Ads are a necessary outcome of users rejecting to pay for digital content 99.9% of the time
The early days of the internet didn’t facilitate trillions in economic value like it is now.
We can use that anecdote as inspiration but it really has no merit on the modern internet.
Neither does ads. The “trillions” in economic value are what's driven by the businesses using the internet for their business (say to order food, taxis, hotels, online games, etc.).
The ads-based internet generate only a tiny fraction of that value. In fact, it only generates the low-quality value for which people aren't willing to pay anything. Youtube is probably the only exception here, and in fact if they decided to go fully paid, then many people would probably still pay for it, like they pay for Netflix.
With all those additional trillions there should be enough overall wealth for everyone to afford a completely ad-free internet now more than ever.
Trillions of dollars of shit is still shit, but shit is at least useful for compost where ads are useless at best.
I too long for those days, trust me, but it's just not a fair comparison.
Clearly market forces often lead to a horrible product many of us don't like.
Even if cost per user hasn't gone up (which I would actually bet it has, if we had a way to measure it), the total cost has gone up, and for a distributed non-commercial Internet you need to have a total cost, not a per-user cost, that is affordable for lots of people, not just for large market leaders, like it is today.
What I don't agree with is that the current state of affairs is necessary due to scale.
We have adverts thrown in our faces and tracking everywhere we go, even on sites that could be profitable without it, simply because it is easy to do and almost all sites do it.
If all the time and money spent on figuring out tracking and ads had been put into micro-payments or distributed infrastructure, we'd be better off.
But people want stuff "for free" and big companies don't want to give up control, so here we are.
Then of course almost immediately once bandwidth got fast enough there were image ads and an explosion of GeoCities sites.
That lasted all of 5 seconds before banner ads and auto-playing ads became the norm. Bandwidth isn't free.
i.e. anyone can register a domain, but if an ad or paywall is found on a site there's a warning -> suspension -> domain unregistered. Only donation links accepted but they cannot provide extra content.
Hobbyist/amateur sites would thrive there as there would be attraction due to visitors being confident they won't be met with ads or paywalls.
It would be awesome until the registrar inevitably caves and gradually bends the rules to increase revenue.
Ads generated more revenue.
Then Netflix came along, and their core value prop was that there were no Ads, it was subscription only. Like their DVD service. This obviously fundamentally changed online consumer viewing habits and revenue sources.
Until of course Netflix decided to look into Ads as a way to feed to the beast that is Revenue Growth.
Attempts at a Netflix for other types of media seem to have largely failed to capture and change the market in the same way.
Apple News is a ghost town. Maybe old Media and Magazines are just mostly dead anyway?
The few people donating money will never donate enough to sustain the platform that also serves non-donating users. And those same people that donate will never even find any platform that hasn't already become popular thanks to the free ad-supported tier. There's no way out. The griftnet is here to stay