We all act like we want to live in a world with no ads, but can you actually bear the real cost?

The internet as you know it only exists because someone is paying for your attention. If something is getting propagated, someone is willing to pay their own money to showcase that. Every free product you use, every search you run, every reel you scroll through exists because advertisers subsidize your access with cold hard cash.

Roughly 75% of Google's total revenue comes only from ads. Same story with Meta, X, and most news sites. The free internet is not free. You pay for it with your time and your data. But deep down we know that everything in the world has a cost, sometimes you gotta be happy that it’s just money.

If Google and Meta went subscription-only tomorrow, what would you personally pay monthly? Fifty dollars? A hundred? Most people would not pay a single penny. That gap between perceived value and actual infrastructure cost is the ad subsidy.

It is the greatest value transfer in human history, and nobody acknowledges it.

Now AI is about to break this entire model.

A classic Google search costs roughly $0.0003 to$0.001 per query. A ChatGPT-class AI search costs $0.003 to$0.01 per query. That is a 5 to 15 times multiplier in compute costs. At those economics, ad-supported AI search is mathematically impossible at scale.

AI companies are stuck with limited options. They can eat massive losses like OpenAI. They can charge subscriptions and cut out 95% of users like Anthropic. They can degrade model quality to reduce costs, which every company is quietly doing. Or someone invents a new business model, which is highly unlikely.

There is no scenario where AI remains free and good.

The internet is heading toward one of three futures.

The first is subscription internet. The top 5 to 10% pay for access, everyone else gets locked out. A digital class system, which is worse than discrimination.

The second is degraded AI. Free AI is deliberately crippled to force ad exposure or upsells. Think Spotify ad-tier but worse.

The third is a new extraction model. AI companies find a way to monetize that we have not imagined yet. Behavioral data from AI conversations is potentially 100 times more valuable than search data. They will sell insights, not ads.

But we think the winning model will not be any of these cleanly. It will be a hybrid that nobody has articulated yet because we are still thinking in old paradigms of ads, subscriptions, and data sales.

Meanwhile, browsers are becoming the new walled gardens. Chrome's Privacy Sandbox is not about privacy. It is about Google controlling the ad infrastructure at the protocol level. Dia and Safari are doing the same. The browser wars were never about market share. They were always about vertical integration of the ad stack down to the transport layer.

The actual breakthrough will come when someone realizes that AI does not monetize attention, transactions, or data. AI monetizes decisions.

And that is where all the problems start. Once you start monetizing decisions, AI becomes the closest thing to a propaganda machine that humans have ever built. It can influence choices however it wants and the few people holding the keys will be responsible for how the entire human race behaves.

Most people demanding free AI do not realize they are demanding their own digital alienation. The ad-supported internet was a flawed bargain, but at least the transaction was visible. You saw the ads. You knew the deal. But AI that monetizes decisions operates in the dark. And that is a bargain none of us signed up for.

Free internet sold your attention and now free AI will sell your agency — tell us if we are wrong.

A thought by Shashank & Hameed