Pennies on the day is a significant underestimate of how much value you are providing to the company that provides the service. That would be ~$7.30/year.

Actual revenue per user for Facebook in the US and Canada is $26+ / quarter or over $100/year... That is on the order of $10/month [1]. So if a company wanted to be as profitable as Facebook, and not make money from advertising, they would have to charge $10/mo. That is more than I am willing to pay for Facebook -- my friends have my phone number.

If you think profit of providers like Facebook should be limited then that's a regulation issue. Personally I don't think that should be the case.

It is possible to provide the service Facebook provides in a fully encrypted manner. Individual companies would require subsidies and audits to ensure encryption. Essentially regulation.

Another alternative is fully encrypted, distributed services where personal CPU and storage are used to support the service. This is possible through systems like Diaspora or Mastadon, but there is an ease of use / network effect issue there.

I just don't think it is as simple or inexpensive as pennies a day. Or to push a company to charge that little would require regulation.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/01/31/fac...

And this is sort of the problem. In order to overcome freeriders subscription prices are always exorbitant compared to the ad revenue. I can't afford even 1 dollar a month for every site I visit, I could however almost certainly beat the cpm price those sites earn from ads... But we have no way to ensure every one pays and we have no way to distribute even if we did.

There is a way, actually. Browser crypto mining. People just seem to (IMHO irrationally) hate it even more than surveillance and data gathering.

I'm not personally opposed to it actually but A) does it actually work? B) until people can pay rent in arbitrary coins it very much relies on mining the "right" coin to be able to get any useful USD, SEK, ZAR... Whatever out of it. C) because A is reliant on the cost of mining and established crypto-asset-ma-bobs are expensive to mine trying to get value off the small amount of cpu you can grab via JavaScript mining it incentives ScamCoins.

I think the hate is rational, but more importantly the math really doesn't work. It pays far less than advertising on all but the very least desirable sites.