Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7

"Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow."

I remember a world without advertising on the internet. Products still existed. Commerce still happened. Information still flowed. At first I got access to the internet through universities. Later I paid subscription fees for internet access. Nothing I accessed on the www required a paid subscription.

Bandwidth sucked. CPUs were less powerful, RAM and storage were in short supply. All that has changged.

But I still pay for internet access, much more than I did in the early days. And, remarkably, I see people asking internet users to "subscribe" to websites, in addition to paying internet subscriber fees. This does not stop these websites from also conducting data collection, surveillance and targeted advertsing.

Internet advertising is not like other advertising. People try to argue it makes stuff "free". Stuff that was already free to begin with.