The internet isn't free if you have to give up your privacy for invasive ads and tracking in order to read a recipe on a blog.

I pay a whopping 80 euro per month for my free and open internet to our ISP, one fiber and two mobile devices.

Straw-man. The grandparent is pointing out that services like Google, Instagram and YouTube would be behind paywalls without ads. There is no free internet without ads.

> There is no free internet without ads.

of course there is. Because there was. It existed. Eventually we got banner ads. It just got worse after that. People ran their own servers, so did companies. They paid to have their own content online for whatever reason they wished. And often you would get cut off, "so and so's website can only serve 200 requests a day, come back tomorrow." My server runs ad free for no other reason than I want it there with some of my content. Ads enabled a bigger internet and "content creators" who work full time growing the internet. The internet was just fine without these professional content creators.

So only rich people who can afford to run their own servers and have the technical knowledge to put one together should be allowed to share content?

You don't need to be rich or have any strong technical knowledge. Setting up and running your own website is cheap and easy, and even if you don't want to do that, there are plenty of others who provide fora to you.

people who didn't run servers shared stuff all the time (email, forums, etc). For it to be hosted, someone had to find it worthwhile and have the funds, yeah.

> There is no free internet without ads.

Nonsense. Of course there is. It may not include Google, IG, YouTube, etc., true, but that's very far from the entire internet.

And, notably, I pay money to YouTube.

It's not a straw-man, a question has been asked and answered.

I pay my ISP bill. Everyone else can take their problems with my "free" internet to them.

I think it's a stretch to call the larger web "free and open" at this point. But there was a day, before ads, that it certainly was!

Sounds like they'll have to figure out something else.