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.
The fundamental frustration is that people want to get a thing for free without any cost or inconvenience to them in the slightest.
And like, that’s valid - paying for things is annoying - but people generally aren’t in the habit of doing things for you for no personal gain. Put another way, it’s kinda nuts that, at no direct monetary cost, a person can access a functionally unlimited amount of video and music, can send instantaneous messages to nearly anyone on the planet, can create a personal repository of videos and images and share them with people you know, etc etc. The amount of things you can do in the modern world where the only cost is the mild annoyance of being advertised to is genuinely insane, especially given the massive technical and administrative challenges that come with running a platform like YouTube.
And while I do understand the desire for the option to actually pay money for services instead of data, the sheer fact of the matter is that, given the choice between something costing money and it costing data, 95% of people will choose the free option.
And at the end of the day, most of these things are not actually required to live. Even for services that are functionally necessary today, like email, there are privacy-focused services that provide it. There is simply no world in which a something like Gmail, YouTube, or Instagram exist without bringing in any revenue, because even ignoring the profit required by capitalism, running massive services like that comes with very large costs. The engineers and infrastructure alone cost a fortune, and that fortune has to come from somewhere, whether it be marketing budgets or user fees. We’re never going to get services of this nature without paying those costs in one way or another.
Yup
Like. a lot of us have grievances with reddit. But the third party apps were actively preventing corporate reddit from monetizing the site (and were often taking the money people might otherwise have paid as a subscription). reddit chose the route of disabling third party apps and changing nothing else which… was a choice
But other sites realize that you can use user data instead of ads. Rather than sell products to the user, they sell users to the products. And most people have zero issue with this because they never see an ad… at that site.
Its why I REALLY dislike the piped bot or whatever it is that automatically replies to every youtube link with “And if you don’t want to give them any money, click me”. That is just begging for google to go stupider with youtube (and they already are, at the “free” tier).
And it is why, for decades now, so many of us have been discouraging the use of adblockers by default. Use blocklists, not permit lists. Because if a site is responsibly serving up curated ads, let them. And if a site is not serving up ads in a way that you like… do you care about the site enough to visit it? But, people didn’t and now even the “good” websites are shilling dick pills and massively invasive tracking cookies because it was that or shut down.
All of which is why The Fediverse is gonna get REAL interesting over the next few months. Mastodon and Lemmy have had massive surges of users… which means storage and traffic costs. And it is going to be REAL interesting to see how the instance admins justify monetizing even while having bots that run around actively demonetizing other content (like the summary bot). Considering past experiences: There are gonna be some really pissed off and “betrayed” users
We already pay. Every month. I pay $85/mo to access the Internet from home and an additional $90/mo to access it from my phone. Add on my streaming bills and I’m paying roughly $2400/yr already. So yeah, YouTube should be free. Gmail should be free. No ads, no privacy violations, just included in what I’m already paying.
This used to be standard back with AOL and EarthLink. Your email was just included.
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.
…you do understand that you paying Comcast or whoever does not automatically give money to Google, right?
Not to mention, what you’re proposing is that the cost of all major internet service be included in your monthly internet bill, so you’d be paying for all of them, even if you don’t use them. And you would find this to be an improvement?
In case you’re unaware, running a service like YouTube is incredibly costly. The bandwidth costs alone are massive - YouTube is nearly 10% of all internet traffic - not to mention the cost of paying engineers and purchasing the infrastructure needed to support storing, processing, and streaming millions and millions of videos every day. Someone has to pay for that, whether it’s you subscribing to YouTube Premium, you watching ads, or your proposal of bundling service fees into your internet bill.
What a baffling lack of basic understanding of how the Internet works
Oh? So my understanding of how Google profits off user data is incorrect? My belief that the ISPs are profit-driven entities is inaccurate?
If the harvest and sale of user data had been made illegal in 1993 would Google have progressed the way it did? Would they be forced to charge a fee for their email and video hosting services? Would that have incentivized them to maybe make a deal with the ISPs to be included with the monthly payments we already make?
What if local government owned and maintained all the existing internet infrastructure? Would we have been able to choose which ISP we preferred all these years rather than essentially having to pick between coax or satellite? Would ISPs then have been incentivized to pick up additional services like email, video, and image hosting in order to gain more customers?
Are we experiencing the best possible version of the internet, or could it be better?