dvdnet62Mozilla Welcomes Anonym: Privacy Preserving Digital Advertising
Unskilled5117While there are a lot of critics of this, ask yourself: for how many services and apps you use (e.g. messenger, cloud storage, email, operating system…) are you willing to pay recurrently? If that answer is not for every single one of them, then this move is the answer. The internet desperately needs a way to fund things and advertising seems to be the only viable solution on a bigger scale. And I don’t think that there is anyone better suited than mozilla for the job of pushing a privacy respecting way of doing so. Sure this needs to be done the right way, but they should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Even if the answer to the question above was yes, consider the masses. Other people might not care enough/have the same awareness about privacy to pay, but they could gain a lot with this. Consider people in less fortunate circumstances monetary wise. Don’t they deserve privacy if they can’t afford to pay for services?
It is a bullshit false dichotomy to claim that the only options for business models are charging fees or showing ads. Knock it off with the misinformation.
What are your other suggestions besides ads and subscriptions, professor?
Go ask Wikipedia about their business model. Or the Linux kernel. Or any number of other Free Software projects that neither charge users a fee nor show ads.
Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated group of people donate their time and energy to run.
Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) OSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they’re still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of OSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.
These are not businesses.
Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.
…and? That’s what makes them the best part of the Internet!
For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.
And it doesn’t stop them from existing, proving that the Internet does not actually have to run on profit.
Yes, we could have an internet without businesses. See my initial comment you replied to that you somehow seem to disagree with while also fully agreeing with.