2 ms·

I think this is a problem with the World Wide Web, not the Internet. At the network level, per-user cost accounting and quality of service is implemented quite

I think this is a problem with the World Wide Web, not the Internet. At the network level, per-user cost accounting and quality of service is implemented quite well, to the point of being able to pay per byte if you really want to. And access to any network beyond your own LAN is not free. The problem of how to fund actual web application development is not much different from the problem of how to fund media development in general. Newspapers, television, and magazines alike long ago settled on some mix of premium-tier subscription services augmenting a more open, ad-funded free tier. This is so much more of an issue today than 30 years ago not because of anything specifically about ads to fund media, but because ad profitably has been driven sky-high by individual consumer profiling that relies upon privacy invasion and surveillance of your customers. Ads back in the day would improve via voluntary focus groups and that was fine. Today, they improve by tracking every digital action a person ever takes in order to more accurately correlate interacting with an ad with making a future purchase. Volunteers for focus groups are pretty much okay with giving their opinions in return for cash. Every person on the planet is not nearly as okay with having every digital action they ever take recorded and analyzed.

abecedarius 5y ago
In the alternate history I'm imagining, with network-layer accounting and payments from the beginning, flooding and spam were never much of a problem -- they were at most a "nice problem to have". Endpoint security became a priority from the beginning, because failures that cost money (even if not much per computer) get treated that way. Participating in the network as a full peer, e.g. running the equivalent of a webserver on your home PC, was considerably more practical and normalized. (The bigger address space of course went into this too.) And this history made other peer-to-peer software easier to develop and more practical and economically sustainable, in a virtuous cycle. This doesn't mean it'd kill advertising. It wouldn't even kill all of the forces encouraging me to put my 'content' on centralized services even though I'm nothing like a media corp. But I suspect the right changes could've helped a lot towards a healthier computational ecosystem now. This early architectural decision that costs are out of band didn't fundamentally make anything impossible. But when you see a lower-level problem addressed by higher-level workarounds, and you're getting to redesign the system, isn't that exactly what constitutes an opportunity?

abecedarius 5y ago

In the alternate history I'm imagining, with network-layer accounting and payments from the beginning, flooding and spam were never much of a problem -- they were at most a "nice problem to have". Endpoint security became a priority from the beginning, because failures that cost money (even if not much per computer) get treated that way. Participating in the network as a full peer, e.g. running the equivalent of a webserver on your home PC, was considerably more practical and normalized. (The bigger address space of course went into this too.) And this history made other peer-to-peer software easier to develop and more practical and economically sustainable, in a virtuous cycle. This doesn't mean it'd kill advertising. It wouldn't even kill all of the forces encouraging me to put my 'content' on centralized services even though I'm nothing like a media corp. But I suspect the right changes could've helped a lot towards a healthier computational ecosystem now. This early architectural decision that costs are out of band didn't fundamentally make anything impossible. But when you see a lower-level problem addressed by higher-level workarounds, and you're getting to redesign the system, isn't that exactly what constitutes an opportunity?