It's worth talking about, though, and to some extent, it's worth worrying about. If the only economic mechanism for getting stuff on the internet is direct pay-for-use, the the internet as we know it is dead. The biggest problem is that the overhead costs of tracking who is entitled to what would put a huge anchor around the neck of anyone who wanted to launch a new service or content site. The truth is, most internet users could probably afford to spend $10 or maybe a little more per month to pay for what they read and use online. Some people could afford hundreds, but for every one of them, there are ten internet users who can afford next to nothing. And it wouldn't be worth it for most pay-based systems to charge much less than a few dollars. So that means that most people would only be able to afford to subscribe to a few services. That would make the internet worse than AOL.
Speaking of AOL, probably the most workable pay-for scenario looks a lot like AOL, with people paying a flat fee for access to a whole vertically integrated content network, run by one entity or a federation of affiliated publishers, who shared the revenue. But the AOL walled garden compared very unfavorably to the free internet back in the 90s, and it would look even worse today.
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