[Animats]

Kahle's approach works only for static content. It's not hard to distribute static content; BitTorrent does it just fine. The Internet Archive stores static content. Kahle thinks in terms of static content, because that's what the Internet Archive does. But it's less of the Web today. Despite that, it's good to have a way to distribute static content. Academic publishing, after all, is almost all static content. That should be widely distributed. It's not like academic journals pay their authors.

There's the problem that distributing content means someone else pays for storing and serving it. This is part of what killed USENET, once the binary groups (mostly pirated stuff and porn) became huge. There's a scaling problem with replication.

Federated networks are interesting, and there are several federated social networks. A few even have a number of servers in two digits. You could have a federated Facebook replacement that costs each user under a dollar a month at current hosting prices. No ads. The concept is not getting any traction.

Kahle wants a system with "easy mechanisms for readers to pay writers." That's either micropayments or an app store, both of which are worse than the current Web.

[substack]

There are extensions to distributed protocols like bittorrent that are already deployed to address mutable, non-static content. The approaches I know of address content under the hash of the public key. One of these approaches is http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html and ipfs supports this technique too.

If you have a single mutable pointer, you can build a feed of data that points at immutable content by its hash, which could replace the data model of twitter, facebook, or many other social networking web services. The benefits to decentralized distribution are huge: native offline functionality, trivially transferable identity, longevity and robustness against providers shutting down, direct commerce without middlemen.

Payments, or perhaps ISP-style peering arrangements may help with the spam/large binary problem. A big part of distributing the data model will also involve distributing the costs, but this is somewhere non-profits like the Internet Archive can play a very important role.

[gglitch]

Why are micropayments worse than the current web? People have differing opinions on the advertising-pays-for-content-so-don't-block-it issue, but are you referring to something technical?

[dredmorbius]

Multiple reasons, though many boil down to Gresham's Law or similar: it's difficult to assess the quality of information, particularly when disaggregated. Most media advances have occurred through bundling rather than unbundling options: magazines, books (collected parchments, monthly serials), subscriptions. Even advertising-supported broadcast and Web models work by aggregating product, though in this case, eyeballs sold to advertisers.

See:

"Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...

Nick Szabo: "The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments" http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html

Jacob Nielsen tries to make the opposite case. He's wrong. "The Case For Micropayments" http://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/

I see a mix of some advertising, patronage, and a content syndication system similar to the existing performance payment model for music (broadcast, commercial establishment use) via ASCAP and the Harry Fox agency as most likely: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...

See Phil Hunt's UK proposal: "A broadband tax for the UK?" http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...

[e12e]

With apologies for not reading all the references you list before asking:

> it's difficult to assess the quality of information, particularly when disaggregated.

Do you mean that it's difficult in general, or in terms of "should I buy this"? I could see micropayments work similar to Kindle - a 24 hour no-questions, semi-automatic refund policy. Don't think that article was worth 50 cent? Just "unpay" for it.

[dredmorbius]

It's difficult for a number of reasons, which I spell out in the essay you've failed to read:

Market mechanisms work best where goods are uniform (either individually or on aggregate average), their qualities are readily determined (or again tend to average out well), where the fixed costs of production are low and marginal costs of production high (relative to one another), and externalities, both positive and negative, are small relative to market price.

Information goods violate virtually all these assumptions.

● Quality is highly variable.

● Quality assessment is difficult, and often frustrated by other factors (e.g., pay-to-publish journals, "friendly" colleague peer reviews, discussed recently by Joerg Fliege at The Other Place).

● Quality isn't, and often cannot, be known in advance.

● Variance of individual instances is high enough that averages rarely suffice.

● Fixed costs of production are high, particularly for research, also to an extent for selection, review, and editing.

● Variable costs of production (e.g., publication) are low. In fact we're utilizing a system which was specifically created to reduce those costs still further, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, developed to transmit physics papers between CERN, SLAC, and other related facilities.

● Information goods typically have very high positive externalities -- they benefit those who don't directly consume them. Occasionally they have high negative externalities -- e.g., smallpox, "superflu", or weapons research.

There's the question of what does a content payment scheme provide? Of which the answer is, generally, "an incentive to create content". What matters isn't whether or not each individual information trasnfer is equitably priced, but whether, at some reasonable interval (e.g., at years' end) you've got sufficient compensation for authors, researchers, reporters, etc., to provide an adequate supply of information and entertainment.

When distribution was on physical media, printing and transactional sales were reasonably appropriate. With the price of reproduction* approaching zero, but nonzero fixed costs of production, there's an inherent conflict in the mechanisms which allow for price discovery in markets.

[e12e]

Right. But it's easy, after reading an article,to decide: this was interesting: I don't need my quarter/dollar back?

Granted most posts are crap, and also probably most of the stuff that's worth a quarter to some are not worth it to most. But publicatuon is free - if one million people doesn't pay for your book, that's fine if 5000 pays an average of 20 USD for it?

[dredmorbius]

Consider two schemes for payment of content.

A: You must decide, for each piece of data or information you consume, whether and how much it is worth to you. I'll note that in this discussion, not only did you not pay to read a work, but you couldn't even be bothered to click a link to examine it. Which, actually, I applaud as a rational behavior: the odds of being rewarded with quality content by following an arbitrary link posted on an Internet discussion site by someone who's preferred description is "space alien cat" is fairly low.

But it also rather handily demonstrates the specific failure mode of micropayments.

B: Information is paid out of a general cultural tax, apportioned by wealth or income. You may access as much (or as little) of the availed information as you choose. Creators are paid according to the access and performance of their works, tracked by one or more monitoring services.

Under the first scheme, there are numerous issues: the rich and poor have vastly different information access, as do children. Researchers who might reference many works (though often only in brief fragments) would have tremendous data charges, as might musicians or authors or photographsers, who typically have large reference libraries of relevant works. Those who don't directly consume information but benefit by its effects on society as a whole pay nothing. Remixes of works would be difficult to arrange given complex rights negotiations.

Under the second scheme, there's no concern at the time of access whether or not the work is worth paying for (though in circumstances where you're accessing physical resources or premeses: a book, a recording, a performance venue) you would still typically pay. Children and the poor would have as much access as any other. Researchers and artists could reference works as needed without concern as to cost. Remixes of works would be straightforward. Payment would be made regularly throughout the year.

At first blush, scheme A describes what we have today, and scheme B is a utopian broadband tax / content syndication scheme. Actually, this is entirely backwards: scheme B is largely the system we have in place today, except that instead of a government-imposed tax, it's one based on advertisers and paid through higher prices for goods purchased regularly throughout the year. Total advertising spending in the United States is $181 billion per year -- $567 per person in 2014.[1] Artists are paid through either ratings-based metrics for music, or according to negotiated television contracts for actors, screenwriters, and such. There's one key difference though: under an advertising-based system, it's ultimately the advertiser who calls the shots on content, and content is geared to maximise advertising-based appeal. This shapes both the types of works produced and the topics covered.

A broadband tax approach changes one element of this: how revenues are collected. It's either through an access provider (your ISP, cable, or broadband service), or through a public tax imposed independently. Allocate some or all of the $567 per-person advertising cost presently collected, and it would be transferred directly to authors, composers, musicians, actors, reporters, researchers, etc. Without the advertising middleman.

Your micropayments scheme requires a middleman and payment processor, trusted by both crators and consumers, some way of providing for refunds, and the somewhat problematic issue that there are limited capabilities to suck out any information you might have acquired but decided after the fact that you weren't interested in actually paying for. At least, without inflicting possible brain damage. How do I keep you from copying my book, or music, or photos, or movie?

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Notes:

1. US Advertising!spend!statisics: http://galbithink.org/ad-spending.htm

http://carisesuatu.loomhost.com/cari/Annual_Advertising_Spen...

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-united-states-to...

[bitcuration]

When content was distributed via physical good, the manufacture served as the "value appraiser" to invest in the cost of manufacture. This surely functioned as the price discovery but not ideal as it acts on behalf of consumers.

When the distribution cost down to zero, the value appropriator has now changed to advertiser or marketing campaign organization, but in online world is mostly viral though mostly still driven by underground campaign, have replaced the physical media manufacture/distributor and become the new price appraiser.

[Animats]

No, just the general failure of the pay-to-read model. Other than the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, few general publications with a paywall make money. They all have large, worldwide reporting staffs. Nobody is going to pay to read your blog.

Pando Daily is trying pay-to-read. It's too soon to tell how that will work out.

[michaelchisari]

The NYT/WSJ/Economist model is too exclusionary and the pricing isn't ideal.

I'm watching Blendle closely, because their model of micropayments for news content, mixed with no-questions-asked refunds I think could be huge.

[scholia]

Text is a rather small part of web traffic. Most bandwidth nowadays is used to deliver multimedia content (music and movies), much of it in real time.

Several people have written articles about how the Internet has been and is being changed to work as a more efficient video distribution network, which is a long way from the original idea.....

Some of that is paid for by subscriptions (eg Netflix, Spotify) though I assume the vast majority is -- like most radio and television -- paid for by advertising.

[doublerebel]

There absolutely should be distributed short-form knowledge. Only metadata needs to be exposed in order to find small facts. I don't think there is any need for payment per-datum for such knowledge. This kind of static content is simple to trust as well.

Long-form knowledge, in contrast, still has massive value and many channels exist for distribution and consumption already.

If we base the web of trust on facts combined with people then we can walk the short web and exit at the long-form.

However nobody wants to create a web of trust based on a system that encourages selfies and ephemeral knowledge -- we've tried that. And this is where things get interesting.