[pmoriarty]

"Even regular sites used to be full of punch the monkey ads, popups and pop-unders."

Commercial sites were. But there was a time before corporations started treating the internet like the Gold Rush. Before that the internet was actually not full of ads, much less all the spyware the likes of Google and Facebook brought.

But Google and Facebook are just two big worms in an internet that's been rotten by corporate influence.

[Clewza313]

That time largely predates Google though? Google was founded in 1998, and the first monkey punch ad was 1999.

[pmoriarty]

True. The internet was already ad-infested by the time Google came around. AltaVista, which was the dominant search engine before Google overthrew them was full of ads, and (ironically) Google's value proposition at the time was that it was ad-free and a lot faster than AltaVista (which was slowed down by all their ads).

How times have changed.