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.
that’s absolutely ridiculous and totally unfeasible.
the privacy implications alone are unfathomable.
the logistics? essentially impossible.
Fuck you. That sounds terrible.
Do you prefer paying for websites with your data?
Changing to a pay-per-request would theoretically be on, as it would hopefully cut down on bot traffic too, but this would NOT stop any sort of data mining, data broker services, or anything like that. It would not stop revenue either.
Do NOT give these sacks of shit any more poor ideas on how to charge is for another service
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!
I rent a VPS for under 10 credits a month. Traffic is included. It gives me a centralised calendar & address book, media streaming, and also a website. I happily pay this money. There are no ads, or data mining. Hell, I wouldn’t even want money for each visitor. That would be presumptious.
I see that there is a problem for e.g. journalism though. Not relying on advertising would be nice. But not in the way you propose.
…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
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.
What you’re describing is not unlike Brave browser’s Basic Attention Token.
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.
Step 1: Create page that makes 10k HTTP requests per second
Step 2: Rival Elon, except liquid
A better analogy: This would be like charging per word for telephone conversations
It would be a privacy nightmare, of course. Either we would all have to install monitoring software on our devices, or we would have to allow ISPs to break HTTPS.
I believe ISPs can already see the domain names you visit though, which would be enough data even for what I proposed
Multiple HTTP requests can be performed over a single connection, and not all connections are for HTTP requests in the first place. The only way to know that an HTTP request is being made (or how many) is to actually see the requests.
Currently sites have no choice but to pay for their upkeep with advertising
Kind of like Lemmy?
Lemmy is a charity. As you can probably tell, most of the economy, including the internet, is unable to run on charity, else that would be the dominant funding model
My point is that you seem to be presenting ads as the only other option, but it’s not - there are other ways to cover the cost ranging from financing it all yourself to making it subscription-based and everything in between. I don’t even necessarily disagree with your core idea but I want to highlight that there are creative ways to go about it rather than just defaulting to ads. As an extreme example, I’m a paying member of a community that’s subscription-based but anyone can just message the staff and get a year for free for whatever reason if they don’t want to pay, and they can do it again the next year if they want to. They’re handing out a crazy amount of free subscriptions but that doesn’t matter because there’s enough people paying to cover the costs.
You’re essentially suggesting a tax on our consciousness. That’s… Rather Draconian.
