An Internet without ads?

I remember the first time I logged onto the world wide web. It was back in 1994 in the college computer lab. A friend of mine had returned from the computer lab that week all excited about the world wide web, Internet Explorer, something called "Yahoo", and the Pearl Jam website.

At the time, my total experience with the Internet had been using the Pine email... um, software. I hesitate to call it software since it was basically a command line program: the screen was black and the text was green, a la The Matrix. I was no Neo; checking Pine for email from my three friends who were using email required at least 15 minutes of fumbling clumsily through botched commands and login attempts.

Oh, and I should mention that I was "MUDding". MUDding was the ultimate nerd activity. It was black-screen/green-text Dungeons & Dragons without any extraneous or potentially embarassing face-to-face human interaction. It was also terribly boring after about two weeks.

So I went to the computer lab after dinner one night with hype in my head and very low expectations. I sat down at a terminal, much as I do today when I'm forced to use a Mac, and stared at the screen, not knowing what to do. I opened up the command line and typed "internet". Then "world wide web". Then "yahoo" and "pearl jam". Naturally, a lot of cryptic error messages. How was I supposed to know to double-click on the big, blue, lowercase "e" on the desktop?

I finally tried the "e". It opened and there was Yahoo.com, not terribly different from today's Yahoo portal. And there, greeting me with epileptic glory, were animated gifs (Flash not yet having been invented).

That same friend introduced me to Google.com in '99 or '00.

Since that time, as we all know, the web has been slowly but surely taking over the desktop computer. And the desktop computer is slowly but surely replacing traditional office hardware, like fax machines and phones. With a web browser and broadband internet connection, you can check email, write a novel, create a spreadsheet, design a presentation, touch up photos, assemble a video, phone a friend--all without paying a single penny.

How? The web today, as it was in 1994, is ad-supported. There are two types of ads:

1. epileptic seizure inducers: static images, animated gifs, Flash videos, etc.
2. text-based ads: ads that appear to the right of a Google search, for example

But the web is not supported only by image and text advertising. Many "web 2.0" services sell the information they glean about you as you use the web. How your information is used is nearly always explained, not always with clarity, in the web service's "terms of service" statement.

Using extensible web browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera, it is now possible to block image-based ads. Here's how:

• use Adblock to block ads in Firefox
• prevent ads from appearing in Google Chrome
• remove ads in Safari
• create your own list of ads to block
• stop ads in YouTube
  

And--blow my mind--now you don't even have to hack your browser to block ads! You can now hack your router so that it blocks ads before they even get to your browser. Note that Lifehacker, an ad-supported blog, brought all these techniques to light for their tens of thousands of daily readers. Lifehacker's editors nearly beg their readers not to block ads hosted on Lifehacker.com.

Something like 75% of internet users are still using Internet Explorer, which to my knowledge, doesn't yet have any easy, browser-based ways to block ads. Given the drubbing Microsoft's taken from the web 2.0 movement, I imagine it's only a matter of time before Redmond opens up IE to add-ons, a la Firefox. (Google plans to do this with Chrome soon, too.)

This leaves the Internet with 25% of its users able to block ads on the web. And why wouldn't users block image advertising? It can be pretty obnoxious and really slow down the web-surfing experience. If trends continue and more people move to Firefox and Chrome, the web business model might be in serious danger. What happens then?

A few ideas (updating with new ideas as they occur to me):

• Text-based search advertising becomes the only viable revenue generation model on the web, Google totally dominates.
  
• Online privacy becomes impossible as web 2.0 companies demand more information in exchange for their free, non-ad-supported services.
  
• The web divides into classes. Stone age Americans, poor saps, are left sucking advertising while savvy users enjoy an ad-free web.
• Image ads fade away. Congress legislates against more intrusive privacy policies. Still without any source of revenue, Web 2.0 sites crumble. Broadband fees rise to offset the lack of ad revenue, much like the early days of cable TV.
  

What might an ad-free web look like?