[pas]

commercial TV and radio stations were a very well established thing already by the 90s, the audience paid for their receiver and in exchange for the ads got to see movies and serialized shows.

similarly there were free magazines which were basically ad booklets with some minimal original content in between a ton of ads

... there were ISPs experimenting with the model, both for users and for hosting

free email boxes were the norm, with 5-10MB storage

...

and just as now there was also HBO and fancy cable stations and encrypted stations, and many people did pay for magazine subscriptions

...

the real problem is that a hypergiant is cross-financing the development of a browser

these cross-financing setups ought to be firewalled, the browser should be in a foundation

(of course we know that in practice these are not super useful, see eg. OpenAI, but ... in the end California regulations seem to have helped to keep OpenAI as a "non-profit")