>For many services there is simply no (online, i.e. practically relevant) alternative, because none of the market players have an incentive to be privacy preserving (think major news outlets) or because the service is not interchangable due to network effects (facebook, twitter etc).

But here's the big question: would these services have even existed in the first place if these laws had been in place? The internet has gained massive popularity because most of the resources on it are free. Look at porn - all of the known sites and run on ads, all the paid sites are essentially unknown. I don't know anybody who uses the latter. Wouldn't Facebook, Twitter, news sites etc have gone the same way if they required you to pay? Just look at what happens when a paywalled article gets posted. Either somebody posts a way to bypass it or a lot of people will never read the article.

Most services existed before, with a variety of models. E.g. Both subscription and ad revenue based free news papers existed long before the internet.

Somehow they managed, without the need to track ones every move.

Would the internet look the same, with the same players and behaviours if these laws existed? No probably not. But I also don't think the internet is in a very desirable state.

Maybe, we would have had more invention and uaee acceptance in different ways to pay and consume services instead of this race to the bottom of cheap ads.

>Most services existed before, with a variety of models. E.g. Both subscription and ad revenue based free news papers existed long before the internet.

Yes, but aren't most of those newspapers essentially partisan politics? Every free newspaper I've seen IRL has been backed by somebody trying to push for politics. From my experience they also tend to not be that informative.

>Maybe, we would have had more invention and uaee acceptance in different ways to pay and consume services instead of this race to the bottom of cheap ads.

The problem is that there is no price equilibrium that will work. People from poor countries can't afford to pay what is a reasonable price for people from rich countries. Poor people in general can't afford to pay. Kids/teenagers can't afford to pay. And this gets complicated even more by the fact that we don't even have payment methods available to everyone. Even if you could afford it, you couldn't pay. Ie I've never owned a credit card in my life and as far as I know I'm not eligible for one. They have a minimum income limit that I fall under.

I'm saying that the ad model is what made the internet so commonplace for a lot of information.

I don't know in detail world wide, but Europe has or had several free daily news papers for commuters piled up in train and bus stations. the ones I know used to be fairly neutral because they just printed what came in from news agencies like Reuters, AP, etc with minor changes (license fee is much higher if you want to print 1:1).

As for informational value. They were good enough to keep up to date what is going on, and then use other sources to dig deeper.

I'm not against ads, in fact in small populations like Switzerland where I'm from, fully subscription funded news papers have never been viable to my knowledge. They were always majority advertisment funded. The subscriptions basically pays for having the news paper printed and delivered, not much more.

But the ads that used to pay the peoples bills were those full pagers, clients payed tens to hundreds of thousand of dolars for a single issue. It still worked reasonably well online on desktop with plenty of screen real estate, but with the raise of mobile prices collapsed.

I worked at one of the largest publishers in Switzerland during that time and saw first hand what got cut during re-org: Fact checkers, specialists, investigative departments, international correspondents, etc. News rooms from supposedly independent news papers in the portfolio got merged. More and more pressure to write article to perform on facebook.

All things that a normal reader will not immediately notice, but that severly affect quality and journalistic integrity long term.

While I think having all information available for everyone worldwide would be amazing, I don't see the current situation sustainable quality wise for anyone beyond the few top percent of market leaders.

I don't know how to solve it either, why I said, maybe we would have come up with different models if we didn't go down the path we did. And a lot of these old organisations have to take a lot of the blame of just not reacting to change for years.

But whoever you point fingers at, as it it stands, we are headed for a lose-lose information wise in my opinion.

I would go the other way with it -- the problem is we don't have a low overhead system for anonymous micropayments, so ads are the only competitive way to offer a service with a very low cost (and thus price) per use.

If there was an easy way to anonymously pay the site the five cents they get from the advertiser without incurring 500% payment processing overhead then would sites even be using advertising?

But then we get to much the same result. What we need isn't new privacy rules, it's to delete the old banking rules that prevent efficient payment systems from operating.

I agree that it would massively help, but I don't think it would solve the entire problem. A lot of my interests online were cultivated as a kid where even a 10 cent charge would've made me click away. I'm sure it wouldn't have been an issue in highly developed countries, but it would've been a limiting factor for me.

So the model that works best for micropayments in most cases is exponentially decreasing prices over time. When the content is new it costs $1, in two months it costs $.50, in two months more it costs $.25, and so on down to zero, at which point it becomes free proof of the quality of your work to get people to pay for the newer stuff.

You can actually make more money using a pricing model like that, because you get to charge $1 to everyone who will pay $1 (everybody wants everything ASAP), but in a few months you still get the quarter from the guy who would only pay a quarter. And having a large volume of free old works to show the world you can produce good material is how you get new customers.

Which also solves the problem for people without money. (This is, incidentally, how copyright was originally intended to work. Screw you again, Mickey Mouse.)

Sure, this pricing model might work, but it'll still turn away people compared to right now. News that happened a few months ago isn't interesting anymore. Most people aren't going to read that. This essentially means that the section of people that can't afford the $1 price tag won't read your articles, unless they're researching some story later.

A lot of what we have online just isn't viable on pricing models like this. The main divide you'll see is likely by country due to wealth differences.

It's too late. You can't start to charge for things you used to give away for free. Plus with the internet, there's always an alternative, you just haven't found it yet. So the moment you run into a paywall you will turn around and start searching for the same thing you were just looking for but for free.

> It's too late.

What do you say we try it and find out?

> So the moment you run into a paywall you will turn around and start searching for the same thing you were just looking for but for free.

Because the existing paywalls are some nonsense where you have to give them your home address and sign up to pay a recurring monthly fee which you know is going to be a bear to cancel and costs dollars rather than cents, whereas what it ought to be is a browser plugin that just pays them automatically when you visit the site as long as the amount is below your threshold (with a circuit breaker that requires you to manually approve if you get charged more than like $5 over the course of an hour).

People have been talking about this idea for maybe 20 years (that I can recall). I'm also pretty sure there've been numerous attempts at implementations because really it's not that complicated a thing to make.

None of them caught on though because when it comes down to it, most sites that successfully make money can probably make more money from advertising than they can from this microtransaction system so there's no incentive for them to adopt it.

None of them caught on because the regulatory environment makes it effectively impossible to implement efficiently and all of the attempts had to make fatal compromises in order to comply which made them useless.

The payment processing overhead has nothing to do with rules and everything to do with Mastercard and Visa having decided to not compete on fees.

Then why don't you go into competition with them and undercut them on fees, if the rules make it so easy? Why doesn't anybody?

Barriers of entry exist and have nothing to do with rules.

That's a weird argument to make. Maybe the businesses ("services") would have not existed with these laws in existence already. The question is would the world be a better place without them. I don't think the answer to that question is so straight forward.

We as society implement laws to prevent undesirable behaviour all the time. You can certainly argue that the law against robbing banks for example has prevented business innovation around bank robbery, but I believe this is a desirable outcome, and I think most would argee.

I think the answer is pretty straightforward to me. If the internet hadn't been what it was then I probably couldn't even communicate with you, because I would never have picked up enough English to do so. This is just one effect of so much of the internet being freely accessible. If payment had been required I probably would've stuck to my native language sites, if I had used the internet/computers at all.

I think the internet providing so much information for free is what made it so amazing. I understand that it's not really free, but it's at no monetary cost to the user. The moment you slap a monetary cost on it you create a disincentive for the user to engage with the service.

I do understand though that nothing is free. We are probably going to pay a large price as a society for it.

It can easily be argued that a lot of these services are a net negative and it would have been better for everyone if they never got off the ground in the first place.

I'm okay with killing everything currently online (given backups, of course) in exchange for a sensible micropayment/nanopayment architecture.

Ads must die.

If Facebook etc. wouldn't exists if users knew their prices – ad-infested websites require everyone to pay because companies recoup the cost of advertising by charging higher prices – then by the logic of a market economy they shouldn't exist.