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Ad's got us here to begin with. Without ads the internet would have been only for the rich. There would also have been no google, no amazon, no android, no kin

Ad's got us here to begin with. Without ads the internet would have been only for the rich. There would also have been no google, no amazon, no android, no kindles. I'd still be ordering everything from the Sears Catalogue, waiting 6-8 weeks for it to arrive.

philwelch 5y ago
No Amazon, really? Amazon ships physical goods to your house in exchange for money--they aren't dependent on advertising. Even Google landed on advertising as a monetization technique but existed before it and easily could have been a sustainable business without it (though not the behemoth it has become).
- jedberg 5y ago
  Google existed before ads but had no revenue. Ads are the only thing that kept it alive other than investor money.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    I might have overstated a bit. Ads were obviously a sufficient revenue source, but provide far more revenue that is necessary for the core search engine. It’s possible some other revenue source might have been sufficient to support the search engine, even if not as lucrative.
- asciimov 5y ago
  Not the amazon of today at least. I had supposed without Ad's you wouldn't have had the dotcom boom of the 90's. No dot-com boom means venture capital wouldn't have flowed as readily. Amazon still would have started, but they burned a ton of cash in the late 90's. Without burning so much capital I don't believe they would have become as huge or if they would have even survived. I remember old amazon being cheaper than retail most of the time, they must have been eating that loss. In the end it worked out for them.
pmontra 5y ago
I don't think so. Everybody pays for their internet connection and always had. News on paper have always been supported by ads so it's fair if news on the internet have ads too. Amazon sells things, they would still sell them. Phone makers sells phones and we had Symbian before Android. Wikipedia has no ads. But I don't see how we could actually forbid ads on the internet and the legal basis for it.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
And how do you know this. Also, you are referring to the web, not the internet. I have been using the internet since the web was opened to the public. It was already growing like crazy without ads. You make some very strange assumptions. By all means, find the silver linings, but there is no basis for making a causal connection between computer networks and advertising. Ads are not why we have conveniences. Networking technology, continually decreasing in cost, is the reason. There is no inherent connection between computer networks and advertising. The connection exists in your mind because computer network technology is dirt cheap to produce and people have resorted to sketchy behaviour to try to make money from it.1 It would still be dirt cheap without the sketchy behaviour. The argument that the internet would only be for "the rich" is laughable. It must come out of a Big Tech PR department. Sounds like what Facebook likes to say to the press in response to criticism. Yeah, the internet is for the rich: the people who started a small number of oversized, overtrafficked websites and will use whatever means necessary to stay on top. There is nothing egalitatrian about today's internet. 1 The number of people who became wealthy from this behaviour is relatively small, but news of their "success" is widely disseminated.
- monetus 5y ago
  I think what they are getting at are loss-leading products they fear wouldn't have been made in that timeline.
jjav 5y ago
Of course there would be amazon (widespread e-commerce, if not literally amazon.com), android, kindle. None of these are ad-driven products. google as it exists today, an advertising company hoovering up private data while masquerading as various services, all in the name of pushing more ads, is not a net positive to the Internet. Having it not exist would be wonderful in this alternate universe. Of course there would be search engines though. There were plenty search engines before google, before ads, and those would've evolved along a different path from where they were in the mid 90s.
benlivengood 5y ago
Email, uucp, nntp, and irc were basically funded by the users of the systems since it was primarily P2P systems operated by the ISPs. Most/many ISPs had local ftp mirrors of useful software, and of course provided the first http hosting. The Internet and the web could have grown in this way indefinitely with large e-commerce sites paying their ISPs proportionally more for traffic but reaping the benefits of not maintaining brick and mortar storefronts. The first search engines had no ads. They were public services to a large extent. Modern Google is a distributed crawler/indexer and inverted search tree for queries (last I heard). Something quite similar could have been built and sharded across ISPs. DNS is still ad-free, supported only by the ISPs and Registrars that benefit from it. So is email. The PKI is free again. BitTorrent or ipfs could localize the costs of content distribution if media companies weren't bamboozled by DRM.
jrnichols 5y ago
> There would also have been no google, no amazon, no android, no kindles Oh no! Anyway... Sears could still have their catalogue on the internet. Just because something is online does not mean that it needs advertisements everywhere. It's about time we realize that.
Gollapalli 5y ago
It'd be kind of cool to have a search engine only for pages without advertising. Kind of like Wiby, but specifically geared for that.

philwelch 5y ago

No Amazon, really? Amazon ships physical goods to your house in exchange for money--they aren't dependent on advertising. Even Google landed on advertising as a monetization technique but existed before it and easily could have been a sustainable business without it (though not the behemoth it has become).

jedberg 5y ago
Google existed before ads but had no revenue. Ads are the only thing that kept it alive other than investor money.
- philwelch 5y ago
  I might have overstated a bit. Ads were obviously a sufficient revenue source, but provide far more revenue that is necessary for the core search engine. It’s possible some other revenue source might have been sufficient to support the search engine, even if not as lucrative.
asciimov 5y ago
Not the amazon of today at least. I had supposed without Ad's you wouldn't have had the dotcom boom of the 90's. No dot-com boom means venture capital wouldn't have flowed as readily. Amazon still would have started, but they burned a ton of cash in the late 90's. Without burning so much capital I don't believe they would have become as huge or if they would have even survived. I remember old amazon being cheaper than retail most of the time, they must have been eating that loss. In the end it worked out for them.

pmontra 5y ago

I don't think so. Everybody pays for their internet connection and always had. News on paper have always been supported by ads so it's fair if news on the internet have ads too. Amazon sells things, they would still sell them. Phone makers sells phones and we had Symbian before Android. Wikipedia has no ads. But I don't see how we could actually forbid ads on the internet and the legal basis for it.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

And how do you know this. Also, you are referring to the web, not the internet. I have been using the internet since the web was opened to the public. It was already growing like crazy without ads. You make some very strange assumptions. By all means, find the silver linings, but there is no basis for making a causal connection between computer networks and advertising. Ads are not why we have conveniences. Networking technology, continually decreasing in cost, is the reason. There is no inherent connection between computer networks and advertising. The connection exists in your mind because computer network technology is dirt cheap to produce and people have resorted to sketchy behaviour to try to make money from it.1 It would still be dirt cheap without the sketchy behaviour. The argument that the internet would only be for "the rich" is laughable. It must come out of a Big Tech PR department. Sounds like what Facebook likes to say to the press in response to criticism. Yeah, the internet is for the rich: the people who started a small number of oversized, overtrafficked websites and will use whatever means necessary to stay on top. There is nothing egalitatrian about today's internet. 1 The number of people who became wealthy from this behaviour is relatively small, but news of their "success" is widely disseminated.

monetus 5y ago
I think what they are getting at are loss-leading products they fear wouldn't have been made in that timeline.

jjav 5y ago

Of course there would be amazon (widespread e-commerce, if not literally amazon.com), android, kindle. None of these are ad-driven products. google as it exists today, an advertising company hoovering up private data while masquerading as various services, all in the name of pushing more ads, is not a net positive to the Internet. Having it not exist would be wonderful in this alternate universe. Of course there would be search engines though. There were plenty search engines before google, before ads, and those would've evolved along a different path from where they were in the mid 90s.

benlivengood 5y ago

Email, uucp, nntp, and irc were basically funded by the users of the systems since it was primarily P2P systems operated by the ISPs. Most/many ISPs had local ftp mirrors of useful software, and of course provided the first http hosting. The Internet and the web could have grown in this way indefinitely with large e-commerce sites paying their ISPs proportionally more for traffic but reaping the benefits of not maintaining brick and mortar storefronts. The first search engines had no ads. They were public services to a large extent. Modern Google is a distributed crawler/indexer and inverted search tree for queries (last I heard). Something quite similar could have been built and sharded across ISPs. DNS is still ad-free, supported only by the ISPs and Registrars that benefit from it. So is email. The PKI is free again. BitTorrent or ipfs could localize the costs of content distribution if media companies weren't bamboozled by DRM.

jrnichols 5y ago

> There would also have been no google, no amazon, no android, no kindles Oh no! Anyway... Sears could still have their catalogue on the internet. Just because something is online does not mean that it needs advertisements everywhere. It's about time we realize that.

Gollapalli 5y ago

It'd be kind of cool to have a search engine only for pages without advertising. Kind of like Wiby, but specifically geared for that.