Your favorite dating site, email service or messaging app might also ask you to pay for stuff you once got free. Paid subscriptions are nothing new, but increasingly they seem to be the future of everything. Google and Facebook have so thoroughly dominated the advertising systems that sponsor information and entertainment that subscriptions may be the only realistic alternative. Let me ask you to cast your mind back to the olden days. Lots of information and entertainment was free or less expensive because of advertising.

Source: New York Times March 09, 2021 18:11 UTC