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by bigbluedots 881 days ago
Ok, hear me out: Here is how to remove all unwanted ads from the Internet. ISPs move to subscription-based billing - a flat base fee to cover their own costs and some profit, plus a 'content' fee that is divided among the sites visited and the bandwidth used. The 'content' fee goes to a global rights association that distributes it to creators.
2 comments
JoshTriplett 880 days ago
No, for so many reasons. No, tracking is bad. No, a central organization will not do an equitable job of distributing fees even if it has invasive tracking information. No, a mandatory fee is unacceptable. No, not all sites visited deserve an equal share based solely on visits and bandwidth. No, there is no reasonable automated metric that would allow such division, as any possible metric can be gamed.

The moment something like this were put in place, sites would immediately start gaming the resulting perverse incentives. Sites get more share based on bandwidth? Useless background downloads. Sites get more share based on number of visits? Lots of background loads, content in multiple iframes, split across many pages, etc. Any metric you can think of can and will be gamed, other than "user says they want this site to get a share". (That can be gamed too, but only insofar as sites already compete for user attention.)

Here's how to remove unwanted ads from the Internet: get everyone to install an adblocker, put advertising out of business, observe better revenue models emerge out of necessity without having to fight to compete with "free with ads".

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stonogo 881 days ago
Why is the answer to "how to remove ads" always "track the hell out of everyone at some other layer"
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bigbluedots 881 days ago
If such a scheme we're to compensate content creators there'd have to be some way to determine how to slice up the revenue for them. Hits and data is one way. Your ISP probably already does that - at least re sites visited and data used.
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stonogo 880 days ago
They might try, but I tunnel all my traffic out anyway. In your proposal, my tunneling behavior would be morally equivalent to piracy. I don't think it's the world I want to live in.

Canada does something similar with cassette tapes and blank CDs; essentially pre-convicting the entire nation of copyright infringement and collecting punitive fees up front. I'm betting it didn't keep anyone from going hungry.

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