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Magazines (fashion, fitness, sport, etc) have this effect by virtue of advertisers not wanting to be seen in a "free" publication, but most of their revenue sti

Magazines (fashion, fitness, sport, etc) have this effect by virtue of advertisers not wanting to be seen in a "free" publication, but most of their revenue still comes from ads, which is why you continue to still receive new issues for months after you supposedly canceled, even though you nominally are paying for it, all the incentives are for them to pretend you're a paying customer when you in fact are not. But I don't really know how you could reasonably make this work for online communities. Is reading a blog and commenting on it participating in a "social network"? What about reading a blog without comments? Viewing a sponsored Twitch stream?

Factorium 5y ago
It would be a pretty easy legal definition. Start with services that have over 100 million users: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_... And exclude messaging services eg. Telegram, or platforms which are focused on technical or professional knowledge sharing (eg. Quora, LinkedIn, Wikipedia). I think the risk would be conglomeration - platforms would partner up so that the minimum fee could give access to multiple services. You'd also want to avoid the fee from just becoming a 'token' with advertising still driving 90%+ of revenue. Old-fashioned antitrust enforcement might still be necessary (eg. separating Facebook from Instagram and Whatsapp), as well as setting a maximum % of gross revenue that can come from advertising, maybe 75%.