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.
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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.
…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.
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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.
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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?
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I am not operating under any such premise, but I am tired of arguing. It avails us not to continue this discussion.
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?