The opening no one is seeing

Truth is, I have no idea if anyone else sees it as an opening but in my opinion, a nimble, honest entrepreneur can own the internet much like Amazon, Google, and Facebook currently do.

And the best part? These companies will actually shovel users and customers your way if you happen to be that nimble, honest entrepreneur.

You see, the Internet is actually built on a terribly broken business model. It is underwritten by ads.

As such, ads have their place in society. I have come around to the belief that ads are a component in the answer to the "discovery problem" - where finding stuff you want, be it answers on StackOverflow to how much Kim Kardashian is worth, is exceedingly hard.

People have come to hate ads though they also understand that if a majority of users refused to consume ads, the internet would stop working.

The easiest trick to block ads is through an ad-blocker on your browser. Of course, ads will still creep in through apps and on video. A more robust firewall against ads is a product called pi-hole. It is your personal DNS server which, when it sees your browser requesting data from a blacklist of ad servers, returns null data. By itself, ad-blockers and pi-hole are not big enough to consume the Internet.

For that, we need to look at a common complaint people have about the internet - about how much of a time suck and a distraction it can be. This is a far more common affliction that even the most technologically challenged can recognize.

This is the opening that no one is seeing. If you can provide a trustworthy, honest ad-block service which also prevents users from wasting time on the internet, you can quite literally own the first mile of the internet - namely the pipe leaving the user's computer to the DNS server.

Here is where you can provide value added services like tracking how much the user spends on Reddit vs the time spent on StackOverflow or reading scientific abstracts.

Users will kill to take back control of their time. If you can provide them the tools for it, they will handsomely reward you.