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>This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all.

I don't buy this. My entire OS is free. Libre and as-in-beer. No ads. No telemetry. Much of it even requires nontrivial infrastructure to maintain - build farms, package servers - and nontrivial human maintenance. A perplexing economic mystery, by capitalist standards, and yet here we are. Are websites fundamentally different? I say no. In fact I've visited many labor-of-love websites with no ads. They tend to be the best ones, too.

An ad-free web would sink many business models, to be sure, but I can't say I can bring myself to care about that.



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