Thought experiment. Remove all ads from Facebook. Now, the only way corporations can advertise on Facebook is by making Facebook posts on their normal Facebook

Thought experiment. Remove all ads from Facebook. Now, the only way corporations can advertise on Facebook is by making Facebook posts on their normal Facebook page; people only see them if they "liked" the company's FB page. What you've done is slightly reduced huge corporations' advertising effectiveness; and absolutely killed every small internet brand. There's people starting cool clothing, food, perfume, watch brands, starting these companies from rock bottom, getting customers through online ads, and becoming millionaires. The vast majority aren't dropshipper idiots; they're legit brands, many of which eventually get acquired by a Fortune 500 corp. This isn't the 90s. Online ads are just essential to getting companies off the ground nowadays. What should people do? Mail-order magazine ads? (still ads.) Cold calling? (isn't that more intrusive than online ads?) There's other aspects too. Kill online ads and you kill a huge chunk of the social mobility that results from entrepreneurship. There's two paths to wealth nowadays: getting a great job, or starting a company. In your ideal world, the only "path" left is the same old "golden path" our parents talked about, of going to a good college, getting 1 or more degrees, and getting a highly paid career at a big corp or SV startup. For various, well-documented reasons, that system ends up excluding tons of people (many ethnic/gender minorities, people with "difficult life paths" who end up dropping out or are unemployable because of gaps in their resume, ex-felons who have paid their debt to society but aren't going to become Apple VPs anytime soon, undocumented immigrants, and many more). Entrepreneurship is an equalizer. The anti-ad kneejerk reaction often comes from an anti-bigcorp philosophy; but it would only strengthen big corps, and harm any small companies trying to compete. You'd significantly weaken one of the best mechanism we have to reduce social/wealth inequality (entrepreneurship). You have people like HVAC specialists and plumbers advertising their services on Facebook. On the contrary, I think it would be extremely sinister is just a few big corps (browser makers) could harm huge chunks of the economy and society by mortally crippling the best way entrepreneurs have of getting customers. I rarely see anti-ad people address any of these concerns. Think of the ramifications; how about every reputable news source being behind a paywall, leaving fake news sites spreading wildly? I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of other dangerous ramifications yourself.