When you pay your water bill, you aren’t just paying for the upkeep of the pipes that brought the water to your house – you’re also paying for the production of that water. The internet should be no different.
Besides paying a fixed monthly cost to your ISP for the physical connection, there should be a tiny monetary amount – a fraction of a cent – attached to each HTTP request you make, that can go towards covering server costs. Currently sites have no choice but to pay for their upkeep with advertising. Replacing this with direct payments would drastically curtail the data broker and surveillance industry that currently lives off of it.
How server costs would be measured, and whether sites would be allowed to charge a premium on top of that (eliminating paywalls, but also making web browsing a much more price-weary activity) is up for debate.
But currently using the internet is like paying for a car, without paying road tax.
…Yes.
But it would create a perverse incentive to load websites/data, somehow. That would be grifter/spammer heaven.
Only if they actually made a profit off the requests. If the request prices were forced to be just the exact incurred server cost, this would be neutralized. I agree that calculating and enforcing that would be very hard though.
And you’re right, if they were allowed to make a profit, it would shift the incentive to minimize the number of HTTP requests from the web dev (where it lies today) to the website visitor,.
That’s not possible, but don’t throw good money after bad. The direction of your idea is sound