I’m a FOSS (free and open source software) contributor and enthusiast. So I prefer to use such products (Lemmy instead of Reddit, Linux instead of Windows, Firefox instead of Chrome, Signal instead of WhatsApp, you get the idea). Was just thinking that if everyone moved to such solutions, the tech and ad industry would lose billions of dollars. That would translate to governments losing billions of dollars in tax revenue. Would such a move ever be encouraged then by the governments?
Depends on what you mean by “tech industry”. If FOSS projects are outside the realm of “tech industry”, then yes. The users and money would just go to FOSS instead of large well known companies, but the money would still go somewhere and development would happen somewhere.
Think of it this way. Billions of people use Windows. The OS itself is not free, and despite that it is ridiculed with trackers and adware for more profits. Operating system is a multi billion dollar industry. If everyone started using a free OS tomorrow that doesn’t even have ads, the OS industry just lost everything. Sure the dev cost for linux distros would rise because of new users but that’s it. For companies like MS, dev cost would only be a fraction of what they reap yearly, so that profit will get wiped out because people don’t pay for it anymore, not even with their data.
Another example is of Uber. Uber is another multi billion dollar company. Uber takes 30-50% commission on each ride. If everyone started using a FOSS alternative that just charged say 5% commission to just cover the dev and infra cost and reap no profits beyond that, the ride hailing industry just lost billions.