I don't think you got what I was saying. Try a closer read. The internet is for-pay; we are paying for it, and there's no way around it. The question is how we pay for it.
In your pre-eighteen-year-old case:
* Most likely you (or your parents) bought stuff from a company that advertises on the web. So you (or your parents) were paying, just not directly. And as I point out, you were paying extra.
* If you didn't buy enough of the advertised products, your internet was subsidized by other users who did. Same for people in poor countries. But these subsidies are wasteful, as the advertising overhead takes a huge cut.
* You still paid for the opportunity costs of an inferior product.
* Most importantly, you still paid for and will continue to pay for the damage to society that advertising and an ad-supported web inflicts. Ads are dishonest and manipulative. An ad-supported web is driven by click-rates, not user satisfaction, so we get the proliferation of link-baiting empty (if not manipulative) content that we all see today.
But you are right in that if we ditch advertising, we need some way of distributing the costs progressively, and make sure that people who have little still have plenty of internet and internet content access.
Comments
I don't think you got what I was saying. Try a closer read. The internet is for-pay; we are paying for it, and there's no way around it. The question is how we pay for it.
In your pre-eighteen-year-old case:
* Most likely you (or your parents) bought stuff from a company that advertises on the web. So you (or your parents) were paying, just not directly. And as I point out, you were paying extra.
* If you didn't buy enough of the advertised products, your internet was subsidized by other users who did. Same for people in poor countries. But these subsidies are wasteful, as the advertising overhead takes a huge cut.
* You still paid for the opportunity costs of an inferior product.
* Most importantly, you still paid for and will continue to pay for the damage to society that advertising and an ad-supported web inflicts. Ads are dishonest and manipulative. An ad-supported web is driven by click-rates, not user satisfaction, so we get the proliferation of link-baiting empty (if not manipulative) content that we all see today.
But you are right in that if we ditch advertising, we need some way of distributing the costs progressively, and make sure that people who have little still have plenty of internet and internet content access.