The internet is broken because it is free

Everything in life is constraint bounded including time and attention and computer capacity. When you have free email, you get spam. When you have free video uploads, you get low quality advertising funded content, when you have free search, you get SEO blogspam.

Microtransactions for everything would fix the internet. It should cost a small amount of money to send an email. It should cost a small amount to use a search engine or upload a video.

Advertising is a racket and it distorts incentives without actually producing much if anything in the way of economic good.

An effective search engine that has advertising as its revenue model is an oxymoron.

-criminals use the free internet now and use the free real world too. Crime is crime regardless whether it costs money to engage in or not. If gasoline was free do you think crimes would increase or decrease? I'd say probably increase.

-sure large corporations would be able to afford a large number of micro transactions but it seems that is better for society than a bunch of manipulative or irrelevant ads and user tracking.

-no

-poor people would still exist just like they do now. Watching the latest meme video is not a human right. Almost everywhere on earth internet service costs money. I don't see how it is different for content to also cost money.

-no you would not be required to charge for forums but it would be kind of stupid for you not to if most other people were doing it. Just like it would be stupid for restaurants to give away free food. Creating content takes time. Time equals money. Right now the surplus goes to mega advertising racketeers like facebook or google. I would rather see the returns to content creation go more to the creators or moderators.

For those of us old enough to remember, there was a time when people created things for fun on the internet. It cost pennies (relatively speaking) to do it, and it still does, and there was no worry that we were being exploited in the process. And there was no expectation that when I visited your web page about the electronics behind purple Beany Babies that you were trying to monetize and data mine the shit out of me.

Plus, the website owners didn't give a shit if they knew who I was or not: if they really cared (and I really cared) I could sign the guestbook.

Some of them eve had ads. Nothing wrong with a banner ad that relates to the content. Nothing at all. But that's not enough. The ad companies want to run javascript to figure out every single data point that they can about me and everything on my home network.

It's not my job to validate a company's business model on the internet. If they need ads or microtransactions to survive and all ads are blocked and no one pays for their content, then they die. End of!

No, I do not want that kind of internet. We used to have a perfectly functional internet without mega-corps wanting to fuck me over constantly. We used to have a perfectly functional internet without SEO spam. We used to have a perfectly functional internet without constant monitoring and having to prove who I was etc.

We can have it again too if we really want it.