The problem with this rosy view is the apparatus of permanent, escalating surveillance that you need to keep the shell game going. Many of the services we use are funded by venture capital, in the expectation of future profit. The only way to keep the investors' wallets open is to convince them that advertising will be a better business model in the future than it is right now. That creates a race to see who can build the most invasive systems for tracking and influencing user behavior.

> We spend our days using free services and reading free content which is all supported by advertisers. Google, Facebook, Tech blogs, newspapers.

It's kind of funny, it used to be people paid for (or their employees paid for) their homepage hosting for a blog. It's now easier and cheaper than ever to host a static site, and yet a lot of people end up on "free" ad-supported platforms.

I still read a few mailing-lists, and come across the occasional blog that isn't ad-financed (but they are usually not paid for in any direct way, except maybe by an employer -- certainly many are "free time"-projects).

Most of the things I need, have very low resource requirements -- if it wasn't for peoples insistence on using bloated technologies and techniques that add absolutely nothing to the content/value over plain html and images.

And the I read hn of course, which is sponsored, but not ad-supported. Does anyone know what (if any) budget hn has?

It's a very, very small group of people that argue this position, and they constantly recycle it; they just happen to be loud about it.

Meanwhile, a large portion of the Internet only exists because of advertising, and that will always be true. A big portion of the reading and watching public will never want to pay for all their content.

The article might as well proclaim that the advertising that supported radio, newspapers and magazines was the devil too. Because that worked out so terribly for a century, right?

It kinda did.

Free TV is mostly horrendous where I am. Tons of ads, terrible content. Radio as well.

The only sources with quality and range are community radio (free but dependent on subscriptions) and community television (only people willing to show World Cup, but now unfortunately needing ads to support themselves) and premium services like HBO.

Private models with advertising as the revenue eventually seem to be a race to the bottom to get eyeballs on ads with as creativity and production cost as possible.

This is ignoring quite a few European TV and radio channels that are funded by (various forms of) taxation?

As the article ponts out, pre-Internet advertising lacked the kind of tracking tools that make online advertising such an effective engine for permanent, mass surveillance today.

By the way, do you use any kind of ad blocker?

No I don't. I don't like the look of sites that have ads blocked. Also I sometimes see ads that are interesting to me and click them. I even buy products and services because of them sometimes!

I actually don't mind ads either. But I block because of the tracking, not because I'll see a picture of ketchup or underwear. I'm uneasy about tracking, and for the moment the most comfortable position for me is to block. It's an evolving position.