Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web

Irrelevant.

That's not the payment transaction. You are not paying for content with ad views. You're paying when you buy products and services which advertise online.

Why would you care?

Because unlimited recourse to view, then withdraw payment, torpedoes the system.

You've also got the matter that under a syndication system, all views are retail views, regardless of source. Where advertising promotes piracy schemes benefitting publishers at the expense of authors, a Syndication scheme would fairly benefit both.

A "net traffic" based system would eliminate this concern: it simply doesn't matter where your work is served from, so long1as it's served. And no, it's not necessary to measure via privacy-invading mechanisms:

1. Zipf power functions mean that a small number of major sites are the bulk of traffic. You monitor these.

2. You're concerned with served traffic volumes. Other than eliminating suspect traffic, it doesn't matter who is accessing content, only how many. Yes, you've got a views-inflation issue to deal with, there are methods for mitigating that.

3. Sampled traffic estimates are used to model total traffic. That's apportioned across total funds for apportionment.

There's probably going to be some level of bundling, and it may be that specific creators market through specific syndicates, rather than directly. But in general, you're going to end up with payment based on actual access and funded through an indirect, general, tax or fee.

Google and Amazon serve only specific markets. There are large parts of the world with some Internet access but limited payment or finance systems. Credit card fraud is a thing, $11.3 billion worldwide in 2012, up 15% from prior year, and breaches of credit and payment data details are running to the hundreds of millions if not billions[1]. Individually transactionalised online payments are a considerable risk. Ecommerce for all its touted benefits remains a modest fraction of total retail, favoured strongly in B2B space, that is, established relationships and regular transactions.

Also noted that you've failed to address access issues for the poor, children, researchers, and creatives themselves, all of which a general fee would cover.

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Notes:

1. "Skimming off the top" http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21596547...

(Libraries providing content in digital form also do: CDs, DVDs, eBooks).

I don't see how a flat tax would be any better for the poor, than direct payment?

I feel like I'm repeating myself. Oh, because I am. Information is social infrastructure, benefitting all:

● Information goods typically have very high positive externalities -- they benefit those who don't directly consume them.

That is, a tax, particularly one scaled to income:

● Captures the otherwise uncompensated benefit to those who benefit by information even without directly paying for it. Among the benefits I'm referencing is living in an accurately informed public, which requries accurate, relevant, and timely news. Problems with compensation of news media are an ongoing problem. But entertainment matters as well: here's looking at you kid, whether you've paid to watch Casablanca or not.

● Is scaled to income/wealth. Just as the wealthy have benefitted more from society, they're paying on that basis. Dittoes for information.

● Information is raw material. Any denied access is lost social potential and deadweight cost.

your model would appear to me to extend the status quo -- where a lot of low quality content get a lot of views

That is a concern, and something I'm concerned with. It's addressed in a follow-up article (not listed above):

"Specifying a Universal Online Media Payment Syndication System" https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specify...

"Some level of price tiering. Seems that there should be a recognition that some content is considerably more cost-intensive than others. I've been pondering how to address this, and don't have a good metric, though assigning either authors or works to specific categories, and setting compensation tiers appropriately, could help. This might also be a way to avoid the Gresham's Law dilemma of crap content driving out good. If crap content has zero (or even negative) prices, then there's no (or at least less) economic incentive to produce it. Rewarding highly complex work based on its inputs would also be of benefit. To be developed but several models exist."

There are a number of related articles found searching for "content sindication" on my subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=content+syndic...

At the very least, you're breaking out of the blockbuster model and restrictions imposed by advertisers or agents on what gets created in the first place. We're already seeing this to some extent now. Sturgeon's Law applies: 90% of everything's crap. But with sufficient filter and recommendations systems, the good stuff can be found (though addressing that is another challenge).

There's also the issue of addressing quality and especially truth/relevance in informational content (news, research results). That's something else I'm kicking around. It's largely independent of content syndication, though possibly not entirely so.

How do you see taxation/fees working across borders?

Good question, and one I hadn't really considered, but I'd divide it out into respective chunks:

1. Let's get back to the goal here: it's to provide sufficient compensation to authors and artists of works distributed in electronic form with a minimal of interference, overhead, control, cencorship, or privacy invasion, while enabling, facilitating, and encouraging open distribution of such works. It's not "build a perfect utility-capture system", and it's not "prevent the least amount of unauthorized / uncompensated use."

To that end, a first-order solution to foreign use is "it doesn't matter.

But let's say that's not quite satisfactory.

2. The total global GDP is presently about $70 trillion. Roughly half of that by nominal GDP is contained within the G7 nations: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US.[1] The G20 (20 largest economies) are 85%.[2] The OECD -- 34 nations -- ⅔ of global GDP.[3] Again, Zipf power functions are your friend. This puts the lion's share of interest in a subset of the 206 sovereign states of Earth.

As with other international tariff treaties (postal, telecoms), most are based on bidirectional rights. If your country's producing significant informational goods, you'll have higher incentives to strike a deal with other countries. States which produce little by way of intellectual property would of course have little incentive. Most of these would be developing nations.

Note as well: this scheme would be fully compatible with CC or Free Software/OpenSource licensing. Authors/creators could register and be eligible for compensation.

3. And as with broadcast, your interest is finding a representative population to sample*. The largest providers, servers, or ISPs within a given nation. If this is based on some sort of licensing arrangement, you'd be looking at those parties to set up monitoring and enforcement.

So: first approximation, don't worry about it and treat each nation independently.

Second: scale out among largest economies first.

Third: approach largest broadband / connectivity providers first.

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Notes:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G7_(major_advanced_economies)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oecd

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states

Ironically, in the media world, cable/network, both models of content distribution market existed, there is public station yet there is HBO. Why "HBO" never took place in the web world is a mystery.

Back then, Internet literally made many bad things easier and harder for law and law had to adapt.

You get the point. Why do you think internet today is going back to Aol, technology is always a result of culture.