Stephen Downes

Just over a year ago, Mozilla acquired Anonym, a privacy-preserving digital advertising company. Today they're filling out their vision a bit. It concerns me. They say "advertising literally funds the internet" but it's just not true. It funds the commercial content, sure, but the vast bulk of content is non-commercial - it consists of the blog posts, shared photos, email messages, discussion board posts and social media bits we exchange back and forth every day. And we pay for that - we buy our own computers, and pay for our own bandwidth. The claim is like saying 'advertisers pay for the highways' because they take advantage of them to put up billboards. Or that 'advertisers pay for sports' because advertising pollutes the pro version, as though we would never play sports otherwise. All I want from the internet is to not have to look at ads. I'm perfectly happy without commercial content, if that's what it takes (though of course we know we could have commercial content without advertising).