The Price of Free Google Report.
Proton analyzed over 54,000 demographic profiles using 2025 ad auction data to estimate what advertisers pay to reach different types of Americans. The range is much wider than you might expect.
The average American generates about $1,605 a year in advertising value. A 35- to 44-year-old man in Bozeman, MT, without children, using a desktop and making high-value corporate searches, generates an estimated $17,929.30. An 18- to 24-year-old father in Fort Smith, AR, using an Android phone and making low-value searches, generates $31.05.
That’s a 577x difference between two people using the same free service.
Data collection. One of the reasons the Nazis were so successful was because countries like Germany and the Netherlands kept excellent records on people. As soon as they got access to those records, they were easily able to identify people as undesirables and send them off to the camps.
Today, Google collects data like this on you, and then the US government buys it off them, bypassing constitutional privacy protections. This is the one of the ways ICE is targeting people. (Feel free to replace with your local equivalent.)
In order to prevent things like this happening, we should prohibit the collection of the data in the first place.
OK so it's done. All the data scraping is illegal.
Now all that money they are making either comes directly out of our pockets or you don't use it any more. A lot of countries now cannot afford the internet as a complete service.
The thing is though that people are selfish so this isn't going to happen.
And it worked just fine without those services, or the Internet at all, for thousands of years. I'm not sure if the Internet has been a net positive or negative for society yet.