The user base panorama – 1.5:80 billion – can change very quickly. The simple announcement of a credible competitor to Google would be cause for celebration. As a plus, we have a new search engine “paradigm”. We may also see the emergence of paid search services, which would be a big step towards ending the attention/surveillance economy.
As moves by Netflix and most other streaming services indicate, ads and the surveillance-tech underpinning them are never going away.
You can pay and still be the product. Paying for ad-free Netflix doesn't exclude your account from telemetry collection or from stitching together other non-Netflix behavioural data that can be freely collected from data brokers.
