| > ads drive innovation because they make expensive services possible for the masses. The flaw is the assumption that this is not possible without them. Consider what happens in the alternative. The services would still exist, but they would charge a ridiculous amount of money, even more so because charging money means most people won't pay, but if only a minority of people are paying the prices have to be even higher. So then a hobbyist starts their own free one, and it's terrible, because it's the effort of one person on a weekend instead of a full-time staff. But free-as-in-beer. So everyone who can't afford the pay service uses that one instead. It ends up with many users, because it's free. And the users want it to be better, so they make improvements and submit patches, or donate money etc. You end up with Linux, BitTorrent, OpenStreetMap. Somebody tell me why you couldn't build a YouTube based on BitTorrent. You could, over time, if you could get people to use it while it's still terrible and therefore improve it. Which you could do if it was the free one when all the others cost money, but you can't do when the existing YouTube is better funded and proprietary yet still doesn't require the user to pay money to use. And then the dominant platforms become controlled by individual companies instead of being federated open standards, which suppresses innovation by creating a monoculture that only one entity has the ability to modify. |