> ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it.

They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it

If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw at them

Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost) but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's do that through taxes please

If a company is willing to spend $5 to force you to watch an advert, then they are expecting more than $5 from you in return.

Probably not too popular of an opinion on HN but email in my opinion would be a great example of a service that could be run by the government. Just like postal service (at least in some parts of the world)

Then we'd be living in a world that didn't require you to have an email in order to do anything like have a job or a social life, which is probably a good thing

Maybe. Or maybe we could fund those services from all the money we'd save without advertising.

Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.

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