The ladder is also pulled up behind any kind of independent quality content producers. You cant run a successful channel without dedicated paid subscribers, and you can't build a dedicated subscriber base without years of work and supplementing your income with ads, so basically everything with an online audience also dies.
> And we know that the world without online ads is perfectly possible and livable, since we all lived through 1996.
We're in an information crisis. Most people don't know what is true or false anymore. Google and Meta didn't make it better and in fact might have contributed to it. I'd say let's go back to 1996.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
That would be a staggering cut to everyone’s standard of living.
The wealth inequality in the past 30 years has dramatically shifted in favor of the ultra rich.
Technology has been used to create illegal monopolies -> too big to fail -> surely we can't / don't need to regulate this -> tech companies get away with murder and laugh all the way to the bank.
A company like Meta could finesse their algorythms to bias people against antitrust action and you would never know.
To repeat the talking point of tech companies that "technology has helped us, therefore we should not regulate it in any way" is to accept the premise of people that spend every waking hour of their day figuring out what they can get away with to screw you over.
Those too would be lost.
Sure some drag out three minutes into fifteen, but whatever…
Even that “curated” content is often the result of a company’s PR professionals sending free gear for review and possibly wining and dining the writers.