zlacker

That's not going to work for plenty of services. Most people (if not everyone) are not going to pay for search, social network, instant messaging, maps, mail etc.

>>rafi_k+(OP)
Why would they not? If someone wants to be able to use a social network, do you really think they wouldn't pay $5/month for something they use as much if not more than Netflix? You can't do it now because other services can undercut you and rely on advertising but there is no reason it couldn't be the standard.

>>rafi_k+(OP)
That seems like quite a big assumption. Younger generations today think nothing of spending $xx/month on their phone/data plans and another $x/month on each of Netflix/Spotify/etc. It's not hard to imagine the same people paying real money for social networking sites they value. Search could obviously still do advertising even without any personal data mining, since it knows exactly what you're interested in at that particular moment. Useful informational sites could run ads without the privacy invasion and tracking as well, since they also are aimed at specific target audiences. Plenty more sites would continue to run without a (direct) goal of revenue generation anyway; I see no ads on the free-to-use discussion forum that we're all reading right now.

This idea that the only viable business model on the web is spyware-backed advertising is baloney, and it always has been. There is little reason to assume the Web is a better place because the likes of Google and Facebook have led us down this path, nor that anything of value would be lost if they were prohibited from continuing in the same way.