I was around in the 90's, yes. If newspapers are your model of a better alternative - pre internet, newspapers were funded largely by advertising. Yes, they al

I was around in the 90's, yes. If newspapers are your model of a better alternative - pre internet, newspapers were funded largely by advertising. Yes, they also took subs and sales, but they could not operate on that alone. A very large amount of product and service discovery -not just consumer, but B2B -happened by means of ads (including classifieds) in newspapers and professional magazines. Have a look at a 19th century issue of "The Engineer" or "The Builder", it's very enlightening. If we want to get rid of the current internet giants, we need to figure out what can replace them so effectively that businesses dump them like they did the newspapers.