Accepting payments from users can make the site have to deal with sales taxes or VAT in every jurisdiction that it has paid users in.

A reasonable way for sites to deal with that is for the site to not sell directly to users. Instead they sell to some third party aggregator and the aggregator sells to users. Basically the same model we see with app stores--people in 20 different countries buy your iOS app through Apple's store and it is Apple that deals with the 20 different tax authorities.

I think we'd end up with a very small of very large aggregators, because generally a bigger aggregator is more efficient than a smaller aggregator.

But then we probably won't need micropayments for this. Nearly everyone will be using the aggregators enough that an occasional normal sized payment to maintain a credit in their accounts will work.

There needs to be political will to do so, but if advertising does become unprofitable there will be pressure for such political will to exist.

Also, sales tax is mainly a US problem with every state rolling their own tax regime. Intra-EU VAT collection is actually pretty straightforward in comparison; unless someone claims to be not from EU or is an EU-based business, you charge the nominal VAT rate from your country, remit it to your government and call it a day.

Assuming you are talking about VAT MOSS, it's the VAT rate of your customer's country.

You also need to collect multiple pieces of non-contradictory location proof to justify why you are charging the rate you are.

You assume for some werid reason, that using adblock is in a way popular... gosh, how to break it to you - outside of the tech bubble people hardly know it's possible to block adds...

> Content moves behind subscription requirements

As it should be!

I don’t like ads, but I think the only ethical options are posting to avoid them (preferably direct to artists) or watching ads, so I can understand why people want companies to be able to use ads to pay for their costs since the alternative is a lot of content many people won’t see because it won’t be made.

I think that ethical position is weakened by the fact many ads are links to scams and unethical things. You aren't just supporting creators by watching adverts, you're also potentially exposing yourself to bad faith actors.

If someone is playing honest with me in good faith, and they ask for a show of good faith back, I think reciprocity, good manners and ethics favour the idea that I should do so.

If someone asks me to play fair with them, and then tries to shaft me - then any consideration I might have had for their position goes out the window. I don’t feel the slightest need to play fair with them because they are a bad faith actor.

To be clear, this is purely an opinion about ads on YouTube and whether I have to sit in one of two ethical buckets, not advocating an anything goes position.

My opinion is that there’s a third ethical position, which is a bit like the classical solution to the prisoner’s dilemma: co-operate until the other person plays you false. After that, don’t consider them a friend, and there’s no ethical problem in refusing to cooperate with them.

A whole lot of shit is still shit though.

They haven't forgotten anything. This claim is so barely true it's not worth considering.

The web both became accessible to ordinary users and gained support for inline images with the release of Win/Mac Mosaic in August 1993. In October 1994 the first banner ad appeared in HotWired, the online version of Wired magazine.

Given that that web went only one year between gaining support for images and people starting to use them for advertising, the idea that the web existed before advertising isn't really true. There have been ads for as long as there has been web content created by paid professionals, as is to be expected.

> I'd be fine if every last ad supported site on the internet disappeared.

You are of course welcome to create a list of websites that don't advertise and then only browse those, although recall that HN obviously wouldn't be usable by you as it is supported by ads. The rest of us will get on with living our lives.

Most of YouTube is just clickbait anyway

Google's "Web Integrity" and Microsoft's mandatory TPM in Windows are working together to save the day!

What Google servers send is what your browser will render. Guaranteed integrity, end to end. Though not "your" browser technically. And not really "your" machine anymore, but nevermind that. Just sit back and enjoy your YouTube.

In many ways that is the problem, and it is created by the video streaming industry which demands it's pound of flesh. Eventually they will run out of steam and a more friendly means of streaming will emerge. At the moment it feels like a stand off, which none of us want.

This problem is largely solved for audio.

By and large, we don't especially feel the need to block ads that aren't interfering with us. Back when Google's ad business was fairly new, they did simple text ads that stayed out of the way, and they made plenty of money on it.

If that was what the vast majority of ads were today, I probably wouldn't even bother with an adblocker.

But these days there are pop-ups, and pop-overs, and pop-unders, and autoplaying videos that follow me as I scroll the page (and which, on mobile, hide about 1/3 of the content I'm there to see).

And even if I could deal with those annoyances, there are vast swathes of ad networks today that need to be avoided at all costs, because they host drive-by downloads, page redirects, and every other kind of spam, scam, and malware you can imagine.

We didn't start this war. The ad industry did. If they had been content to make a decent profit while enabling other websites to do the same, we wouldn't be in this mess. But they just had to try and squeeze every last drop of attention and money out of us.

So, we will fight for a right to block ads. And if giant chunks of the web end up being financially unsustainable because the ad business collapses entirely, that is not on us.

Don’t tell me what to do with packets on my network, either. If you want to use a broken business model that is on you.