So some of the most critical public goods of our age, which are currently mostly ad-funded, like web search, video hosting, email hosting, smartphone navigation, etc. would become publicly funded? Great, I'd like to live in that world too. But this article says nothing about how to get there (actually it considers the demise of Google et al to be an argument in favor without even considering the fact that in the absence of advertising, Google's services would need to be either restricted to those who could afford them or taken over by the government).
Advertising certainly has plenty of negative externalities, but the positive externalities of the free ad-funded services I mentioned are absolutely mind-boggling. Try to imagine living without them (if you couldn't afford to pay for them yourself).
I'd claim services being ad-funded is not dissimilar from being funded by a JS crypto miner - which is to say while it does move money to that service, it's on net a waste of resources and average affordability would be better without it.
For instead of your ISP spending 20% of their resources advertising (because otherwise they'd lose market share to ISPs that are advertising), they could likely offer email hosting and basic web hosting without you paying any more than you do currently. Competition between companies should be directed towards productive ends (improving their product) else it just becomes a giant zero-sum game of resource wastage.
ISPs, at least in the US, already offer free email hosting.. they used to offer basic web hosting too, not sure if that's still the case.
Using those is worst idea ever. ISPs are all horrible, and the only good thing is you can switch to the other one. The last thing you want is to tie your email/website, something you can't easily change, to them.
1) Advertising is profitable for companies. Which means that you as a consumer ultimately pay the advertiser more than what they paid to advertise their product to you.
2) Wikipedia is not ad-driven, and remains as useful, if not more useful than any ad-driven competitor.
Advertising certainly has plenty of negative externalities, but the positive externalities of the free ad-funded services I mentioned are absolutely mind-boggling. Try to imagine living without them (if you couldn't afford to pay for them yourself).