get outcompeted.

Advertising itself is only mildly offensive; if done with taste it can be no problem at all, but too many companies seemingly don't know when to stop - the line from Ready Player One about monetizing 70% of a person's field of view sounds exactly like what Meta and Google would do if they could get away with it.

I want legislation on this topic to create breathing space for real businesses which make things of value.

You're talking as a richer person.

Advertisers aren’t charities though, their objective is to show ads to people who have the means to buy stuff - poor people seeing their ads (and having their content subsidised) isn’t something they want and they’d be more than happy to stop it should there become a reliable way of tracking and detecting poor people.

They can close if it is too expensive to run them.

> enthralled

I never heard that word. Is that an euphemism for "corrupted"?

Similar - more precisely another term for "enslaved". The subtle distinction in my mind is that enslavement is forceful, while enthrallment is more like people voluntarily baring their neck to a vampire, hoping for dark powers.

This isn't really true, it means "capture the fascinated attention of". A child could be enthralled by a jigsaw puzzle. You could argue that their attention has somehow been enslaved, but I can't recall ever hearing or reading any phrasing quite like it.

See my other reply; it is true according to https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enthrall

No, it means "capture the fascinated attention of". A child could be enthralled by a jigsaw puzzle.

"to hold in or reduce to slavery"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enthrall

Context matters. If you are talking about a child with a jigsaw then sure, the more cutesy definition applies. But talking about politicians and money, you have to bend over backwards pretty far not to see the second definition as more appropriate.