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Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

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Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#141

Post by PragmaticPulp »

nine_k wrote: post #69
asdff wrote: post #63

If only the web was supported by visitors contributing to hosting costs of a visited page directly out of their internet bill, instead of advertisement supporting the web, and visitors paying a flat fee to their ISP regardless of their use. Blogs could be sustained with little readership considering how cheap it is to host a lightweight website that sees little traffic, and larger websites like HN would pay for their…

I would say that hosting a blog has an effectively zero monetary cost, that is, not distinguishable from the noise floor of daily spending, like an extra latte. For static blogs, even several completely free options exist. The real cost of maintaining a blog is the time one spends to compose, edit, proofread, sometimes illustrate a blog post. And no, you don't think about a post only while you're working in it; you t…

> This cost can hardly be remunerated by every reader paying a few cents, unless your readership is in tens of thousands at least, and the money allow you to actually free up some time for writing.

Extrapolating further, people spend orders of magnitude more time, bandwidth, and server-side CPU resources for everything else they do on the internet: Scrolling JPEGs on social media sites, streaming gigabytes of Netflix movies.

Sending a 100KB blog post page to someone might take 0.00001% as many resources as streaming a 2-hour Netflix movie. If servers were paid according to resources used, blog authors would receive virtually nothing relative to all the multimedia based services.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#142

Post by swebs »

asdff wrote: post #67
warkdarrior wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BAT (the cryptoccurrency used in the Brave browser) allows you to do exactly that.

No it doesn't. Pay me 50 cents right now with your BAT. You can't. There is no inlet on my end for this BAT without the cruft of me setting up whatever is required. Yet you should be able to, considering we both have computers capable of connecting to each other over the internet. We both have bank accounts or money someplace. I can send you a file with scp trivially right now. Why can't I send you 50 cents over the…

>There is no inlet on my end for this BAT without the cruft of me setting up whatever is required

>I can send you a file with scp trivially right now.

You'd still have to set up "cruft" for that as well. Generating private keys, enabling port forwarding, configuring sshd, configuring firewall rules. I don't see how setting up some crypto wallet is unreasonable in comparison.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#143

Post by hkt »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #108
ganafagol wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Destroyed" may be a too strong word. It may currently be a little hidden below the layer of all the crap out there, but good journalism is not dead and once reasonable payment models have beeb worked out, it can easily come back. Mind you that this has not been going on for that long. 15-20 years maybe. In the bigger picture, that's nothing.

15 to 20 years is long enough to affect journalists’ ability to provide for their family and save for retirement, and signal to other possible high caliber journalists that journalism is not a viable path for them.

Confirmed: I've spent a long time trying to start a career in journalism in the UK and it is simply not possible. Freelance rates have hit close to zero unless you already know editors in person. Jobs are increasingly scarce as newspaper staffs shrink. Local papers which once had fifty employees will now have ten or fifteen. The descent has been brutal, the result is the foreseeable end of journalism as a fully fledged profession. Well, for those who don't know editors personally.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#144

Post by Guthur »

krapp wrote: post #88
joe_the_user wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free structure of the Internet was the only way it could have appeared and is still the only way most of it can operate, for good or for ill. Even more, people attacking the free part tend to evoke an image of all the other manipulative parts of modern media vanishing if people somehow pay. But the Wall Street Journal and to a lesser extent the New York Times, do their best to be paid but it's the same sort of pr…

Before the web, newspapers, magazines and other media could afford writers, editors and journalists, and the effect of the web was for print media to gut its infrastructure and budgets in favor of intern bloggers and clickbait because it couldn't be free and afford to compete with random no-budget sites and Twitter feeds otherwise. The news used to be worth paying for, and for some reason people seem to have convince…

I'm not sure that's the whole story. I feel that political leadership really woke up to how the cult of personality and limited attention spans could be used to manipulate the message for the masses.

It started much earlier in the US I believe but came into full swing in the UK with Tony Blair's Labour. [0] you can be sure she wasn't the only one, just someone that got caught.

News media in particular has become so polarised and only really feeds into it's own respective echo chambers, to the point where it's all but useless as an impartial presentation of facts and opinions.

There is still some great instructional and educational content on Web and it feels for the moment all of these issues are still limited to news and entertainment.

[0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1588323.stm

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#145

Post by tnzm »

kortilla wrote: post #94
m463 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I remember folks setting up peering agreements. What if that model had taken over? How about a neighborhood hub where you pay someone to put in a small fiber run from your house and choose a vendor who can run your traffic back and forth from that hub? Or maybe there's a citywide ring network everyone hooks into and you pay for out-of-city data? Or what if most cellphone data defaulted to wifi firs…

Most of the stuff people do online is non-local though. If any non-negligible amount of traffic was just staying in your local city, ISPs would have already optimized for it with direct local peering. As it stands though, it’s so little traffic that it’s not even worth a circuit in a local IXP.

It's a chicken-and-egg thing, methinks. When I started using the Internet in the early 00's, it was over a metered connection - but my ISP had a FTP server with content where traffic was unmetered, so people could download music and movies even on a meager data cap of 500MB (cheapest plan - I have fond memories of exceeding every metered plan by 2X, causing surcharges until my parents finally caved in and went for unmetered.)

This was later replaced by a private BitTorrent tracker as the government briefly tried to crack down on piracy a few years later; traffic between peers in that tracker was unmetered as well, as they were all clients of the same ISP.

This introduced a lot of people in my city to torrenting; a few more years down the road, data caps were relaxed and eventually removed, another ISP's local tracker evolved into the nationwide filesharing platform that my peers still cherish. (Sure, Hollywood got screwed, but there was minimal value they could extract from our market in the first place, considering the vastly different standard of living.)

Of course, I hear the ISP landscape in the USA is a little different; and with worldwide content streaming services like Netflix and Spotify being paid monthly, usage patterns have surely changed. Maybe today's equivalent would be local ISPs playing the privacy card and providing self-hosted encrypted NextCloud instances?

I'm not sure what percentage of local traffic would this amount to, but it's not that difficult to imagine a world where the atomization of society driven by the non-locality of the Internet is offset by the fact that your cloud services are at least hosted in the same jurisdiction as yourself, and where the Web serves as an augmentation to local communities. (My dark Balkan side does not discount the possibility of walking into one's ISP's office and kicking their asses for fucking with one's connectivity or data, legal consequences notwithstanding - good luck pulling that on Comcast, or flying to Dublin or Frankfurt or wherever to kick Google's ass!)

Maybe it's a little difficult to imagine how this can be competitive to the current globalized landscape though. It would effectively go against the interests of the same entities that fund the underlying infrastructural development, and besides political pushback (e.g. my ISP contract prevents me from redistributing the connection to my neighbors, although I hear this scheme is nonetheless widespread elsewhere) there might also be purely technical scaling issues (such as the existing technology simply being poorly adapted to whatever novel model of organizing connectivity eventually sticks.)

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#146

Post by mschuster91 »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #127
mschuster91 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the axe descends, the only sentence can be "You have violated the ToS." > I am not sure what the alternative would look like, but for anyone with complaints about the current situation, it is important to examine just how we got here. One alternative could be to restore the authority of the processes that societies have evolved over the last two hundred years - courts . Given that modern social networks essent…

> Given that modern social networks essentially act as public space But that's the thing: they aren't public spaces. The number of people which have their content hosted on a private platform is inconsequential to the legal nature of the platform. Social media are very much subject to legal regulations and lawmaking. Calling a space which is governed by a private entity that doesn't represent you / answer to you, as…

> But that's the thing: they aren't public spaces.

They are the de-facto places where online discourse is held, and at least German courts have acknowledged that even speech that borders on hate speech is a part of public opinion forming (e.g. https://www.idowa.de/inhalt.gerichtsurteil-nach-sperre-faceb... or https://www.e-recht24.de/news/facebook/11029-neues-facebook-...).

> Calling a space which is governed by a private entity that doesn't represent you / answer to you, as "public" is a contradiction.

It is not, even in the meatspace. Spaces that are open to the public yet governed by private entities are also covered under the freedom of assembly (e.g. airports, see https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/bverfg-zur-versamml... or train stations, see https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.gerichtsurteil-zum...).

> That's the most direct way of legitimizing their dominance in modern telecommunication networks.

In Germany, telecommunications providers are actually banned from terminating your access by law (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tkg_2004/__45k.html); the only exceptions are non-payment and spoofing fraud. The reason for this is that access to telecommunication networks is seen as a vital basic right to participate in society.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#147

Post by mschuster91 »

lawtalkinghuman wrote: post #115
mschuster91 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The situation we're in now is bad, but needing a judge to sign off on every moderation action would be much, much worse. I had not meant that every moderation action would need a judge, but that every person should have the legal right to appeal and plead their case in front of a judge instead of hitting stone walls.

What the civil court system desperately needs: more lawsuits from people who got banned from web forums.

At least in Germany, you can file a c&d order ("Abmahnung") without ever having to see a court. Seeing a court is the escalation option in case the counter party does not react to your Abmahnung.

And besides: that access to legal protection is what taxes and court fees are paying for!

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#148

Post by hnbad »

karol wrote: post #117

I hate the idea of wrapping all interactions into transactions. It flies in the face of an idea that might I want to give something away for free. I would then presumably need to package this into a transaction for 0 cents. Economy is part of life, but we also interact on biological, spiritual and emotional planes which may be driven by different economies.

It's the logical conclusion to neoliberalism though. We're already coerced to view our personal time as a finite resource we "spend" on activities and to constantly consider our return on investment, to optimize our leisure time for maximum enjoyment and recovery. Even friendships and relationships are thought of as transactional and talked about in terms of how much you get out for what you put in. And anyway how is your side hustle going? Do you really need to binge another show on Netflix when you could be writing that pitch deck?

Yes, not everybody does that and not everybody does that to the fullest extent, but it's the same ideology just applied to every last facet of interaction.

Of course this isn't how the web started. The Internet was built on military technology and first settled by scientists, amateurs and aspiring tech nerds. Everything was free because it seemed obvious that "information wants to be free", which really just meant charging for bytes more than it cost to generate, store and transfer them (i.e. deriving "surplus value" or "profit" if you want) seemed like a rip-off even when commercial BBSes started popping up. If you wanted to put an edge on it, you could even call the early web a form of "primitive communism".

But there's no reason to bring politics into discussions of technology of course. Running websites costs money and how else are people supposed to turn a profit on providing a service if we don't find better ways for them to charge visitors for access?

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#149

Post by pjc50 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #131
pjc50 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative on offer in the 80s definitely did make every transaction a financial transaction: the phone company. We can have a look at what the world might have been without the Internet's decision to build without a billing layer, and indeed to route around billing, without needing a time machine. It would have been a faster version of Prestel and Minitel. Fully centralised, with national borders. All the TOS i…

If payments had been built into the structure of the internet, they could have been done in an optional way. Per memory, that's how the original RFCs looked? Which means you still would have had free content, as well as paid. The fascinating historical bit is when you follow the cross-border issue... it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individua…

> it would have required efficient, scalable (small to large amounts) international monetary transfers between individuals.

That would have caused it to face even bigger barriers to adoption, surely? The UK only just abolished capital controls in 1979: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_Controls_in_the_Unite...

The current cryptocurrency system (cryptography itself was subject to arms control until 1991!) relies on being able to use a credit card to transfer real money to a (usually foreign) exchange, do some transactions, and then receive a wire back with the real money. All of which are products of the Internet itself.

Re: Paid in Full: an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction

#150

Post by jtbayly »

minikites wrote: post #112
austincheney wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not an itemized receipt of what I pay. The accounting arithmetic to produce such is nontrivial. Asking any nontrivial calculation of the general public may as well be fantasy. For example it would be great to receive a receipt indicating that I paid $10.12 for school meal programs (0.31% of my tax contributions) if I don’t have children in school.

The problem with this idea is your premise that you shouldn't have to pay for school meals if you don't have children. Paying for school benefits everyone, even the childless, because it's good for society. The idea of itemized taxes reduces your interaction with others and society down to a capitalist transaction, which is not a healthy foundation for civilization. People are more than their productivity and your sy…

Somehow you got confused. Paying for a meal for somebody at school is not the same thing as paying for that person to go to school.
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