This isn't an issue. You either have the ability to pay the monthly fee (which would probably enable cheaper subscriptions, saving people money), or you can't afford it & you'll experience the same web experience you have now.
For people in lower economic areas, their monthly fee would be relative to the median income (hence the "integrated into your internet bill").
What I'm saying is we have a solution that is being suppressed. It would fix the internet for 80% of people, and the other 20% would experience no downside.
I hate that we still are talking about this. Ads suck, and there's already a better way to do things.
Micropayments are the answer. Everyone on the internet pays a small monthly fee, say $5/month (ideally this would just be integrated into your internet bill), and every piece of content you view streams tiny amounts of that fee to whatever content you are viewing. The actual amount sent is based on your monthly usage, and never goes over that $5/month cap. People who browse less send more.
A webextension tested this years ago & it was sweet. Businesses could be sustainable on there own, no ads, no data selling. If you have viewers, you have currency. But, it wasn't a seamless experience so it didn't take off.
Make no mistake: This is the best possible way to fund the open web, which is exactly why Google pretends it doesn't exist. If chrome had this feature built in & people never had to think about it, ads would drop to near 0 incredibly fast. Google says no.
We are doomed to have an enshittified web because the powers that be won't integrate sustainable funding mechanisms.
That's pretty funny, and is literally what I did with a CLI tool I made once. It was supposed to loop through something that was over 10,000 entries long. It finished in under a second.
I decided to add a small fraction of a second every X iterations and output some garbled data to the terminal. I got paid a nice little sum because of that. Sometimes, knowing how to make something look complicated is as important as doing something complicated.
I think the tool they used came from their capital reserves. IIRC they had about a billion dollars worth of BTC, and they have money from other sources as well. So they got liquidity to buy up all the sellers of UST on exchanges and stopped it from going to zero. If you have enough capital to soak up the supply, then you're good.
I'm not familiar with how Google does it with Android & Chromebooks, do you have a similar level of understanding there? Your explanation was very good, thank you for that information. I'm now wondering if Google is just small enough (with their OS operations) that they don't face these issues, or if they do something different.
Hot Take that no doubt will meet a lot of doubt:
I would make a prediction that Window's next OS, is going to be semi-Linux based.
Imagine Windows doing to their OS the way they did with their browser, forking opensource code and rebranding it as their own. I could see them deciding to take some flavor of Linux (or maybe even something esoteric like Google's Fuchsia), and just slapping on their bloat & spyware.
I don't think this would damage Microsoft's marketshare as much as some people think. Sure, they no longer have "their own codebase", but I don't see the benefit in that. Hell, they could go lower & build off the actual Linux kernel and then build there own distro off of that. That way they can still enforce certain structures at a low level.
I would deeply enjoy this, although I would not use it (sticking with Linux). But imagine Microsoft embracing & advocating for AppImages/Flatpaks/Snap packages, Vulken, WINE/Steam Proton, etc. Imagine building for only 2 platforms to get your app running on (nearly) all devices. Imagine having Linux on the desktop get the same treatment it got with Linux on mobile.
Again, I understand this sounds like I'm predicting pigs will fly, or it'll rain cats & dogs, or the government will be efficient, but I'm serious, I can see this happening. Maybe not soon, but the next decade could be very interesting to see how this fabled "new" Microsoft moves & behaves.
I highly doubt Google would embrace something that kills there business without having a plan.
Off the top of my head I can think of 3 scenarios:
1. Google is investing in tech that allows them to index canvas-rendered items (putting them far ahead of all other search engines if they are the only ones with this tech)
2. Google will put out an "index.txt" guideline ushering in a new way to create SEO content for the internet (there are problems here but, like with anything, they can be addressed in time)
3. Google might ditch indexing altogether and look into alternative ranking methods (curation groups? popular in your social sphere? heavier reliance on ads?)
And then Charlie walks out and goes "Ooooh, uh oh, uh yeah, guys you know what... I think I know what they mean. Last week when everyone was talking about the virus, I had just watch this really cool cyber hacking movie on TV last night, so I kinda zoned out and didn't know what our next scheme was, so when I went home I paid someone on the darkweb for a virus just like in that movie-"
Dennis: "How the hell do you have money to pay people on the darkweb Charlie?"
Charlie: "KittenCoin"
Dennis: "Oh god dammit, KittenCoin? You did that huh? Alright, checks out. Anyways, so then what happened?"
Charlie: "Well then I didn't really know what we were doing still, so I just emailed the file the russian kid sent me to your email, but I totally messed up the address cause my fingers were all sticky with peanut butter at this point and-"
Dennis: "WHY WERE YOUR- You know what, not only do I not wanna know, but I'm also gonna take a stab at how this story ends. Charlie, are you telling me you made a scam cryptocurrency and then used the profits to pay some sketchy russian hacker for a ransomware virus which you then emailed to a random address with a subject line something along the lines of "FOR FRIEND, IMPORTANT FILE, FOR PLAN, GIVES MONEY", which obviously enticed the random receiver to open said email promptly starting a massive email worm that managed to spread its way into the government's oil pipelines?"
Charlie: "That's... Uh, yeah, yup, yup, that's pretty much spot on dude, I'm pretty sure."
For people in lower economic areas, their monthly fee would be relative to the median income (hence the "integrated into your internet bill").
What I'm saying is we have a solution that is being suppressed. It would fix the internet for 80% of people, and the other 20% would experience no downside.