"Whenever you post a photo on Instagram, write an Amazon review, or skim through complaints about potholes on your neighborhood's Facebook group, you're helping

"Whenever you post a photo on Instagram, write an Amazon review, or skim through complaints about potholes on your neighborhood's Facebook group, you're helping generate profit for the world's richest corporations. A growing movement is making the case that you ought to get paid for it." The value is in the traffic, not necessarily the content. The traffic is what allows them to sell advertising. They could have billions of submitted photos, reviews and comments about potholes, but if they failed to get enough daily traffic, the business would fail. Imagine if web users retrieving each others' content were each visiting different websites controlled by different people (different domain name owners); the traffic would be more evenly distributed. Advertisers would be faced with different choices. They could not all choose to advertise with a small number of disproportionately high traffic websites. One website could not so easily generate billions in revenue from ad sales. When so many web users all visit the same website, they create a highly valuable entity to advertisers. Why do they all visit the same website? They do so because that is the only source of the content. Exclusivity. "Walled garden." What if a web user could retrieve those same photos, reviews and comments from many different websites, instead of just one? What if it was the author that mattered and not necessarily the source? What if we reimagined the way content was distributed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking If users are the ones generating this "content", and they retain ownership, then it stands to reason that if provided with the technical means, they can choose make it available on any website they choose. It is their choice. Open source operating systems use mirrors to make software available to users from multiple websites. The goal in that case is to distribute traffic more evenly across multiple websites, not to send all users to one controlled by a single owner. When traffic is distributed across disparate websites it reduces the likelihood that web advertisers will fund the creation of monopolistic web-based companies like the ones that are causing so many unnecessary problems today. Is there a technical barrier that prevents user-generated content from being mirrored at many different sites, with servers located around the globe? Perhaps it already is? Is there a technical requirement that all these sites be controlled by the same entity? The disproportionate traffic to a single domain name is what allows one owner to monopolise and generate disproportionate wealth. What if we could distribute the traffic to other owners? After all, it is the user's content. Whether it is exclusively available from one website or available from multiple mirrors should be the user's decision. Of course the author here may see no problems with the existence of these monopolies. Maybe all he really wants is a piece of the enormous ad revenue. He wants a multi billion dollar enterprise to pay him. Absent a lawsuit, what are the chances of that? Websites will not pay for content. Howeverthey will pay for traffic.