One that has us pay for websites would be far better. Including services like Gmail and such. We would be paying customers, not eyeballs for sale, and only websites deemed worthy of that level of loyalty would survive.
Any websites that prefer it could still be free then, but the costs to host them would have to be paid by their owner (like most personal or business websites today), not sponsored by ads.
You’re speaking from the position of someone clearly privileged enough to afford all the services you’d like to continue using. There are vast swaths of t people for whom an additional monthly subscription to watch YouTube, have access to email, read the news, browse social media, etc just isn’t financially tenable.
Especially in the year 2023 where technology and internet access is so crucial to survival, I’d prefer for a low-income family to not have to choose between a meal and renewing their monthly email subscription.
>You’re speaking from the position of someone clearly privileged enough to afford all the services you’d like to continue using.
No, I'm speaking from the position of someone who believes we should use fewer (or even no) services, be it Gmail, or Figma or Spotify free tier, or whatever.
There's always FOSS software. There's also freemium (no ads, just reduced functionality to lure someone to the premium full-featured version), and of course freeware.
Ad-supported also has a cost: the ad-induced consumerist spending is one of the biggest expenses people make (disproportionaly so for poorer people). And there's also the jacking up of product costs to cover an ad budget. Plus the social cost in multitude of ways (from the advertisers having influence over the service provider, to personal data being harvested and sold).
This is a good thing. By requiring paid access to more websites, you might find there’s less people spewing garbage in comments sections etc, since they can’t really afford a bunch of accounts to just troll around.
You know how you pay for cable, and Hulu, and Netflix, and still have to sit through ads? It would be like that. If I'm going to have to watch ads anyway, I'll decline paying for the service, thanks. And go on blocking the ads.
The unlikely proposition of the GP is that a grassroots movement with browser extensions would somehow manage to overwhelm and destroy the advertising industry by rendering it unprofitable and nonsensical.
Passing such legislation would be rather redundant at that point, wouldn't it?
I might be wrong about Netflix, I have not watched it in a long time. But certainly many pay channels, pay sports networks, and pay streaming services also have ads. Sometimes skipable, sometimes not.
Any websites that prefer it could still be free then, but the costs to host them would have to be paid by their owner (like most personal or business websites today), not sponsored by ads.