Companies did just fine selling products with non-personalized targeted ads that were intended for a wider audience before there was an internet. None of this tracking is actually needed in order to sell ads or make a profit.
People also were able to communicate before there was an internet. None of this internet is needed to allow people to communicate.
Personalized ads are as big of a breakthrough for the ads industry as internet is for people's communication. Both also come with legit downsides, but saying it's not needed is naive, at best.
Ads with tracking, like it or not, are extremely beneficial to almost every single business, especially small ones who don't have that much money to spend on advertising.
And placement based ads are disappearing for a good reason - they just aren't that effective, except for specific niches.
Look, I understand that there's a lot (like a loooot) of reasons not to like ads and tracking. But let's get the facts straight about what they bring.
Personalised & tracking ads are beneficial firms because they extract more revenue from consumers. That means it makes consumers poorer by diverting a larger fraction of their disposable income.
As such, I couldn’t care less whether personalised ads are beneficial to big or large firms and help their bottom line. These laws are (rightly, IMHO) targeted at protecting consumers and so I’m glad they’ve been passed and are being enforced.
This is only true in the most naive sense. Through added efficiency we generate additional money. The information industry today and everyone that uses part of it was enabled through that added efficiency/money. Companies paying doctor money for programmers is not an accident. It's a consequence.
Sure, you can do ads without tracking like in the old days. You can also also do some amount of cancer treatment without chemo, or get old without any system of elderly care. It was "just fine" for hundreds or thousands of years. Parts of it might even look enticing. But if you cut out chemo, be prepared to die "naturally" younger, and if you cut out elderly care, be prepared, at the very least, to debilitate a generation of women, who will not participate in the workforce.
You can simply not expect the internet to get rid of just ad tracking, the additional money it provides and have everything else stay the same. A lot of silly things are being done with the money, things that nobody will miss, but if you expect only the bad things to go consolidate and all the fun and good parts to remain when ad efficiency and revenue goes down, I don't know what to tell you.
