Given the absolutely ridiculous amount of content that is ad-funded, I very much disagree. All of my preferred youtubers and streamers would immediately be without livelihood. Same is probably true for a whole lot of news websites.

More Wikipedia, more paywalls, less free news sites, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

A tremendous amount of resources are wasted on adtech - bandwidth, latency, which ultimately are accounted for in non-renewable time. Just compare using hacker news on mobile to reddit. I have a newish iPhone and reddit is basically unusable. Plausibly it’s a net-neutral situation, the downsides balancing out the upsides.

Similar evaluations can be made in the gaming space, comparing paid, freemium, and advertising driven. It wasn’t until fairly recently that advertising was even a viable revenue source for game developers.

The larger question perhaps is who loses their audience when they can no longer buy targeted advertising? Hint: it’s not the giant brands who blast billions of dollar blindly on mass advertising campaigns and can purchase Super Bowl commercials.

Disclaimer, a significant proration of the money I’ve made in the past decade + was from digital advertising.

Lots of non-ad companies rely on advertising. You would probably kill every marketing department worldwide. You would probably throw a huge number of companies in the world into chaos as they try to figure out how to grow revenue. The world would probably enter a depression worse than the 1920s as revenues severely tank because companies are not allowed to advertise their business.

There's no reason to conflate "advertising" with "user-targeted advertising". There's nothing inherently privacy-breaking about advertising. A regular billboard doesn't track users, a print magazine ad doesn't track users and there's no reason internet advertisements absolutely need to track users.

In the short term I think many sites would die, but in the longer run we would see other forms of people trying influence other people to make them buy something or vote for something or believe in something.

I fear that we would see a huge wave of advertising in disguise and other not necessarily more transparent forms of indirect funding and influencing.

For instance, there would suddenly be a very big incentive for product companies to become media companies themselves to make the distinction between reporting, advertising and simply describing their own product go away.

I believe an advertising ban would have a very large number of unintended and undesirable consequences.

The vast majority of the content on the internet would disappear and the entire western world would likely be thrown into one of the worst economic recessions in history.

Probably less than 5% of the internet would work as is. If you give more time (like 10 years), the number would be more than that though.

$300B is no way negligible by any mean and businesses are tightly coupled so the impact will propagate across everywhere. For instance, almost every functional search engines are powered by advertisement in some way (even DDG); how would you use the internet without a search engine?