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The same people as who have always paid for it: the users at the edge of the network via subscription fees to centralised providers (Usenet, email, etc.), or di
by PaulRobinson 10y ago
The same people as who have always paid for it: the users at the edge of the network via subscription fees to centralised providers (Usenet, email, etc.), or directly for web hosting, etc.
If you're not paying for something, you're the thing being sold.
It may be we end up paying central IT orgs small amounts of money to host apps (I can see people paying AWS for social network applications of their own running on Lambda, for example), but the network pays for itself by users paying for it.
If users are not prepared to do that, they are always going to be sold as commodities, as they are today in most free SaaS consumer-facing applications.
- harryf 10y agoPrivacy and security might sell. Freedom from government snooping and similar. Anti-virus software shows how you motivate non-technical consumers to buy - in cynical terms you basically just scare people enough until ready to pay.
- type0 10y agoWell it seems already be a market for selling hardware without backdoors, unfortunately the price is not affordable for the majority of people. There was HN tread about this desktop system https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12711185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12711185