Re:Vivaldi co-founder: Advertisers 'stole the internet from us'
by crazygringo on Sunday March 12, 2023 @12:42PM
(#35122377)
> Why does everybody want everything to be free?
To fully understand the question, we need to understand the alternative.
The only viable, practical alternative to a free, ad-supported internet is basically a monthly subscription one, where your ISP charges an extra $20/mo. (or allows metered usage) and the money gets distributed through some proportion of the pages you visit and the minutes of videos you watch. Basically the same way you pay Spotify $10/mo. and the money gets distributed to the artists you listen to, more or less.
But this would have required the government to step in and set this all up in a mandatory way which would have been totally against the original decentralized ethos of the internet. It requires massive tracking and so forth, and a centralized authority to manage all of the billing and payments.
And basically very few people want that. Hackers and libertarians are against the centralization and tracking, left-wingers are against the poor having to pay more for internet because it's almost like a regressive tax, consumers in general don't want to pay more for internet, and so forth.
Whereas nobody likes advertising, but they'll put up with it or just block it if they can.
(And the other funding alternative -- micropayments -- is dead in the water because everybody hates them. Nobody wants to be constantly deciding whether it's worth $0.02 or $0.07 or $0.12 or $0.87 to read this one news article on this one site when it might turn out to be a crappy, useless article anyways.)
To fully understand the question, we need to understand the alternative.
The only viable, practical alternative to a free, ad-supported internet is basically a monthly subscription one, where your ISP charges an extra $20/mo. (or allows metered usage) and the money gets distributed through some proportion of the pages you visit and the minutes of videos you watch. Basically the same way you pay Spotify $10/mo. and the money gets distributed to the artists you listen to, more or less.
But this would have required the government to step in and set this all up in a mandatory way which would have been totally against the original decentralized ethos of the internet. It requires massive tracking and so forth, and a centralized authority to manage all of the billing and payments.
And basically very few people want that. Hackers and libertarians are against the centralization and tracking, left-wingers are against the poor having to pay more for internet because it's almost like a regressive tax, consumers in general don't want to pay more for internet, and so forth.
Whereas nobody likes advertising, but they'll put up with it or just block it if they can.
(And the other funding alternative -- micropayments -- is dead in the water because everybody hates them. Nobody wants to be constantly deciding whether it's worth $0.02 or $0.07 or $0.12 or $0.87 to read this one news article on this one site when it might turn out to be a crappy, useless article anyways.)