There is no going back, we are now talking about a 90% mobile network, that is used by some people every two minutes. This is not even comparable to the network we had. If we switch to a non digital ad world, it will be a net with different classes of citizens. I‘ll gladly pay for my 30 subscriptions but a whole global class of people will not be able to.
If the web went back to what it was 20 years ago that would be economically catastrophic, I mean if it happened like nearly instantly, if it happened over a space of 10-15 years OK.
In the context of the quote, let’s ignore non-ad based stuff, like amazon’s shipping network, and online banking.
In what way would resetting the ad based parts 20 years be catastrophic?
Were RSS and semi-curated news portals like yahoo and google news that much worse for publishers? (I thought they were actually better, economically, than FB...)