I've always thought that if online advertising as a business model had been entirely banned from the internet in the 90s, the internet would've looked like a much better place today.

And micropayments would've taken off in a big way.

The only reason why micropayments doesn't really exist today isn't due to technical reasons, it's because advertising is too dominant, and because consumers got trained on expecting everything on the internet to be "free", not realizing they're the product.