[hagbardgroup]

This is pretty close to ad fraud.

However, I agree with you that display ad networks suck. I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free. The happy medium is to have users pay for content, making it so advertisers don't need to track users to verify that they're real humans, and improving the web for everyone except poor people.

One way that this could be done is to use bitcoin for tiny micropayments, billed frictionlessly. Rough for legal reasons among others, but ideas like this are sensible if only for human verification reasons.

If you want the web to largely free content, to pay for that you must accept privacy-destroying ad networks to bear that cost. We've created a situation where the choice is to free ride on other people, or to surrender privacy.

If you want the web to be largely teasers for paid content, then you can have significantly more privacy also. Instead of the articles being articles, you will get articles that are actually big ads for paid content (already the case for a huge number of popular search results).

Spreading tools like these kills free content like snaps fingers loudly that. I'm indifferent. Users might not be.

[greyman]

> I'm also not sold on the idea that the web should be free.

I see it exactly the opposite way. The web IS free, it works that way (unless someone erect a paywall, which I find perfectly acceptable), and no entity is entitled that the web should "provide" it a profitable business avenue. If someone successfully exploited the web and created a business relying on ads, that's fine, but he don't have an implicit right for that. Internet users are not obliged to display data he provides through http the way the creator expects.

[hagbardgroup]

As in, should most web content be free if more and more people are declining to have display advertising render properly in their browser? It can't be at scale and consistently without a revenue engine of some kind.

>If someone successfully exploited the web and created a business relying on ads, that's fine, but he don't have an implicit right for that. Internet users are not obliged to display data he provides through http the way the creator expects.

No, they're not. As this trend continues, the assumption that underwrites a lot of free content will stop being nearly as true. When the assumption stops being accurate, that business model fails, and more free 'content' winds up being ads gussied up as content. This is not exactly what the visionaries of the web had in mind, but them's the breaks.

In print, there are free publications handed out on street corners and in boxes. They tend to have low ad rates because the distribution is unverifiable. On cable, ad rates are still super-high, because the distribution is verifiable, and the cable networks have all the data they need about you on your cable bill + viewership surveys to aggregate for sale to advertisers.

[pjc50]

Frictionless billing is harder than it sounds, because it opens the door to frictionless fraud. If I can automatically bill you for a thousanth of a dollar I can automatically do that hundreds of thousands of times. If it's with bitcoin I can obfuscate the destination of the money.

[hagbardgroup]

Agreed. Question is whether it's harder or easier than restricting traffic fraud, and if you can comply with know your customer laws and still protect privacy.