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Comment by joes223 | Hacker News Reader

The biggest barrier is that there is no money in honest business. In other words, people want to pay for useful content (e.g. wikipedia is still up and running), it's just what they want to pay is nowhere near multi-billion-dollar valuation that VCs are used to. Can Google Search, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android and so on exist without ads and tracking? Absolutely. It's just this business would become non-profit.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "honest business" or what any of this has to do with non-profits.

Nothing is free. You either pay with cash that you earn, or you pay with your attention with ads. Option 2 is faster, easier, more passive, more affordable and more equal. That's why billions of people prefer to monetize attention on-demand for their content instead of paying cash upfront.

He is arguing that Google could make money with cash, only less than what they currently make with ads, because people spend cash cautiously, whereas they spend data wildly.

None of that has to do with being non-profit. Google is a trillion dollar company. Yes it can make less profits and still survive.

Whether people would pay enough to get anywhere near the costs however, is probably unlikely given how little they pay for far cheaper content on the internet today. Wikipedia is not comparable since the vast majority is unpaid volunteer work and user-provided content.

There is nothing more equal in it. It's outright criminal. The today's adtech is when you walk into a grocery store, get stuff for free, while in the meantime the store takes notes what car you drive, who you likely are, packages all this info and sells to whoever pays, including criminals.

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