> this would be a huge disadvantage to smaller websites
Smaller websites already make no money on the web. Nothing in my scheme prevents them from explicitly requesting money or whatever else.
> you'd have to make contracts with each individual ISP
I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with.
> a lot of them seem to want to move in this direction already with paid prioritization
Totally agree, but I think this is deeply harmful. My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away.
It's definitely difficult for small sites to make money off of ads (although there are some that have been able to do so), but I don't think this is the right solution for that, either.
> I wouldn't let ISPs refuse to contract with content providers. They'd have to carry all content, and they'd have to distribute their profits according to whatever scheme we come up with.
Even if the ISP is required to contract with you, just getting a contract with all of the ISP's is going to be a huge hurde. There's tons of providers in the US alone [0], and many of them will likely want a formal contract rather than offering a simple sign-up form. If you have visitors in other countries, it gets even harder, since now you have to worry about taxes, currency conversion, etc.
Most likely, you'd end up with some kind of "micropayments-as-a-service" company that would do it all for you in exchange for taking a percentage, but that still feels like it shouldn't be necessary.
> My hope would be that by recategorizing ISPs as "dumb pipes" all of these problems go away.
I'm not sure it's possible to make ISP's "dumb" while also giving them control over how the money is distributed. In theory, you could make a really exact specification for how they have to count views, how they have to make deals, and how they have to distribute the money, but I'm guessing that there's always going to be loopholes that they can take advantage of. Particularly in the US, ISP's have a history of being monopolistic and engaging in shady practices - I doubt that's going to change once they're given more control over how websites operate.
But once you start doing aggregate stats instead of individual stats, you start to run into other problems. First, the math gets really weird. Let's say that I have a website that's getting 2% of all traffic. Now, let's say Netflix comes out and is insanely popular. My percentage drops to 1%, even though I have experienced zero drop in traffic. Because even though all of my users are still visiting the site exactly the same as they used to, people are spending more time online and they're spending more of it on Netflix.
The next problem you run into is distinguishing a site visit from a normal network request. So... what's a site visit? We can't go by bandwidth usage for obvious reasons, unless you want every site's homepage to weigh in at 300MB. So probably we go by request volume, and we ought to only allow requests for HTML resources, since otherwise people just stop bundling CSS and stick a thousand invisible images on every page.
Except now single-page apps don't work (maybe you think this is a positive) because they rely on regular AJAX requests. A micropayment system suffers from the same problem, but (assuming we're not foolish enough to build micropayments directly into browsers) it has the advantage of not being standardized, so you can have an individual site set up its own payment model. This cuts down on bad actors, because there's not a standardized set of rules to exploit, and because users have to consent to the system before they're charged -- ie, they're not giving someone money without knowledge just by clicking on a link.
Ignoring problems like that (and I think there are more that we could go into) what exactly is your goal? Is your goal to get people to make high-quality content? Because we already know that payment models based on clicks (micropayments included) bias towards low-quality, clickbait content. We've seen this on Youtube. We've seen it in news sites.
When just clicking on a link is enough to get someone money, and there's no advantage after clicking on that link to provide some kind of high-quality memorable content, then everyone who's investing in high-quality content is at a competitive disadvantage. Anyone who makes an app without twenty page refreshes is at a competitive disadvantage. Anyone who makes a news article that isn't paginated into 5 different screens is at a disadvantage.
Here's how it used to work: You'd pay Google Contributor $5-$15 per month. When visiting a page with ads, Google Contributor would bid for the ad spot on your behalf and show a non-ad when it won. This has the benefit of paying each site what they're "worth" based upon the bids for the ad space, so it entirely sidesteps the problem of valuation. Additionally, there's an easy out for people who can't afford it as well - view the ads.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end... I only learned about Contributor right before it was reworked. After the rework, it now only works with a list of sites that have opted-in, and the list is disappointingly short[1]. It basically seems dead now.
[0]: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta [1]: https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995
Your though experiment makes about as much sense as pricing groceries by weight. Buying 10L of water and one 100g stake. With your method pay the water company x100 as much because reasons.
> mandating that an ISP must track every single website someone visits is a huge privacy problem that people like me would never support
I would also never advocate or support this, and I'm firmly in favor of an anonymous web. I think that's a separate issue though, and for this purpose I'm comfortable hand-waving and saying, "well hits would be anonymous with some way of distinguishing unique traffic", which is currently accomplished by existing online advertising tech. Sure it's got problems (can you trust it etc.) but that's again a broader discussion.
> First, the math gets really weird.
I fully admit to spending 3 minutes on the math. My general idea is that every content provider should get some baseline, and that popular content providers should get more. Whatever formula achieves those goals with the least perverse incentives is fine by me.
> people are spending more time online and they're spending more of it on Netflix
I agree this is disconcerting from a content-provider point of view, but I would argue a couple points:
- There's still a ceiling: 24 hours a day * number of total internet users. The Netflix guy was saying their main competitor is sleep. I think these incentives are unhealthy, and I think we should entertain things like a ceiling, or an additional weighting (subsidy) for educational or civic content -- that a lot of Netflix content would certainly fall under by the way -- but at some point we reach peak saturation, so I don't think this is a huge concern.
- You didn't explicitly state this, but I agree that Netflix is harder on an ISP than your average news site. I'm also fine with a weight for bandwidth or latency requirements, but one that's also progressive to avoid ladder-kicking (a video startup with 100 users shouldn't pay the same bandwidth penalty as Netflix with 3456789876567898 users).
> So... what's a site visit?
This is a fair question, and my unsatisfactory answer is "ehh, I don't really know". I don't think that spending an hour on nytimes.com, reading 10 articles, and generating 11 site hits is that different from spending two hours on washingtonpost.com, reading 8 articles, and generating 2 site hits because they've built an SPA (have they? I don't know it's an example). Which is to say I'm fine with a fuzzy but open algorithm for this. Mindful of gaming blah blah etc.
> Ignoring problems like that (and I think there are more that we could go into) what exactly is your goal?
You're totally right that there are plenty of challenges. I'm not about to write papers or form an advocacy group or something. My goal is to give a very rough outline of a system whereby we can resume compensating content providers for their work. I think the (commercial content) web should function more or less like Spotify, and while I agree that you create incentives for vapid musical garbage or clickbait this way, I also think that's not different than any other content regime -- be it cable, Netflix, "real" newspapers vs. gossip magazines, and so on. I think "improving" (whatever we think that means) content quality is a stretch goal. I just want a path from here to Spotify for web content providers, and I think turning ISPs into Spotify is the way to do it.
So whatever pricing model exists has to be a completely universal standard. ISPs can't decide not to pay it, and websites can't negotiate with ISPs for higher profit models.
Well, OK, if a model like that exists, then sure, we can just all adopt it. But, the existence of a universal way to value content online and to measure engagement is not a problem that can be just glossed over. People like me would argue that formula probably isn't even possible to create.
Brave is trying to create something like this with its attention token. I think they're incredibly naive, but they do have the huge advantage that they are only one company and you can decide whether or not you want to engage with them. Building it into the browser is... eh, problematic-ish. But it's a far cry from legislating it. Other people who disagree with Brave can iterate on their model, or go off and do something completely different.
It's kind of like the Open Source philosophy. I'm allowed to do stupid things because it's easy for you to repurpose my work and then ignore me. ;) But when it's a standard, then I can't be stupid anymore. Then it needs to be right the first time.
So in theory, if there exists a standard that everyone can agree on, I guess we could put that at the ISP level? But that feels like putting the cart before the horse to me.
If you're worried about poor people do something to increase their standard of living. Access to cat gifs is a lot priority when your the only drinking water you have is filled with lead.
Setting the cost of using a website by traffic makes about as much sense as deciding how much things in the super market cost by weight. A liter of water being 10 times as expensive as a 100g stake.
Websites and services should have the freedom of setting their prices to whatever they want. Just like how every other market works.
If the web is a market, then it's a magical one where everything of value on it can be copied infinitely for free. I admit that as an archliberal I'm skeptical of markets, so it's possible that a market-based solution would work here and my bias is preventing me from seeing it. But isn't our current solution market-based? How is the current setup not a market?
> If you're worried about poor people do something to increase their standard of living. Access to cat gifs is a lot priority when your the only drinking water you have is filled with lead.
This sounds a little like a "people on food assistance spend their EBT on frivolous things" argument, to which I always respond: even poor people deserve the ability to eat junk food and waste time on the web, because those things help us deal with stress and stress literally kills us. I also think that knowledge is power, and the web is the biggest source of knowledge humanity's ever built. I also think that community is power, and the web is the biggest community we've ever built. I've never seen a news story on TV about the water in Flint, I only know about it via articles on the web. I'm then free to research the history of water pollution and water regulation in the United States, or how to contact my elected representatives to get the situation changed, or how to contact political groups in order to change the political regime that allowed this to happen in the first place. Access to the web is a huge, huge thing for poor people "to increase their standard of living".
> Setting the cost of using a website by traffic makes about as much sense as deciding how much things in the super market cost by weight. A liter of water being 10 times as expensive as a 100g stake.
I admit I mostly made up the numbers in my scheme completely off the cuff because they weren't really the point of my scheme, but even so I'm having trouble figuring out what your argument here is. I based my prototype model off of newspapers, where a newsstand or drug store would buy like 100 copies of the NYT, USA Today, whatever, and then mark them up slightly to sell to the public. So if you sell 80 copies of the NYT, you make whatever your profit margin is * 80, - the cost of the papers you didn't sell. In fact this model is better for "retailers" because you aren't out money if you don't sell everything. But because the ISPs here wouldn't be making any money anyway, it doesn't really matter.
Are you saying that my blog with 1 hit shouldn't make as much money as a major news site? It wouldn't (half the profit sharing is weighted by traffic) and I don't think it should. If I'm wrong in the way I expressed it, then apologies! I just think that if a content provider gets X% of your traffic, that should be reflected in the profit sharing. If that's (traffic_percent * total_profit / 2) + ((total_profit / 2) / number_of_content_providers_hit) then OK. If there's a different formula that actual smart people have actually worked on, even better.
Low-income people and people in developing countries already experience a dramatically different web than those of us in the US with engineer salaries. I worry that adding micropayments into the mix would just widen the gap.
The system I would prefer would be progressive ISP costs based on income. So if you're a DINK household in the US midwest making > $200k a year, your internet costs $400/mo. If you're a single parent in a major US city making < $50k a year, your internet is free. All ISPs then pay money to content providers based on usage -- so if 80% of your traffic went to Breitbart, 40% of your profit earmarked for content providers goes to Breitbart. The other half is distributed evenly across all the content providers loaded by your users.
Also ISPs should be regulated like public utilities and all of the "profits" should go either to their communities or content providers, but that feels unattainable in the near future.