A 100 years from now, someone is going to write an article about the insanity of today's advertising models that is going to be immediately obvious to anyone from that era, while we, much like the feudal vassals, are unable to see it, having experienced no alternative.
When it's even available. But then they start cranking the ratchet, increasing the no-ad price and introducing a with-ads tier at the old no-ad price, or cutting quality, or cutting corners on customer service and security, etc etc. We've seen this play out many many times and it's a fundamental outcome in even the most basic econ 101 models: an oligopoly with high switching costs is more profitable for suppliers than a free market, made all the moreso by tacit collusion. An unregulated free market is essentially doomed to fail whenever an opportunity to establish such an oligopoly arises.
In extreme cases it does start to look like a protection racket, especially when important services like broadband Internet are involved.
The internet is today's TV. Did you complain so much about TV ads back in the day too?
(Surveillance is a different thing, and no, advertising isn't the main driver for surveillance. State actors are, and ad tech is just piggybacking on what state actors want to do anyways.)
An American visiting the Netherlands in the 80's was watching TV and asked if we purchased the (American) movie because of a lack of advertisements. When he learned it was just TV he was furious. It had never occurred to him that it wasn't necessary to constantly interrupt movies.
To be fair when that was the case (before the Internet with ads) many people were not older than 18yo, so of course they wouldn't be complaining about stuff like that.
But yes, I hated adverts with passion as a child too. I didn't complain about the industry as a whole, I just hated their existence.
