The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:
Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.
Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.
It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?
And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.
This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…
I mean… what’s wrong with stuff like the Fediverse just gradually strangling the commercially-driven internet? I pay a couple bucks a month to a number of different Fediverse providers and if everyone does that, they’ll likely be able to stay self-sufficient and community-oriented. I honestly don’t mind paying websites directly in that fashion as long as my data is portable and not for sale, whereas I know that if I let most commercial websites have my data, they will sell it to whomever and however many times they are capable of, all while enshitifying the user experience on their website as much as possible without making everyone leave completely.
It’s the most frustrating business model possible and why I refuse to give them any more traction than they already have.
The problem with donation driven Internet is that it lives on the whims of a few and weaker willed developers and content creators start trying to pander to whoever is paying them.