Furthermore, it misses that we might be somewhere better than here had we not had ads. (I'm not saying it's a foregone conclusion, just one of many possibilities not mentioned.)
It's fun to think about how it could have all been different. No more sites designed to game search result rankings, designed to waste your time to maximize eyeballs on ads, designed to keep you on the site in a garden instead of surfing the web.
ISPs should have bundled hosting with internet access. Give everyone the possibility to generate their own site. It would be like a large insurance pool where your monthly bill might subsidize the costs of hosting another user who's site gets millions of views, just like how your monthly insurance premium ultimately covers the salary of someone else's surgeon, nurses, anesthesiologists, and keeping the lights on in the operating room. You can still ask for donations or even paid subscriptions if you wanted a well off full time staff.
Instead, we leaned on advertisers to fund our websites, middle men working tirelessly to come up with new ways to extract comfortable profit out of the system. Leeching resources that could have otherwise gone straight to the publisher had we designed the internet to be a little more federalized, a little more universal, with the costs shared among the users of the internet who are already paying for access anyway.
Part of it is due to the fact that advertising has worked just fine without tracking for literally hundreds of years in a variety of different media.
As to your points, though, paid content is great. If people won't pay for it, they probably don't actually want or need it.
I don't want to see any ads. No ad is relevant to me, so all ads, even supposedly targeted ads are random. In 30 years of using the web, I have literally never once intentionally clicked on an ad. So better tracking for ads gets me nothing and loses me a lot.
Wealthy people already subsidize lots of content for political gain, so nothing is changed by having it be targeted ad supported or not.
Most small companies cannot use the legitimate ad networks because they don't have enough volume. So this is a non-issue.
A sharp stone on a stick has also worked just fine as a weapon for literally thousands of years in a variety of locations. That doesn't mean it makes any sense to use it today. This is just a bad argument.
Ads provide a lot of exposure instead of just eliciting a direct response. Better tracking for ads benefits content publishers and service providers, many of which users enjoy. You don't have to click on an ad for ads to have value.
"Part of it is due to the fact that advertising has worked just fine without tracking for literally hundreds of years in a variety of different media."
Magazines, radio, and television are all tracked in different ways. When were ads not tracking users? On stone tablets?
"Wealthy people already subsidize lots of content for political gain, so nothing is changed by having it be targeted ad supported or not."
They do, but it would be a much smaller percentage if the content creators had a way to monetize it.
"Most small companies cannot use the legitimate ad networks because they don't have enough volume. So this is a non-issue."
How is it a 'non-issue'? Many startups, especially here on HN, rely on advertising as a business model.
