> What if every service had a price tag. No ads, no data harvesting, no “free tier”. Would you pay for YouTube. Would you pay for it and Spotify and cloud storage and messaging apps. At some point you’d run out of money and you’d have to choose.
> That constraint would make the internet look very different. Instead of sprawling mega platforms where you can dip in and out of anything, we’d have something smaller.
That does not follow, if anything this'd made internet much more centralized. People hate to pay, so most households would have a single "youtube" subscription, and all the other video hosters would have zero chance of getting exposure. People would choose one or two "news" subscriptions, and the rest, like regional newspapers, would have zero chances of independent operations. A lot of people would likely have facebook subscription, so that's where the traffic would be .. and all the self-hosted forums and individual websites would be a great disadvantage. That's a true commercial hell.
(This assumes there is some sort of draconian law requiring payments. If there is no such law, then we might go back to "old internet" setup: making webpage is a way to share the info, so people are _paying_ for the privilege of having their webpage up. But then what stops well-read blog author from having a sponsorship deal? Likely nothing, so we'll slowly move back to the current status quo)
theamk•4mo ago
> That constraint would make the internet look very different. Instead of sprawling mega platforms where you can dip in and out of anything, we’d have something smaller.
That does not follow, if anything this'd made internet much more centralized. People hate to pay, so most households would have a single "youtube" subscription, and all the other video hosters would have zero chance of getting exposure. People would choose one or two "news" subscriptions, and the rest, like regional newspapers, would have zero chances of independent operations. A lot of people would likely have facebook subscription, so that's where the traffic would be .. and all the self-hosted forums and individual websites would be a great disadvantage. That's a true commercial hell.
(This assumes there is some sort of draconian law requiring payments. If there is no such law, then we might go back to "old internet" setup: making webpage is a way to share the info, so people are _paying_ for the privilege of having their webpage up. But then what stops well-read blog author from having a sponsorship deal? Likely nothing, so we'll slowly move back to the current status quo)