Excellent news. One big reason why the deleterious adware economy has no viable competitor is that somewhat sophisticated users can partially opt out of it and

Excellent news. One big reason why the deleterious adware economy has no viable competitor is that somewhat sophisticated users can partially opt out of it and get subsidized by the less savvy. By forcing people to pay for youtube premium (which, in fairness to Google is very reasonably priced) or look elsewhere, non-surreptitiously-paid-for consumer services become much more viable. Unfortunately, the other reason non-surreptitiously-paid-for services are currently not viable is that most people, including the vast majority of HN seem to be, uhm, not very sophisticated about reasoning about costs (to most people the k-gadzillions that google makes apparently materialize out of thin air, instead of really coming out of large_overhead_factor*k gadzillions they personally proportionally pay for). This seems hard to overcome. reply