Users need publishers to be able to make enough money to survive, or there won't be any content for them to use. You can't totally screw over either side, or the other will no longer exist.
> In particular, Google:
> has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store);
I almost miss Slashdot style "Micro$$$oft" discussions, at least people had some baseline hostility toward browser hegemony.
No, absolutely not. User-targeted advertising does not need to exist, a priori. Plenty of empires were built on privacy-friendly content-targeted advertising in the past and there's no reason that can't be done now. Except that Google would make far less money.
I strongly doubt the internet would stop working.
I fear that we would see a huge wave of advertising in disguise and other not necessarily more transparent forms of indirect funding and influencing.
For instance, there would suddenly be a very big incentive for product companies to become media companies themselves to make the distinction between reporting, advertising and simply describing their own product go away.
I believe an advertising ban would have a very large number of unintended and undesirable consequences.
Nonsense. I'm not going to stop buying food or soap because I don't see ads for it.
$300B is no way negligible by any mean and businesses are tightly coupled so the impact will propagate across everywhere. For instance, almost every functional search engines are powered by advertisement in some way (even DDG); how would you use the internet without a search engine?
Although I think your point is correct, I don't think that this program's failure is evidence for it. I give cash money to numerous small creators, but there's absolutely no way that I would have used the Google Contributer program to do it. That requires more trust in Google than I can muster.
A tremendous amount of resources are wasted on adtech - bandwidth, latency, which ultimately are accounted for in non-renewable time. Just compare using hacker news on mobile to reddit. I have a newish iPhone and reddit is basically unusable. Plausibly it’s a net-neutral situation, the downsides balancing out the upsides.
Similar evaluations can be made in the gaming space, comparing paid, freemium, and advertising driven. It wasn’t until fairly recently that advertising was even a viable revenue source for game developers.
The larger question perhaps is who loses their audience when they can no longer buy targeted advertising? Hint: it’s not the giant brands who blast billions of dollar blindly on mass advertising campaigns and can purchase Super Bowl commercials.
Disclaimer, a significant proration of the money I’ve made in the past decade + was from digital advertising.
Not to mention cognitive resources. How much brain power has the world wasted on trying to get people to look at or click on things?
Just a tip, if I want to use reddit on an iPhone, I usually go to i.reddit.com or reddit.com/.compact
There are also third party apps (I like Slide for Reddit) which are pretty good.