[teekert]

Adds are annoying yes, but they are only bad for your privacy if they track and profile you. Adds allow for free stuff and they can be done the right way. Granted this is becoming more and more rare so I understand your standard association of adds with distrust. The adds you refer to are non tracking (please tell me if I'm wrong though) and will slowly be replaced by sites you visit (often).

[chriswarbo]

> Adds[sic] allow for free stuff

The opposite is true: ads must be paid for, which makes products and services more expensive.

Ads are a convoluted, inefficient form of wealth redistribution; whether that's "good" or "bad" depends on the specific circumstances.

For example, we might (simplistically) say it's "good" when we receive something paid for by ad revenue, but the burden of paying for (e.g. by price increases) and being subjected to those ads is carried by others. For example, if we tune in to a radio station, listen to a song, and tune out before some ad for a product we don't use.

We could say it's "bad" when the opposite happens, for example if we pay higher fees for shopping on Amazon, which then get spent on advertising Prime Video which we don't use.

[Karunamon]

Ads abuse the user's time, attention, and privacy. Minus the tracking, that's still two factors of abuse rather than three.

[teekert]

How do they abuse your privacy without tracking? Of course if they didn't abuse your time and attention they wouldn't make sense. But someone has to be paying Firefox's development, and it is not you. I'll take that last part back if you contribute to Mozilla. Hey, maybe it's an idea for a donation: make a 5$ Firefox without adds. I'd pay. To bad part goes to Google that way.

[makecheck]

The irony is that people pay, just not to the right place. Every unnecessarily-bloated download tears through data plans and costs people money to their ISP that never makes it to the provider.

I want plain-text ads that provide just as much revenue to web sites but without obnoxious experiences and fat downloads.

[palunon]

> Every unnecessarily-bloated download tears through data plans and costs people money to their ISP

Only in third internet world countries like the US... Elsewhere, we don't have limited data plans.

[Karunamon]

This is going to put me in weird company but I really don't see why metered billing is such a terrible thing. Most other utilities are pay-for-amount-used. And as a bonus, this creates an incentive for developers (via customer pressure) to not use insane amounts of data.

[franga2000]

It is because data, unlike water or electricity, isn't a finite resource. Your electricity bill includes the generation in the power plant and the transmission over the power lines. When it comes to Internet access, you're paying for the transmission (bandwidth), but there isn't a "packet generation plant" that you should have to pay for.

Also, data caps mean people will use less data, meaning using less bandwidth, meaning ISPs will have less of an incentive to upgrade their already ancient infrastructure. It would be giving them more money to use less of what they provide.

[QAPereo]

I don’t mind ads... uMatrix and uBlock Origin take care of that noise for me.