I can't wait to find out what an ad-free Internet looks like. Maybe more like when I was a student, and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle. Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services, because they no longer have to compete with free crap. Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity. An ad-full Internet is harmful, polluting our minds to the point people consider it normal and making them afraid of what could only be positive change.
I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career.
> and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle
How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I'm a random person with a random interest, oh sweet I can post about it online" and hello to "Sponsor this content on patreon".
> Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services
All of this "I'll just pay for it" stuff ignores that the only reason you can find content creators to pay directly is because they have free platforms like Youtube that are paid for by advertising.
> Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity
So propose it. I'm all for this. Give me a new business model that doesn't involve ads and let people choose. Go for it. But maybe let's not break the entire internet before we even have an idea of what that will look like?
So I would say, not the whole internet would go away without ads, but probably the worst parts and what remains is worth visiting.
They got funding because they are large and have reputation behind them.
If you tried starting up a new Wikipedia to compete, guess he much non-advert funding you'd get?
Look at how quora tried and failed hard, and have to sell out to survive. Look at stack overflow these days?
They made lots of bad choices, leading to users (including me) leaving the plattform.
And in general I don't think that you need that many wikipedias, my point was, that donation funded websites work -> if people want it to work.
If you just want to host a blog and maybe dabble in PHP, Apache works great. These days as an adult who programs professionally, my personal site is just a directory that I point nginx to with xhtml/xslt/css files that I hand edit + things like photos. I do have a domain name these days, but it's not like you need one. If you wanted something to be permanent to avoid link rot, you should want browsers to support ipfs so you could use that.
You asked what a free internet would look like without ads, but you need to keep in mind that ads have distorted the market that we have today. Even today, it's easy for a curious teenager to set up a web site for free on their computer, and it could be made even easier if the demand weren't being satisfied by people dumping onto markets.
If you don't want to be cornered into a single option that invades your privacy, now is the time to pay attention.
> Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows
What does that have to do with privacy or advertising?
> invades your privacy
I'm comfortable with a company seeing "<random id> likes cars" tbh
I agree that I prefer, privacy wise, to only deal with one company. But, this leaves them in a considerable advantage. It's ultimately, bad for consumers. And, from the beginning, bad for other businesses and market.
It's not like it goes to Google first and then it goes to advertisers. Chrome is what decides which data leaves the browser. Or have I misunderstood?
So when people say this is a threat to the "free internet" I'm asking what that means - because right now the status quo has a lot of upsides, a few of which I listed. I want to hear what the alternatives are. What is it people are asking for?
What's the implementation of this that you think would be better?
Many folks feel like this is a capitalism-flavored move on par with "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government." The point is that it hands over a lot of control.
What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas? Could that be used to try to target folks seeking abortions, potentially with legal action? All of these are hypotheticals, but they're all potential destinations if we continue in this direction.
Hence the EFFs warning.
But Chrome doesn't send Google that data. The data doesn't leave Chrome. What leaves are the features.
> "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government."
But behavior and identity are not being conveyed in this instance.
> The point is that it hands over a lot of control.
But you can disable it.
> What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas?
That would suck, but:
a) If this is done as intended it's anonymous
b) That would be insane
The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.
> I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.
I'm saying someone has to pay for it.
Look up geocities maybe, most providers gave you some free space anyhow
> I easily set up a web server
I can't believe you can write one after the other.
It would be very healthy anyhow if setting up a server (or any kind of self-hosted service) were less fraught upon, it really is much simpler than many people imagine
Other than the hurdles that the giants have put in the way it could be incredibly fast today.
Providers didn't offer free space, you paid for it with your subscription, and you would lose if you changed provider.
Yeah it had ads but without much targeting
Providers: you still pay for internet subscriptions; you used to get several services included for a fair price
As a result, few people use them, and because they stopped being a competitive advantage, providers stopped offering them, and when they do, it is usually not free and a borderline scam. A way to add fees to unsuspecting users for something they won't even use.
All of that, and worth noting still that Geocities was extremely unique in what it offered when it offered it. It's not a very compelling model for the entire internet, at best it was an experiment that ultimately failed.
It arguably failed because of Yahoo, and it was just one hosting service, not a model
Yes a lot of crappy sites would not exist; very expensive ones such as (ads-filled) YouTube probably wouldn't either, but YouTube was the beginning of the downfall; we'd definitely have been better off without it.
I think the other question would be "can you do tracking without violating privacy". To me, "<random user id likes cars>" is not a privacy violation.
And even if they did, just imagine all the sites that solely use ads vanishing. And there you have it. You can still do shopping and banking. You can still subscribe to newspapers.
And you could have run your blog for free with no ads on SDF, and you could host videos there, too.
Sure, it wouldn't be the same as today's Internet, but like I said, since ads aren't going away, it's just an interesting thought experiment.
I don’t know how good of an example these sites are. They’re turning into gigantic dumpster fires very fast.
Ads are why I could run a wordpress blog as a young student.
If you assume "the current internet is good, but we want to improve privacy" what Google is doing makes sense. Advertisers can still say "ok that person likes cars I'll show them cars" but they can't actually track that person or attribute information to them other than "likes cars".