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.
In that case, your “email” is included with your ISP. You can be an at comcast.net or whatever if you really want to.
Aside from that: Your boss pays Sally. So why should they pay you? You should just work for free
Which is the “problem” with not having a single monolithic entity (no, even Google doesn’t count). Comcast gets their cut but Youtube doesn’t. And then the Creators who make the stuff you watch on Youtube don’t get paid either.
I’m not saying Google shouldn’t get paid. I’m saying that there are standard Internet services that are used widely enough that they could be bundled with what we already pay. We pay enough already to have those basic services included.
So we pay the ISP, the ISP pays the service provider, and the service provider pays the content creator. We pay enough to the ISPs that we shouldn’t have to pay extra for these basic services.
Again, your boss pays Sally enough. Why should they have to pay you? She can figure it out
Also, 80 bucks a month is NOT that much in the scheme of how many servers need to be maintained to get you your cute kitten video (whether it is a lot more than comcast needs to throttle your connection is a different discussion). By the time that trickles down to the person who made that helpful youtube channel about how to replace a bath tub faucet? It is not even a penny.
And this is WHY a lot of smaller content creators are very much worried about the ever growing shift to patreon models. Because that overly benefits the large content creation groups. Someone will pay 5 bucks a month for a couple dozen hours of podcasts from a big group. They aren’t going to pay that for a single video by someone who ACTUALLY went through what “the paper trick” is for a 3d printer. Which gets back to there being a monolithic entity that controls and produces all content on the internet.
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.