Demonetizing the web sounds mostly awesome. Good riddance to the adtech ecosystem.
But, like on OTA TV, you can get all the shopping channels you want.
So who pays for all of this?
The web needs to be monetized, just not via advertising. Maybe it's microtransactions, maybe subscriptions, maybe something else, but this idea of "we get everything we want for free and nobody tries to use it for their own agenda" will never return. That only exists for hobby technologies. Once they are mainstream they get incorporated into the mainstream economic model. Our mainstream model is capitalism, so it will be ever present in any form of the internet.
The main question is how people/resources can be paid for while maintaining healthy incentives.
The web needs patrons, contributions, and cost allocation, not necessarily monetization and shareholder capitalism where there is a never ending shuffle of IP and org ownership to maximize returns (unnecessarily imho). How many times was Reddit flipped until its current CEO juiced it for IPO and profitability? Now it is a curated forum for ML training.
I (as well as many other consumers of this content) donate to APM Marketplace [1] because we can afford it and want it to continue. This is, in fits and starts, the way imho. We piece together the means to deliver disenshittification (aggregating small donations, large donations, grants, etc).
(Tangentially, APM Marketplace has recently covered food stores [2] and childcare centers [3] that have incorporated as non profits because a for profit model simply will not succeed; food for thought at a meta level as we discuss economic sustainability and how to deliver outcomes in non conventional ways)
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/
[2] https://www.marketplace.org/2024/10/24/colorados-oldest-busi...
[3] https://www.marketplace.org/2024/08/22/daycare-rural-areas-c...
I think you forgot that