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Comment by ddxv | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular take I know. But ads are a source of revenue for much of the free and open internet. The alternatives are paid features that are a regressive tax on poorer people who can't afford them or fork up larger amounts of their discretionary budget.

While popups and bad ad practices have always been a problem, it's sad to see that they became so bad that the response to them is to paygate web content. More and more sites are locked behind paywalls.

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Ads create a terribly perverse incentive to increase users viewing time on platforms. It's the whole reason most of the internet has become so horrible. My email provider doesn't try to drive up my engagement because they have no incentive for me to use the product more than I naturally want to. I'd also be willing to bet that the current ad funded system ends up costing the average person more than just paying for services when they get influenced to buy the things in the ads. That's the whole point of advertising after all.

We have already long since had a solution for low income people getting access to paid content, libraries provided access to paid books and newspapers for free. People with higher income would still buy copies themselves for convenience but there was a free option. We also have public funded news orgs providing ad free news and reporting.

Next you'll tell me that doing something at cost as a public service is somehow better than getting the same thing but with a 20% margin tacked on for the shareholders.

The hard part is that when you have a few companies competing to do something, they very quickly start doing it for less money than government does because they innovate to compete with each other. You can take a snapshot in time and pretend cutting 20% off the top is worth it, but by the time you do the political organization you've usually lost the plot. Plus all of the mechanics of taxation and bureaucracy are usually more expensive…

That can be true in some cases, for sure. For example we probably don't want government-run fast food or government-run rental cars because of that "race to the bottom" you're citing. But there are also things where that 20% margin actually makes it more expensive. Managing utility poles and electrical infrastructure is a pretty good example. There's a strong public interest in having poles and electrical wiring in every house, and so a government monopoly is probably good. You're not going to have more than one electrical system in an area, and if you did it would substantially increase cost of delivery. Roads are another good example -- you're not going to find yourself in possession of more than one driveway to your house and pay differing prices for different driveways. You could also argue that things like healthcare, education, and maintenance of shared public spaces is also something we should probably do through government because consolidated physical infrastructure allows us to substantially reduce the cost to the taxpayer versus what they will pay out of pocket when these things are privatized, and you can experience those costs when you use for-profit public spaces like indoor play parks and such. And then the elimination of that profit motive absolutely does reduce costs even further. There are examples of this you can look at where IE emergency services are privatized and they immediately get more expensive for everyone and with less actual service provided.

I think it will greatly benefit politics in the US to stop looking at this tension between government services and private services as all or nothing and start thinking about what is most beneficial to the public economically.

The free option with libraries was somewhat limited because libraries rarely had more than a small number of copies of a given book or newspaper.

Saying people with higher income bought for convenience is understating the situation. If you needed timely access to books or newspapers that were in high demand you often had to buy out of necessity.

I'm not sure how a similar thing would work the internet. How do you limit the number of people that can use the free version? If you don't the people who could pay largely won't.

The only idea I've heard that might work is to just make it free for everyone, but put a tax on something that correlates somewhat with use, and divvy up that tax to the sites based on their traffic.

That then raises questions like what to tax and how to divvy it up since simply dividing it proportionally to traffic probably would not work well (Richard Stallman has suggesed such a system, with the split based on the cube root of popularity).

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