I wish the “Dark Web” hadn’t turned into shit show, Just looking into it now gets you onto some fuckin watch list but it would have been a perfectly viable place to set up a proper censorship-free web. It also takes care of the user-quality issue by being slightly harder to use than a button that says “INSTALL APP NOW!”
I don’t care if I have to see unobtrusive ads (not overlays, not popups, not unskippable videos) ads help keep many web services free, sometimes I even find it helpful when ads are relevant to my recent searches or the page I am looking at. But having companies build up profiles about me and then share that between themselves is bullshit, that kind of behavior would be treated as stalking if done by an individual, why is it ok for a business?
I don’t know the standard but if Google is involved you know they are going to be pushing people to use their own ‘extensions’ of the standard to lock both the hosts and users into their ecosystem. It’s the same thing as Microsoft’s ActiveX making sites IE only in the early 2000s.