When you pay your water bill, you aren’t just paying for the upkeep of the pipes that brought the water to your house – you’re also paying for the production of that water. The internet should be no different.
Besides paying a fixed monthly cost to your ISP for the physical connection, there should be a tiny monetary amount – a fraction of a cent – attached to each HTTP request you make, that can go towards covering server costs. Currently sites have no choice but to pay for their upkeep with advertising. Replacing this with direct payments would drastically curtail the data broker and surveillance industry that currently lives off of it.
How server costs would be measured, and whether sites would be allowed to charge a premium on top of that (eliminating paywalls, but also making web browsing a much more price-weary activity) is up for debate.
But currently using the internet is like paying for a car, without paying road tax.
Fuck you. That sounds terrible.
Do you prefer paying for websites with your data?
Yes
Well actually my proposition would still let you do that. Except that instead of sites embedding ads into themselves, you’d get to pick where (and how) to watch the ads, and then you’d directly receive the money for it which you could then send to the sites.
No!
…Yes.
But it would create a perverse incentive to load websites/data, somehow. That would be grifter/spammer heaven.
Only if they actually made a profit off the requests. If the request prices were forced to be just the exact incurred server cost, this would be neutralized. I agree that calculating and enforcing that would be very hard though.
And you’re right, if they were allowed to make a profit, it would shift the incentive to minimize the number of HTTP requests from the web dev (where it lies today) to the website visitor,.
That’s not possible, but don’t throw good money after bad. The direction of your idea is sound
Hmm, I disagree with the analogy. Your ISP is like the toll you pay to use the highway… also it would have zero effect on real databrokers, why would they settle for ISP pennies when they have a billionaire industry?
why would they settle for ISP pennies when they have a billionaire industry?
Hmm, that’s true. I don’t know how to solve that bit tbh.
I think the analogy kibda breaks down there tbh. The water one works better, where your ISP runs the infrastructure (maintaining tbe pipes), and the websites are the water plants
You’re approaching something worth thinking about. You could say it’s like ordering something to be delivered to your house and then paying the tolls for the delivery truck. But importantly missing from your analysis is that the delivery truck also has to pay the tolls. It’s essentially a double-dipping situation.
From a data standpoint it’s also pretty bad. Your request to Netflix is a few hundred bytes. Their response is gigabytes.
Currently a TB of server bandwidth costs $3. A single ad to a thousand clicks pays more than that.
It isn’t costs that ads are paying but billions of dollars in profits.
The desire for more profit means that this solution will not eliminate ads or anything else currently available to generate even more profit
With the added detail that the extra information needing to be sent, would only make privacy erode faster
Oh I see, so you’re saying that server costs are small enough to be negligible, and the ads/data harvesting are there ti serve as an additional profit stream?
Yes. A site serving 10 million users can operate on 2 servers costing $10/month if one does careful engineering.
The biggest costs are usually the people. A UBI system would be a much more efficient solution and actually preserve privacy.
What you’re describing is not unlike Brave browser’s Basic Attention Token.
You’re essentially suggesting a tax on our consciousness. That’s… Rather Draconian.
