I know people have rosy eyes for a BBS/IRC comeback, but that will never happen.
By and large, people don't care about having to look at tide and Toyota ads to watch YouTube.
Your bank, school, doctor, and government would all still have websites. Companies would still sell things online. Video calls and chat systems would be there. All the websites run by donation or self-funding would be unchanged. Without ads, the worst parts of the internet might stop existing though.
Uh? No?
The internet existed before being overrun by corporate presence. It still does. Advertising pays a lot, but take the ad money away and let it scale accordingly.
What existed in 1993 was a cultural blip, it's never coming back, so let it go.
Ha! I am under no illusion it is coming back. But even though it flows like the unstoppable tides, ad money is not a requirement.
It's like free software. When it exists you can use it. When it doesn't exist you can't demand anyone to make it exist. And yet we still have free software. Not as much any more though as a lot of it changed to open source.
Now _that_ would be a killer feature.
The "Mag 7", as they're referred to, are dominated by companies that are either advertising companies, or have services that are infested with advertising.
AI might be the last hope for blocking advertising in the future. And potentially only generated by local LLMs because OpenAI and Anthropic are already pwned by members of the aforementioned Mag 7, so ad blocking could well be a verboten path of questioning.
Yes, it's a huge waste of resources - but blocking advertising could be one of the least wasteful use cases if we maintain this dark timeline.
Ad blocking is existential for Google. If everyone blocks ads, Google stops existing. They will do everything they can to prevent it, without going so far they stop existing for regulatory reasons either.