5 ms·

I have serious reservations about making the web pay-to-play. Low-income people would suffer from this, here in the US but definitely elsewhere in poorer count

I have serious reservations about making the web pay-to-play. Low-income people would suffer from this, here in the US but definitely elsewhere in poorer countries. It's essentially a regressive tax on the web. Furthermore, low-income people often run into barriers securing access to the kinds of payment systems micropayments would use (credit cards, etc.). It's also completely unregulated -- if you thought micropayments in mobile apps were bad, just wait until it's the web and there is no Google or Apple to crack down on it. Low-income people and people in developing countries already experience a dramatically different web than those of us in the US with engineer salaries. I worry that adding micropayments into the mix would just widen the gap. The system I would prefer would be progressive ISP costs based on income. So if you're a DINK household in the US midwest making > $200k a year, your internet costs $400/mo. If you're a single parent in a major US city making < $50k a year, your internet is free. All ISPs then pay money to content providers based on usage -- so if 80% of your traffic went to Breitbart, 40% of your profit earmarked for content providers goes to Breitbart. The other half is distributed evenly across all the content providers loaded by your users. Also ISPs should be regulated like public utilities and all of the "profits" should go either to their communities or content providers, but that feels unattainable in the near future.

43920 8y ago
Depending on how this is set up, this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites, though. In order to make any money, you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP, and if they decided they didn't like your content, they could prevent you from collecting any revenue, effectively shutting your site down. (In fact, a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization, although that doesn't have quite as much of an effect as blocking ad revenue does).
- camgunz 8y ago
  A few things: > this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites Smaller websites already make no money on the web. Nothing in my scheme prevents them from explicitly requesting money or whatever else. > you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with. > a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization Totally agree, but I think this is deeply harmful. My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away.
  - 43920 8y ago
    > Smaller websites already make no money on the web. Nothing in my scheme prevents them from explicitly requesting money or whatever else. It's definitely difficult for small sites to make money off of ads (although there are some that have been able to do so), but I don't think this is the right solution for that, either. > I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with. Even if the ISP is required to contract with you, just getting a contract with all of the ISP's is going to be a huge hurde. There's tons of providers in the US alone [0], and many of them will likely want a formal contract rather than offering a simple sign-up form. If you have visitors in other countries, it gets even harder, since now you have to worry about taxes, currency conversion, etc. Most likely, you'd end up with some kind of "micropayments-as-a-service" company that would do it all for you in exchange for taking a percentage, but that still feels like it shouldn't be necessary. > My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away. I'm not sure it's possible to make ISP's "dumb" while also giving them control over how the money is distributed. In theory, you could make a really exact specification for how they have to count views, how they have to make deals, and how they have to distribute the money, but I'm guessing that there's always going to be loopholes that they can take advantage of. Particularly in the US, ISP's have a history of being monopolistic and engaging in shady practices - I doubt that's going to change once they're given more control over how websites operate. [0] https://broadbandnow.com/All-Providers https://broadbandnow.com/All-Providers
danShumway 8y ago
If you think clickbait is bad now, think about how bad it'll be when aggregate traffic percentages across the entire ISP are used to determine site revenue. And you'd need to do it that way, because mandating that an ISP must track every single website someone visits is a huge privacy problem that people like me would never support. But once you start doing aggregate stats instead of individual stats, you start to run into other problems. First, the math gets really weird. Let's say that I have a website that's getting 2% of all traffic. Now, let's say Netflix comes out and is insanely popular. My percentage drops to 1%, even though I have experienced zero drop in traffic. Because even though all of my users are still visiting the site exactly the same as they used to, people are spending more time online and they're spending more of it on Netflix. The next problem you run into is distinguishing a site visit from a normal network request. So... what's a site visit? We can't go by bandwidth usage for obvious reasons, unless you want every site's homepage to weigh in at 300MB. So probably we go by request volume, and we ought to only allow requests for HTML resources, since otherwise people just stop bundling CSS and stick a thousand invisible images on every page. Except now single-page apps don't work (maybe you think this is a positive) because they rely on regular AJAX requests. A micropayment system suffers from the same problem, but (assuming we're not foolish enough to build micropayments directly into browsers) it has the advantage of not being standardized, so you can have an individual site set up its own payment model. This cuts down on bad actors, because there's not a standardized set of rules to exploit, and because users have to consent to the system before they're charged -- ie, they're not giving someone money without knowledge just by clicking on a link. Ignoring problems like that (and I think there are more that we could go into) what exactly is your goal? Is your goal to get people to make high-quality content? Because we already know that payment models based on clicks (micropayments included) bias towards low-quality, clickbait content. We've seen this on Youtube. We've seen it in news sites. When just clicking on a link is enough to get someone money, and there's no advantage after clicking on that link to provide some kind of high-quality memorable content, then everyone who's investing in high-quality content is at a competitive disadvantage. Anyone who makes an app without twenty page refreshes is at a competitive disadvantage. Anyone who makes a news article that isn't paginated into 5 different screens is at a disadvantage.
- antt 8y ago
antt 8y ago
It is not a tax, it is starting to treat the web like a market and not a state subsidized experimental project. Something that has been going on for far too long. If you're worried about poor people do something to increase their standard of living. Access to cat gifs is a lot priority when your the only drinking water you have is filled with lead. Setting the cost of using a website by traffic makes about as much sense as deciding how much things in the super market cost by weight. A liter of water being 10 times as expensive as a 100g stake. Websites and services should have the freedom of setting their prices to whatever they want. Just like how every other market works.
- camgunz 8y ago
  > It is not a tax, it is starting to treat the web like a market and not a state subsidized experimental project. Something that has been going on for far too long. If the web is a market, then it's a magical one where everything of value on it can be copied infinitely for free. I admit that as an archliberal I'm skeptical of markets, so it's possible that a market-based solution would work here and my bias is preventing me from seeing it. But isn't our current solution market-based? How is the current setup not a market? > If you're worried about poor people do something to increase their standard of living. Access to cat gifs is a lot priority when your the only drinking water you have is filled with lead. This sounds a little like a "people on food assistance spend their EBT on frivolous things" argument, to which I always respond: even poor people deserve the ability to eat junk food and waste time on the web, because those things help us deal with stress and stress literally kills us. I also think that knowledge is power, and the web is the biggest source of knowledge humanity's ever built. I also think that community is power, and the web is the biggest community we've ever built. I've never seen a news story on TV about the water in Flint, I only know about it via articles on the web. I'm then free to research the history of water pollution and water regulation in the United States, or how to contact my elected representatives to get the situation changed, or how to contact political groups in order to change the political regime that allowed this to happen in the first place. Access to the web is a huge, huge thing for poor people "to increase their standard of living". > Setting the cost of using a website by traffic makes about as much sense as deciding how much things in the super market cost by weight. A liter of water being 10 times as expensive as a 100g stake. I admit I mostly made up the numbers in my scheme completely off the cuff because they weren't really the point of my scheme, but even so I'm having trouble figuring out what your argument here is. I based my prototype model off of newspapers, where a newsstand or drug store would buy like 100 copies of the NYT, USA Today, whatever, and then mark them up slightly to sell to the public. So if you sell 80 copies of the NYT, you make whatever your profit margin is * 80, - the cost of the papers you didn't sell. In fact this model is better for "retailers" because you aren't out money if you don't sell everything. But because the ISPs here wouldn't be making any money anyway, it doesn't really matter. Are you saying that my blog with 1 hit shouldn't make as much money as a major news site? It wouldn't (half the profit sharing is weighted by traffic) and I don't think it should. If I'm wrong in the way I expressed it, then apologies! I just think that if a content provider gets X% of your traffic, that should be reflected in the profit sharing. If that's (traffic_percent * total_profit / 2) + ((total_profit / 2) / number_of_content_providers_hit) then OK. If there's a different formula that actual smart people have actually worked on, even better.

43920 8y ago

Depending on how this is set up, this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites, though. In order to make any money, you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP, and if they decided they didn't like your content, they could prevent you from collecting any revenue, effectively shutting your site down. (In fact, a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization, although that doesn't have quite as much of an effect as blocking ad revenue does).

camgunz 8y ago
A few things: > this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites Smaller websites already make no money on the web. Nothing in my scheme prevents them from explicitly requesting money or whatever else. > you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with. > a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization Totally agree, but I think this is deeply harmful. My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away.
- 43920 8y ago
  > Smaller websites already make no money on the web. Nothing in my scheme prevents them from explicitly requesting money or whatever else. It's definitely difficult for small sites to make money off of ads (although there are some that have been able to do so), but I don't think this is the right solution for that, either. > I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with. Even if the ISP is required to contract with you, just getting a contract with all of the ISP's is going to be a huge hurde. There's tons of providers in the US alone [0], and many of them will likely want a formal contract rather than offering a simple sign-up form. If you have visitors in other countries, it gets even harder, since now you have to worry about taxes, currency conversion, etc. Most likely, you'd end up with some kind of "micropayments-as-a-service" company that would do it all for you in exchange for taking a percentage, but that still feels like it shouldn't be necessary. > My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away. I'm not sure it's possible to make ISP's "dumb" while also giving them control over how the money is distributed. In theory, you could make a really exact specification for how they have to count views, how they have to make deals, and how they have to distribute the money, but I'm guessing that there's always going to be loopholes that they can take advantage of. Particularly in the US, ISP's have a history of being monopolistic and engaging in shady practices - I doubt that's going to change once they're given more control over how websites operate. [0] https://broadbandnow.com/All-Providers https://broadbandnow.com/All-Providers

danShumway 8y ago

If you think clickbait is bad now, think about how bad it'll be when aggregate traffic percentages across the entire ISP are used to determine site revenue. And you'd need to do it that way, because mandating that an ISP must track every single website someone visits is a huge privacy problem that people like me would never support. But once you start doing aggregate stats instead of individual stats, you start to run into other problems. First, the math gets really weird. Let's say that I have a website that's getting 2% of all traffic. Now, let's say Netflix comes out and is insanely popular. My percentage drops to 1%, even though I have experienced zero drop in traffic. Because even though all of my users are still visiting the site exactly the same as they used to, people are spending more time online and they're spending more of it on Netflix. The next problem you run into is distinguishing a site visit from a normal network request. So... what's a site visit? We can't go by bandwidth usage for obvious reasons, unless you want every site's homepage to weigh in at 300MB. So probably we go by request volume, and we ought to only allow requests for HTML resources, since otherwise people just stop bundling CSS and stick a thousand invisible images on every page. Except now single-page apps don't work (maybe you think this is a positive) because they rely on regular AJAX requests. A micropayment system suffers from the same problem, but (assuming we're not foolish enough to build micropayments directly into browsers) it has the advantage of not being standardized, so you can have an individual site set up its own payment model. This cuts down on bad actors, because there's not a standardized set of rules to exploit, and because users have to consent to the system before they're charged -- ie, they're not giving someone money without knowledge just by clicking on a link. Ignoring problems like that (and I think there are more that we could go into) what exactly is your goal? Is your goal to get people to make high-quality content? Because we already know that payment models based on clicks (micropayments included) bias towards low-quality, clickbait content. We've seen this on Youtube. We've seen it in news sites. When just clicking on a link is enough to get someone money, and there's no advantage after clicking on that link to provide some kind of high-quality memorable content, then everyone who's investing in high-quality content is at a competitive disadvantage. Anyone who makes an app without twenty page refreshes is at a competitive disadvantage. Anyone who makes a news article that isn't paginated into 5 different screens is at a disadvantage.

antt 8y ago

antt 8y ago

It is not a tax, it is starting to treat the web like a market and not a state subsidized experimental project. Something that has been going on for far too long. If you're worried about poor people do something to increase their standard of living. Access to cat gifs is a lot priority when your the only drinking water you have is filled with lead. Setting the cost of using a website by traffic makes about as much sense as deciding how much things in the super market cost by weight. A liter of water being 10 times as expensive as a 100g stake. Websites and services should have the freedom of setting their prices to whatever they want. Just like how every other market works.

camgunz 8y ago
> It is not a tax, it is starting to treat the web like a market and not a state subsidized experimental project. Something that has been going on for far too long. If the web is a market, then it's a magical one where everything of value on it can be copied infinitely for free. I admit that as an archliberal I'm skeptical of markets, so it's possible that a market-based solution would work here and my bias is preventing me from seeing it. But isn't our current solution market-based? How is the current setup not a market? > If you're worried about poor people do something to increase their standard of living. Access to cat gifs is a lot priority when your the only drinking water you have is filled with lead. This sounds a little like a "people on food assistance spend their EBT on frivolous things" argument, to which I always respond: even poor people deserve the ability to eat junk food and waste time on the web, because those things help us deal with stress and stress literally kills us. I also think that knowledge is power, and the web is the biggest source of knowledge humanity's ever built. I also think that community is power, and the web is the biggest community we've ever built. I've never seen a news story on TV about the water in Flint, I only know about it via articles on the web. I'm then free to research the history of water pollution and water regulation in the United States, or how to contact my elected representatives to get the situation changed, or how to contact political groups in order to change the political regime that allowed this to happen in the first place. Access to the web is a huge, huge thing for poor people "to increase their standard of living". > Setting the cost of using a website by traffic makes about as much sense as deciding how much things in the super market cost by weight. A liter of water being 10 times as expensive as a 100g stake. I admit I mostly made up the numbers in my scheme completely off the cuff because they weren't really the point of my scheme, but even so I'm having trouble figuring out what your argument here is. I based my prototype model off of newspapers, where a newsstand or drug store would buy like 100 copies of the NYT, USA Today, whatever, and then mark them up slightly to sell to the public. So if you sell 80 copies of the NYT, you make whatever your profit margin is * 80, - the cost of the papers you didn't sell. In fact this model is better for "retailers" because you aren't out money if you don't sell everything. But because the ISPs here wouldn't be making any money anyway, it doesn't really matter. Are you saying that my blog with 1 hit shouldn't make as much money as a major news site? It wouldn't (half the profit sharing is weighted by traffic) and I don't think it should. If I'm wrong in the way I expressed it, then apologies! I just think that if a content provider gets X% of your traffic, that should be reflected in the profit sharing. If that's (traffic_percent * total_profit / 2) + ((total_profit / 2) / number_of_content_providers_hit) then OK. If there's a different formula that actual smart people have actually worked on, even better.