Comment by adhesive_wombat

Reminds me of a scifi book where the Internet-analogue is so corrupted with junk deliberately injected by filtering services so that they can sell you the filters that it's impossible to use "naked".

I think it's either Neal Stephenson or maybe Stephen Baxter, but I'm not sure which book it was an aside in (it's not Fall, I haven't read that yet, though that appears to have a similar idea).