Most of these sites offered a completely ad-free version for many years, then switched to an advertising model after they'd cornered the market. There's no eth

Most of these sites offered a completely ad-free version for many years, then switched to an advertising model after they'd cornered the market. There's no ethical reason for us to "pay" these scummy actors, including Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, after they destroyed all viable alternatives by giving away their products free and THEN add advertising. As you intimate, there's also nothing intrinsically necessary to the advertising model for it to be served by different domains, with 3rd party cookies and third party javascript. Nor is it necessary to have auto-play videos, popups, etc. Even someone fairly benign like the Guardian is now infested with up-sells and adverts if you look at it without an adblocker. So the sites brought it on themselves. You want to support their ads, go ahead, but don't ask us to come up with the alternative model. You have no moral high ground to preach to us from, all these sites used a bait and switch to get on top. Right now if I look at facebook every 2 or 3 stories are adverts, where 5 years ago it was far less, and for google a huge chunk of the top of the results page, up to three results worth, are adverts. None of these are clearly marked imo, nor are they necessary, they're making billions in profit. They can do it because they monopolized the market.