We sure are. But advertising, not ad-blocking, is precipitating this tragedy:
1. The commons in this case is a healthy marketplace where the users are the customers and thus vote with their dollars. The invisible hand depends on this.
2. But then a competitor comes in and offers something for "free". This is a trick, a lie. The other important principle of the free market is that there is no free lunch.[1] The advertisers pay the website with money that is added to the cost of the products they are selling. Guess who buys those?
3. Here's where the tragedy comes in: Consumers are fooled by this. You've undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that? The straight-up businesses that want to compete the honest way can't. They either have to cave and switch to ads, or die.
4. The tragedy continues: Since we are now the products not the customers, businesses don't compete for a dollars by producing a product we are willing to pay for. Instead, they compete for our clicks (what they're selling to the advertisers). Competing for clicks, as most of us see every day, yields horrible products for us.[2] But of course, we are not the customer.
5. And like every tragedy of the commons, what we are left with is a misused and polluted[3] precious resource, the web.
I haven't even got into the harm advertising itself cause to society, nor how it distorts the free market, suppressing innovation and true competition.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237