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Many people on here advocate for the end of advertising driven internet business models and is easy to see where this desire comes from. The real question thoug

• JPLeRouzic 8y ago
  There are several ways to look at that. My take is that it is not at all the problem of financing Internet, it is about how some businesses can access their piece of the cake. They are fleas on the back of mega companies. People already pays a lot to access the internet to their telecom and devices providers. Internet access is actually quite costly, otherwise the companies like ATT/Apple and so on, would not be among the richest companies on the world. AT&T revenues in 2017 were 160 billion. And AT&T is only one of those Telecom companies. Apple's revenues in 2016 were 215 billions Dollars.
• KozmoNau7 8y ago
  Advertising is not that bad, if the advertisers would simply stick to static "dumb" ads (even text-only, as with the old Google ads), preferably locally hosted, with no tracking nor privacy invasion. The problems started with animations, sound, interactive nonsense, popups, popunders, tracking, redirects, you name it. If an ad can do anything more than what a simple newspaper ad can do, it's too much. And personally, I would rather be without those, as well.
• squiggleblaz 8y ago
  There was a working web before there was so much targeted advertising on the web. People paid for their website which hosted content that they wanted to tell people. Many people got their website thrown in with something else they paid for e.g. their ISP or workplace might provide a webpage which you could use. If you wanted more you paid.