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Comment by insanitybit | Hacker News Reader

What does a "free" internet look like without ads? Serious question, because right now ads pay for a lot. Ads are why we have reddit and twitter - two sites that I think a lot of people like.

Ads are why I could run a wordpress blog as a young student.

If you assume "the current internet is good, but we want to improve privacy" what Google is doing makes sense. Advertisers can still say "ok that person likes cars I'll show them cars" but they can't actually track that person or attribute information to them other than "likes cars".

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Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. And that would be less without all the crap needed to serve ads and track users and monetize everything.

I can't wait to find out what an ad-free Internet looks like. Maybe more like when I was a student, and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle. Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services, because they no longer have to compete with free crap. Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity. An ad-full Internet is harmful, polluting our minds to the point people consider it normal and making them afraid of what could only be positive change.

> Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month.

I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career.

> and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle

How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I'm a random person with a random interest, oh sweet I can post about it online" and hello to "Sponsor this content on patreon".

> Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services

All of this "I'll just pay for it" stuff ignores that the only reason you can find content creators to pay directly is because they have free platforms like Youtube that are paid for by advertising.

> Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity

So propose it. I'm all for this. Give me a new business model that doesn't involve ads and let people choose. Go for it. But maybe let's not break the entire internet before we even have an idea of what that will look like?

Things were already free before the advertising boom, internet was not really worse twenty years ago

Nowadays, you can get a free VM from some providers (GCP) and there are lots of sites where you can deploy a static website for free (github pages). I'd argue deploying something for free is easier than ever.

When I was a teenager, I found and installed Apache. WordPress apparently had existed for a year or two, but I didn't hear about it for several years after. I memorized my IP address and would link people to that, and never bought a hostname or anything.

If you just want to host a blog and maybe dabble in PHP, Apache works great. These days as an adult who programs professionally, my personal site is just a directory that I point nginx to with xhtml/xslt/css files that I hand edit + things like photos. I do have a domain name these days, but it's not like you need one. If you wanted something to be permanent to avoid link rot, you should want browsers to support ipfs so you could use that.

there's always dynamic dns, too

Maybe someday ipv6 will become widespread and we can all have thousands of static IP addresses.

Can we agree that "must be able to install apache" is not a good requirement for adding content to the web?

It's not a requirement; it's a $0 option. You could also pay someone a few dollars or befriend a local computer nerd. My memory is fading now, but I think ISPs used to offer web hosting and email as part of your Internet package, so they could always bring that back (I think they still give you email). Once upon a time, Windows came with a web server. You could imagine that sharing a folder on the web could be as easy as it is (was?) to share a folder through SMB (just open folder properties, click "Share", and give it a name).

You asked what a free internet would look like without ads, but you need to keep in mind that ads have distorted the market that we have today. Even today, it's easy for a curious teenager to set up a web site for free on their computer, and it could be made even easier if the demand weren't being satisfied by people dumping onto markets.

Wikipedia is not funded by ads for example. Lots of other sites neither.

So I would say, not the whole internet would go away without ads, but probably the worst parts and what remains is worth visiting.

But how many Wikipedias can there be?

They got funding because they are large and have reputation behind them.

If you tried starting up a new Wikipedia to compete, guess he much non-advert funding you'd get?

Look at how quora tried and failed hard, and have to sell out to survive. Look at stack overflow these days?

I don't have the number offhand, but Wikipedia did exactly that kind of startup competing with online encyclopedias.

"Look at how quora tried and failed hard"

They made lots of bad choices, leading to users (including me) leaving the plattform.

And in general I don't think that you need that many wikipedias, my point was, that donation funded websites work -> if people want it to work.

You don't need resources if you are small and unknown. Run it at your house until you have a few thousand users, and then move to something like Hetzner (if you're one of those Swiss people with 25 Gb/s Internet, skip step 2). If I'm interpreting their grafana[0] right, Wikimedia gets ~20 edits per second and usually peaks less than ~200k requests/second across all projects, and it looks like traffic has not exceeded 7 Gb/s over the last 90 days across all data centers. Even the largest projects are not a lot from a technical perspective these days.

[0] https://grafana.wikimedia.org

They're not talking about free as in no monetary cost, they're talking about free as in freedom. Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows. I have repeatedly come across sites that don't even test on Firefox because Chrome is just the default now.

If you don't want to be cornered into a single option that invades your privacy, now is the time to pay attention.

I know what they're saying. I'm asking what the internet is going to look like when there's no advertising, and I'm pointing out what advertising currently allows for.

> Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows

What does that have to do with privacy or advertising?

> invades your privacy

I'm comfortable with a company seeing "<random id> likes cars" tbh

You set up a false equivalence. Why is the choice between these kinds of features, which lock Google in as the sole controller of online advertising, and no advertising?

I don't think I'm setting that up, but maybe I'm not understanding. Because to me what Google is doing is a clear attempt at maintaining the status quo of an ad-funded internet while removing the ability for fine-grained 3rd party tracking.

So when people say this is a threat to the "free internet" I'm asking what that means - because right now the status quo has a lot of upsides, a few of which I listed. I want to hear what the alternatives are. What is it people are asking for?

What's the implementation of this that you think would be better?

It's a threat to the "free" (as in freedom) internet in that with this as the tracking mechanism, Google via Chrome is directly tracking your interests. It effectively makes "serves you ads and tracks your interests" a core part of what it means for a browser (Chrome) to be a browser.

Many folks feel like this is a capitalism-flavored move on par with "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government." The point is that it hands over a lot of control.

What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas? Could that be used to try to target folks seeking abortions, potentially with legal action? All of these are hypotheticals, but they're all potential destinations if we continue in this direction.

Hence the EFFs warning.

> Google via Chrome is directly tracking your interests

But Chrome doesn't send Google that data. The data doesn't leave Chrome. What leaves are the features.

> "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government."

But behavior and identity are not being conveyed in this instance.

> The point is that it hands over a lot of control.

But you can disable it.

> What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas?

That would suck, but:

a) If this is done as intended it's anonymous

b) That would be insane

The problem here comes from Google being the ones who monopolise on the user data, leading them to be the only credible source of truth on the user interests. This is an outstanding move from them, business wise.

I agree that I prefer, privacy wise, to only deal with one company. But, this leaves them in a considerable advantage. It's ultimately, bad for consumers. And, from the beginning, bad for other businesses and market.

But Google doesn't get the user data, right? Chrome is just conveying it to advertisers - Google gets the same experience as everyone else.

It's not like it goes to Google first and then it goes to advertisers. Chrome is what decides which data leaves the browser. Or have I misunderstood?

Correct, with the caveat that if you have Chrome profile sync enabled (without a sync passphrase set) then the advertising data tracked by Chrome likely gets uploaded unencrypted to Google-operated servers. I don't know if their privacy policy permits them to look at this data, or if they would look at it in practice.

Hm. All of my sync data is encrypted. Is that not the default?

Nope. See the following page for some screenshots of the UI to turn on encryption with sync passphrases: https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-...

Thanks. I hope they enable that by default at some point.

The internet existed without ads and big centralized sites. People ran their own sites, link rings, email and other services. The big guys have taken away so much of the ability to effectively self-host, but fundamentally we do not need them and we do not need ads.

You're talking about the internet when it was tiny and inaccessible, and you're acting like that was good. That's a position to take, but I don't think it's a good one - again, I would not have been able to write my blog for free, the sites we take for granted today would not exist.

The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.

There a plenty of non-ad-driver services that allow hosting blogs for free. Github, cloudfare’s free tier, and many others - and you can certainly find a one-click vm deployment of a blogging platform for less then 5$. I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.

All of those businesses subsidize their sites because they're billion dollar companies. Is that better than just... using ads?

> I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.

I'm saying someone has to pay for it.

Hosting a static cheap is cheap. And even something powered by a CMS can be hosted on a cheap droplet. No one really expects you to share contents like video and music for free (and even that can be done cheaply if you’re only loking at a few TB of monthly bandwith). So yeah, someone should pay for it, but the internet itself isn’t free and everyone is paying for it.

It was NOT inaccessible

Look up geocities maybe, most providers gave you some free space anyhow

Geocities had ads for most of its life. It also ended up dead because it wasn't profitable anyways. Not the best example.

Providers didn't offer free space, you paid for it with your subscription, and you would lose if you changed provider.

I think that it died because of the dotcom bubble, the purchase by Yahoo and it being overall crappy...

Yeah it had ads but without much targeting

Providers: you still pay for internet subscriptions; you used to get several services included for a fair price

The problem with provider supplied services like hosting and email is that people understandably don't want to tie cloud services to their home internet connection. What if you move, or find a provider that offers better/cheaper internet service.

As a result, few people use them, and because they stopped being a competitive advantage, providers stopped offering them, and when they do, it is usually not free and a borderline scam. A way to add fees to unsuspecting users for something they won't even use.

I think that they stopped offering them (when they did) mostly because there are so many cheap, or free, good other services now

My experience was that it was incredibly accessible. I easily set up a web server on my home internet connection because my line was synchronous and static IPs were easily available.

> My experience was that it was incredibly accessible.

> I easily set up a web server

I can't believe you can write one after the other.

And yet you believe that the current status is necessary

I don't see how one has to do with the other. Saying that the internet was accessible, and showing that by saying "I just had to set up a server" is insane.

He didn't say he had to, he just said he did it

It would be very healthy anyhow if setting up a server (or any kind of self-hosted service) were less fraught upon, it really is much simpler than many people imagine

As a teen and complete novice it took me 8 ours on a Saturday. What's contradictory about those two statements?

Other than the hurdles that the giants have put in the way it could be incredibly fast today.

Geocities had a tiny fraction of the users that forums attract these days and was not free for a major portion of its lifetime.

All of that, and worth noting still that Geocities was extremely unique in what it offered when it offered it. It's not a very compelling model for the entire internet, at best it was an experiment that ultimately failed.

I think forums these days attract three or four people

It arguably failed because of Yahoo, and it was just one hosting service, not a model

We didn't blog. We posted on USENET — for free.

OK so are proposing that we shift the internet to a completely decentralized system somehow? And we'll just kill ads in the meantime while the entire world switches off of the current infra?

If you're asking me, I don't have a problem with that at all. I know full well it will never happen though since big money is now involved.

It was good, and you probably would have been to write your blog for free.

Yes a lot of crappy sites would not exist; very expensive ones such as (ads-filled) YouTube probably wouldn't either, but YouTube was the beginning of the downfall; we'd definitely have been better off without it.

You can do ads without tracking.

You can even host them on your own server, and vet them for quality and security.

True, you absolutely can. They'll potentially make much less money, and I don't know that that's sustainable but I think it's at least an alternative worth talking about.

I think the other question would be "can you do tracking without violating privacy". To me, "<random user id likes cars>" is not a privacy violation.

Wordpress was founded, and hosted-Wordpress services ran for years, in an era where there was only non-personalized advertising. Why do you feel it would be unsustainable? As long as you limit media storage space and plugins, simple blogs cost extremely little to host per user.

I didn't say it's not sustainable, I'm saying it's potentially not sustainable. Sustainability of tracking-free ads would be a good conversation to have.

I believe it can be pretty good. I go to goodreads to track new releases and yeah, I wouldn’t mind ads if it were non invasive. Everyone that goes to goodreads is interested in reading and books in some form, so why not show ads about books here, instead of when I’m looking for music gear?

Newspapers ran for decades without any tracking, and they had to make and distribute physical objects.

Ah yes, print media, a thriving business.

But ads aren't going away. Maybe eventually all tracking goes away (probably in the EU first), but ads never do.

And even if they did, just imagine all the sites that solely use ads vanishing. And there you have it. You can still do shopping and banking. You can still subscribe to newspapers.

And you could have run your blog for free with no ads on SDF, and you could host videos there, too.

Sure, it wouldn't be the same as today's Internet, but like I said, since ads aren't going away, it's just an interesting thought experiment.

> reddit and twitter - two sites that I think a lot of people like.

I don’t know how good of an example these sites are. They’re turning into gigantic dumpster fires very fast.

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