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a) Advertising is socially neutral or good,
b) Internet content provision on the internet is therefore best funded by selling eyeballs to advertisers,
c) Most people just want to consume content the way they used to consume TV or movies, and it's socially acceptable to orient the internet around this model (call it the broadcasting fallacy),
d) We can be trusted; it's Big Government/Big Corporations/Foreign Governments/Weird Religious Nutters/Those crazy guys with the opposite politics to me who can't be trusted.
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Reality check:
a) All advertising tends towards the state of spam (which is merely free-as-in-dirt-cheap-and-unregulated advertising),
b) Funding content via ad sales holds our public arts hostage to a boom/bust bubble economy. Furthermore, there is an incentive for web publishers to prioritize paid ads over editorial content, and to censor editorial content that threatens advertizing revenue,
c) The idea that "most people only want to consume" is profoundly offensive and serves the interests of abusive "producers" who tend towards rent-seeking (see the MPAA for a worked example—most notably in how they run the film classification system in the USA),
d) Nobody can be trusted. (See also when Google turned evil.)
"And that’s a big part of why I’m not an economist. And I think it’s a really helpful scope condition – in cases where it makes the most sense to think of an individual (or, importantly, a firm) as a unified actor with stable preferences, economics has a lot of insight. But I think it can also lead to either frustration (why are these people so irrational?!) or prescriptive rather than descriptive findings (here’s how they should be rational!). In other words, economists, and economic thought, try to make the world more like the one they assume it to be by helping individuals be true to themselves, and by ignoring how much individuals usually aren’t. "
"But in this context, the vacuum is not an “unrealistic assumption” but an abstraction that eliminates a known condition, air resistance. It is not a feature grafted on to make a construct tidy, but the stripping away of an environmental element to see if getting rid of it exposes an underlying, durable pattern. This procedure is in keeping with how mathematics as a discipline evolved, through the successive whittling away of extraneous elements.
But in economics, core and oft-used assumptions necessary to make many theories work, such as “everyone has perfect information,” are unrealistic not in the sense of stripping out real-world aspects that are noisy, but in adding properties that are not observed or even well-approximated in reality. Yet they are deemed valid and those who protest are referred to Friedman. "
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