this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Don't you already pay to use the Internet? Why does anybody have to make record profits every quarter, fuck all ads. The Internet was much better when corporations were not involved.
Idc about corporations but the internet costs and you cant get away from that. Servers and the infrastructure around them has to be paid for. And I'm happy to pay my share when I vist someones website. My issue is that my share is a few cents not a few dollars like a lot of these newpapers try and charge.
I think websites should be paid for by the person or organization that owns them, personally. I don't want to be subsidizing businesses that I have no role in or control over, or paying for other people to engage in their hobbies.
Can you explain this "I don’t want to be subsidizing businesses that I have no role in or control over, or paying for other people to engage in their hobbies."
I dont get why you are against giving money to companies you dont control only on the web, you surely do it a ton in everyday life. In regards to the hobby, how do you know its their hobby and even if it was its not your place to decide if they should be paid for their time. If they're making something thats good enough for you to want to consume it then you should pay them for it.
I pay money to a person or company in order to receive a good or service which is defined and negotiated ahead of time.
Someone I don't know making a website I didn't ask for isn't doing anything for me, and doesn't have my agreement or consent.
That's fine as long as they aren't expecting me to pay them for it. Expecting money for actions taken on someone else's behalf without their consent is a scam.
Yes they are, they are hosting a website which you're visting to presumably consume some of the content or use in some way. They dont need your agreement or consent, you are choosing to vist the website. Just to be clear we arent talking about paying websites you dont vist. We are specifically talking about websites like a blog
I'm talking about random websites that people visit to see what they are, as one does.
Making a blog and thinking that people owe you money to be on the receiving end of your unasked-for opinions/advice is ridiculous. You can talk to people around you and get that for free.
And there's even less reason to pay a company that you have an existing business relationship with to access their website, since you're paying them already.
You've got to be trolling, there is no way you actually think this. I'm done with this bait.
How long have you been using the Internet if I may ask?
20 years
I wish I could take you back 10 years further. It's like a national forest that someone build a parking lot and strip mall over, and everyone cheers because they finally tore the mall down and put up a giant fence water park with cameras everywhere.
Yes things were different back then. It wasnt a national forest, it was forest in a world where no cities existed anywhere. Nothing had been built on the internet back then. You didnt have websites that served userbases in the 100s of millions. You didnt have to serve images, videos, live streams and other dynamic content. You didnt have the same security overhead now required. If the internet were only text chat over irc I wouldnt be sitting here worrying about internet funding.
I dont go to the cbd of my city and think "I wish they replaced this with a forest" because I know there are plenty of forests outside the city, and people choose to live in the city over the forest. Same for the internet and so we need to think about solving the problem instead of wishing to tear everything down.
Like a functional city made to serve the populous or like a typical American city that only works for the rich?
You could never have a city where no one pays maintenance and service fees.
You mean in the current state of human society we could never accomplish that. It's a nice dream that we could have a star trek future but I only see mad max as humanity's fate. Oh well thanks for all the fish.
You don't pay for the services in it. Storage, computation, bigger channels.
So yes, I think it should be possible to make paid connections to a service, like a paid phone call.
Or to buy storage.
There should be a new stack of web-like (application-layer and up) protocols. To separate requesting storage (put, get), computation (submit a task, get a result) and search (get from index by keywords) into technically different tasks and to make them paid on technical level. Probably make some procedure for aggregated payment for accessing a service. Then the service itself should be on the next level, and probably built from these services on the client.
It should be a client-side decision to "continue to a paid service for N monies".
People who've built the Internet - they were an academic bunch, or in case of Sun founders, an economically inept bunch (yes, I can repeat that ; their period of huge success was mostly when they were making workstations ; though to be honest I liked Bill Joy's interview on climate and externalia). They didn't consider this important. They made a library system for a community of peers.
That's an intermediate version of what I'm dreaming of, except what I'm dreaming of would have uniform infrastructure completely separated from content, so services would serve many applications in a uniform way, storage and computation and search and maybe message relay to another user. The applications themselves would differ from each other, and their differences would exist locally on user machine.
You are clueless.
If there's a way to easily pay directly for pooled resources in the Internet, then you don't have to use what big companies milking you in some other way provide.
So it would seem that what I'm proposing is less like slavery. But you do you.