Privacy concerns are a very popular and valid talking point on Lemmy, so I would like to gather your thoughts and opinions on this. (Apologies if it’s already been discussed!)
Would you support this? Would it work or even be viable? (If it could somehow overcome the rabid resistance from these big companies). What are your thoughts?
Personally, I’m getting more and more agitated at the state of this late stage global capitalism, where companies have the gall to ask you to pay or subscribe to their products, while they already make money from you for selling your data. It’s been an issue for a long time now, but seems to really be ramping up.
How many people would you estimate use the internet? I’m paying $100 per month per person on my household. If you multiply $100 per month times the number of people who use the internet, I’m sure you have enough for servers, infrastructure, programmers, and plenty left over for content creators.
Sally and I work for the same company. The company pays both of us. The customer pays the company. If the customer already pays the company, should they have to pay Sally extra for her involvement?
Again, your entire premise is that The Internet is one company. It isn’t.
And, again, you are VASTLY underestimating the cost of these massive services like Youtube or Twitch. There is a reason that the only two viable ones are backed by The Company That Owns The Internet and The Company That Owns Internet Shopping and that both are HEAVILY leveraged by the cloud compute offerings provided by said companies. And the vast majority of social media companies aren’t much better and are built around more or less operating at a loss and relying on venture capital and a buyout by someone dumb enough to buy tumblr (and Yahoo ain’t buying much more these days).
Are ISPs being vastly overpaid? Yes, yes, and yes. But even if all of that money were distributed out, it wouldn’t cover all of the content you watch. Like, we all made fun of twitter for not even being able to host an episode of a fox news sitcom. But that is because it is not just hosting in that case. It is about setting up a content distribution network such that there is availability to everyone who wants to watch it and they can get it in a timely fashion.
Like, let’s think back to video rentals. If 900k people wanted to rent Showgirls then you needed 900k VHS tapes. Except… no. You need more. Because John in Spokane is horny now. He isn’t going to wait the two weeks it takes for headquarters to ship a VHS out to the Blockbuster in Spokane. And headquarters isn’t going to ship a single VHS. They are going to box up a batch of them to save on postage costs. So instead, you need to predict how many copies of Showgirls each Blockbuster needs. You know that the 4th Street Blockbuster in Pittsburgh doesn’t really bother to rent softcore stuff, but apparently the 6th street in Spokane LOVES skinemax. So maybe send one copy to the former and ten to the latter.
And that is the internet except it is happening on a massive scale. Which is a big part of why netflix et al are purging their back catalog.
I am not operating under any such premise, but I am tired of arguing. It avails us not to continue this discussion.