A New Internet Business Model?

Personally, I’m of the view that the internet is like a bulletin board: If you post your content publicly then it can be read publicly. Paywalls and required log-ins are perfectly OK.

I think what Cloudflare is advocating for is preservation of a “public+Ads” bundle where ads are viewed by a human. So they want to disentangle a computer reading something (the core premise of the internet) from a human putting eyes on it.

I wouldn’t mind see a world in which more content is private and the creator can decide how to monetize. It feels like Cloudflare stepping in to say public != public is an overreach.

"Make no mistake, the Internet has never been free."

Honestly, this sounds like a Mozilla press release. The spin is absurd

Before ISPs existed, someone else paid. Universities, governments, selected corporations, etc.

After ISPs (post-UUNet), internet subscribers have always had to pay

Who finances the data collection, i.e., the transfer of data from/about subscribers to the so-called "tech" company for commercial exploitation. Hint: It is not the so-called "tech" companies

When I first accessed the internet, and later the www, the term "creators" was never used to describe people who used it

Methinks "creators" is SillyCon Valley speak for "unpaid independent contractors". Why not use the term "producers"

The gigantic websites comprised of other peoples' work, today's so-called "platforms", are not "creators", they produce nothing. Despite billions of dollars at their disposal, and vast amounts of published material, their production costs are small. This is because production costs are outsourced to unpaid independent contractors. The material the "platforms" publish does not belong to them, they are only third party intermediaries (middlemen)

In the original internet, people publishing on the internet via websites produced the website content themselves

Today, "platforms" are not creating anything except a baited trap for people using the internet, whether they are "creators" (producers) or consumers, where internet users can be spied on for advertising purposes. And the targets of this surveillance and subsequent targeted advertising will even pay for sending the surveillance data collected to the interlopers

Today's "creators" may be paid (if they are lucky, like winning a lottery) or not (the other 99%, their free contributions serve as bait). But "make no mistake", it is not the third party intermediary "platforms" that pay "creators", it is advertisers, but only after the "platforms" (middlemen) take a cut

SillyCon Valley calls this an "ecosystem". But today's internet, cf. the original one, IMHO looks more like a toxic waste dump

an American company controlling the internet

I like the IDEA of residual payments for content on paper. Brave browser tried this, but it didn't get enough traction from publishers of note to be viable. But I think, at least in theory, the idea of me as a consumer having some money attached to my eyeballs for the person/people who created the content I'm seeking out is a good one. Paywalls are annoying and awful, and unfortunately they seem to encourage data hording and selling practices that are unsavory. But I like the model of simply opening the browser, visiting a page, and the creators getting some royalty from that. The system we have now is too exploitative - it extracts more value that it creates.