"Online commerce has always been very healthy and pervasive almost since the beginning of the web." Actually, in the very early days of the Web, I was personal

"Online commerce has always been very healthy and pervasive almost since the beginning of the web." Actually, in the very early days of the Web, I was personally ridiculed by advertisers I approached with the idea of advertising online. Almost every single one I approached stated quite clearly that they were certain the web was "just a passing fad" and that "normal" people wouldn't be interested in it. They all thought advertising online was a waste of time an money. Somehow we've gone from that to pretty much the entire advertising industry having convinced the world that the Internet could not survive without online advertising, and that they somehow have a right to spy on us all to achieve their ends, and almost nobody seems to care that we've been giving away more and more of our privacy to these unsavory characters. "'Standards' are completely unnecessary except for the de facto standards of MasterCard and Visa that predated the web." The web (and the Internet in general) would not exist as it does today, were it not for the existence of agreed upon standards. The entire infrastructure of the Internet is built upon standards of communication which ensure that communication between devices is even possible. Without those standards, it'd all fall apart at the seams. "many if not most consumers make decisions based on the price of the product, and nothing beats a price of free!" Actually, during the time I speak of above, it was also extremely common for most people to think that "free" = "garbage", and that only paid products were worth a damn. If something was given away for free, it was either a trick to get you to buy something, or it was something you wouldn't want anyway, because if it was worth anything, then it wouldn't be given away for free.