Because solving that problem is like solving for global warming: at the end of the day (and conversation), the world uses a few gazillion tons of oil and other "bad" resources for Stuff™... which is depended on by a multi-level deep, exponentially large pile of even more Stuff™, and

- humanity is really, really, terribly bad at the kind of large-scale practical cohesion needed to actually go "okay we fix" and actually follow through, for as many dimensions as have developed over the past 100 years

- the only collective impetus that would scale to this sort of challenge would basically amount to a cult-following phenomena (see also: world history full of inexplicable mass deaths and rituals and whatnot that make no sense, and also generally suboptimal religious practices, as a result of cults).

IMO, humanity's ability to keep up with itself and chip/computer complexity kind of dovetail a bit: things were pretty hazy (ahem, okay, academic) in the 40s-50s, academic/industrial in the 60s-70s, reached a peak of industrial design/practicality around the 80s-90s, and basically "exploded in complexity" from the 90s on. Except things didn't really explode in complexity, they just exceeded our ability to "think small" and execute at the same time.

Looking at the Web, I remember reading an article recently that talked about how the Web standards (HTML5 (incl. video/image format support, network I/O, etc), JS (incl. "web stdlib"), CSS (incl. animation), SVG (incl. kitchen sink), etc etc (incl. etc)) are basically tens of thousands of pages long in total, and exceed the complexity of every other protocol, technical standard, file format, architecture specification, etc - in the world, possibly combined. The article made a point of comparison with the 3G cellular protocol being much simpler than the current Web.

And this is being paid for by... advertising.

Chrome is basically a technology that has the "implementation commitment", if you will (it's massive, it has the R&D pedal to the floor, it's constantly refactoring, it continuously pays out massive bug bounties, etc) of something too big to fail...

...all the while it's funded by, IMHO, what amounts to a really big tech bubble.

It's like, how will it crash? Something has never gotten this big before... and something has never gotten this big without anyone realizing, in particular. Chrome is just like, yeah, duh, it replaced the telephone ("my telephone exists to run Chrome"). It's a standard utility. Of course it isn't going anywhere.

Will it somehow become like a broken telephone pole held up by the wires it's supposed to be supporting (https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3umd5d/buddy_of_mine_..., https://igorpodgorny.livejournal.com/177105.html)? Will we all end up going back to proprietary clients a la AOL and CompuServe? Will the massive 100-to-0 in infosec investment suddenly mean hacks go through the roof 100x?

It probably won't be the end of the world, since the Web is basically just a re-API-ification of desktop OSes, and apps on mobile OSes have enough traction to be a viable escape.

But for now, the entire Web is funded by, basically, hot air. I do wonder if that's part of the reason behind so many JavaScript frameworks - that awareness of existential impermanence, and much subtler sense of unsustainability.

IMHO, buying/using reusable shopping bags, or only using bamboo or metal straws, or buying a zero-emissions car, have much the same amount of impact as deliberately watching ads.

There is absolutely no action you can take, including paying for services, that will match the trillion-dollar advertising industry.

Nothing at all, not even if you were to become a billionaire. That is the problem of advertising.

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Consider the above a sort of "what if" / "is this right? how close is this?" / thought experiment, presented as though it were fact. (I tend to pose ideas to myself in this style, which I think is probably fairly common, but given the "people writing as though they're right on the internet" thing it seems useful to add something like this.)