Why I Work on Ads

That's absurd. People need groceries. If the National Enquirer went to a paid subscription model or disappeared entirely nobody would riot.

Ads are fine. I don't like them, but they are fine. Targeted ads are fine too. I don't like them either, but they are fine.

The privacy invading tactics used to drive those targeted ads are not fine. They are abusive, manipulative, and covert. I am not in Europe, so perhaps I'm bias, but I also don't see regulation of the data collection industry via the GDPR as improving the situation much. It seems to have just moved the goal posts for being more manipulative to gain permission. From my totally outsider point-of-view it seems the only way to effectively limit this privacy-invading data collection is to regulate how the data can be used vs. the collection itself. Heavily regulating the ad targeting itself vs. the data collection would mean even if you did collect the data, it loses its value to the advertisers. This also allows more legitimate data collection such as error reporting to continue as-is without the burden of extra regulation.

Anyways, that is my point of view on it. I would be interested to hear other's opinions on it, perhaps from those in industry.

The lawyer's defense is that, in any decent justice system, people have a right to a legal council and are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Even if they have been declared guilty of a crime in the past they might be innocent of this one and still have a right to council.

People have been saying this for decades. I don’t see a way for this to happen that is both more convenient to users and not open to all manner of automated attacks that would be difficult if not impossible to track down.

Ad fraud is already a huge problem, as are things like ransomware. Micropayments would just give bad actors a direct line to your wallet.

> all more user hostile for my use cases

Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always transparently pay for this" feature, and any YouTube video of reasonable size that is worth watching is definitely worth spending the few seconds of time to assess and then click the "donate to get access" button.

What, you're saying that these things don't exist? Then that's a problem with currently available implementations of microtransactions, not the concept of microtransactions itself.

It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system.

> Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles?

That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem. Microtransactions/subscriptions are irrelevant - that price is so far above the actual cost of your Google searches that the equivalent in terms of the current model (you pay with your data) is that Google demands your SSN in order for you to search - and the results in both cases will be the same: users will use a different product.

Edit: Because this comment has gotten strawmanned in the same way repeatedly: I did not say that the ad-funded model should go away, nor do I believe that - my comment was purely a response to the idea that microtransactions are infeasible, and nobody carefully reading it would think otherwise.