Your bank, school, doctor, and government would all still have websites. Companies would still sell things online. Video calls and chat systems would be there. All the websites run by donation or self-funding would be unchanged. Without ads, the worst parts of the internet might stop existing though.

Uh? No?

The internet existed before being overrun by corporate presence. It still does. Advertising pays a lot, but take the ad money away and let it scale accordingly.

It's like free software. When it exists you can use it. When it doesn't exist you can't demand anyone to make it exist. And yet we still have free software. Not as much any more though as a lot of it changed to open source.

Ha! I am under no illusion it is coming back. But even though it flows like the unstoppable tides, ad money is not a requirement.