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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Just ban advertising straight up. This will kill Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the other companies ruining the web. Not one tear will be shed at this point.

Also, make it a huge liability to store any kind of personal information. Apply heavy taxes on every single bit stored. These companies should be trying really hard to forget all about us the second they send our HTTP responses, not hoarding our personal information like a bunch of stalkers. Make it exceedingly expensive for them to do it and they'll stop.

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You know as well as I do that that will never happen and would probably destroy the economy. As bad as these companies are, flat out killing them is not a good idea.

If the economy can't survive the loss of these abusers, it deserves to be destroyed. If we do something, we gotta go all the way. Half-measures do nothing.

You do realize what the destruction of the economy would entail? That it would mean that many people would lose their livelihood and suffer?

It turns out that people actually prefer getting products for free with ads to paying for products. As bad as google and facebook are, they are providing what people want at the exact price point they want.

I think banning online ads will be awesome for economy.

Serving ads is doesn't create any value. By now, it's just a tax to be payed to google/facebook.

Why do you think banning online ads gonna destroy the economy?

These internet companies don't even pay a lot of taxes, we allow them to move profit across jurisdictions to optimize.

If the economy only stands because of people consuming things they never would've bought on their own it deserves to burn. This mentality is killing us along with the planet.

I really want to see a society wide experiment on banning ALL forms of advertising, be it digital or physical.

What happens when a Chinese knockoff Google comes along and captures the online ad market? Now you've created a new version of the same problem without any leverage.

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