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I see this "pyramid" across society in general, and I find it extremely troubling: - There is no effective monetization scheme to develop, maintain, improve, o
by nfoz 12y ago
I see this "pyramid" across society in general, and I find it extremely troubling:
- There is no effective monetization scheme to develop, maintain, improve, or redesign basic infrastructure that is critical and used by everybody
- There is lots of money thrown around for tiny little non-reusable services that depend on that infrastructure
Where and how money is spent on the core infrastructure is typically sporadic, subject to the whims or neglects of the big companies that have R&D budgets, and typically their best interest for the infrastructure is not quite that of the general public.
Example: the web, which grew from a simple consumer-is-in-control document sharing system to an incredibly complicated and misengineered producer-is-in-control application engine that abuses user data/privacy all throughout. Yes the infrastructure was developed, but very poorly and incrementally, and with bad intentions.
Yes the infrastructure is largely open-source / open-protocol, so that counts as a win? But I wish we could invent a society in which shared-infrastructure is valued and monetized proportional to its contribution to the society (which would outweigh the utility of the services on top of it), rather than vice-versa.
Open-source verifiable operating systems, security libraries: these are more important than your text-messaging app! But we don't know how to fund them.
- davidw 12y ago"Public goods" is what you are talking about, and the link I suggested covers their provisioning, and its problems, in depth.