Most of what we use online feels free. Search engines, maps, email, video. All the things we reach for without thinking. They’re not really free of course. They’re funded by advertising and by siphoning off our attention and our data. You already know the line: if you’re not paying, you’re the product.
But what if that model never existed. What if every service had a price tag. No ads, no data harvesting, no “free tier”. Would you pay for YouTube. Would you pay for it and Spotify and cloud storage and messaging apps. At some point you’d run out of money and you’d have to choose.
That constraint would make the internet look very different. Instead of sprawling mega platforms where you can dip in and out of anything, we’d have something smaller. Each person would curate their own internet, not in the Pinterest sense, but literally choosing what they could afford. There’s a freedom in that. You’d cut away the noise. You’d keep the things that mattered and let the rest go. Privacy would come by default, because there’d be no incentive to harvest anything. But the tradeoff is obvious too. A lot of what we take for granted simply wouldn’t exist.
It’s tempting to paint this as a neat moral upgrade, but it’s not that simple. There’s an ugly side to the system we actually have. Ad-supported services look egalitarian on the surface. Everyone gets access, no one has to pay. But look harder. What they really say is this: if you can’t afford money, we’ll take your data instead. Poorer people are coerced into handing over privacy and attention just to participate in basic digital life. Richer people can pay for premium tiers, or run ad blockers, or avoid the worst of it. The inequality is hidden but it’s there all the same. One model locks you out because you can’t pay. The other lets you in but makes you pay in a currency you can’t escape. Neither is clean. One is exclusion by money. The other is exploitation by stealth.
It makes you wonder what we’ve really built. The ad-funded internet is a mall. Bright, loud, endless, every corridor plastered with sales pitches. You’re welcome to wander, as long as you let yourself be tracked and nudged. A user pays internet would be more like a library. Smaller, quieter, not everything on the shelf, but the parts you pick are yours. One culture grows on distraction and addiction. The other on deliberation and loyalty.
And yes, a lot of the abundance we see today is false abundance. Billions of hours of video, endless feeds of recycled junk, whole industries built on getting you to click one more time. It only exists because someone else is footing the bill and hoping you’ll look at the right ad along the way. If every service had to be funded directly, most of it wouldn’t exist. We might lose a little good with the bad, but probably less than we think.
This is the same kind of tradeoff people argue about with money. Hard limits versus endless printing. Constraint versus growth. Keep the constraint and growth slows but stays honest. Remove it and the whole thing scales into something unnatural, with hidden costs nobody voted for. The internet is no different.
And still, it isn’t just one or the other. Pay or be used. Out there in the cracks, something else grows. Wikipedia scraping by on donations. Open source projects maintained in spare hours. Public libraries digitising their archives. People still giving away knowledge and code because they want to, not because it makes sense on a spreadsheet. If the internet became nothing but subscriptions and advertising, that fragile layer might not survive.
So maybe the real question isn’t which model is better. Maybe it’s this: what does your essential internet look like?