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.
Oh I see, so you’re saying that server costs are small enough to be negligible, and the ads/data harvesting are there ti serve as an additional profit stream?
Yes. A site serving 10 million users can operate on 2 servers costing $10/month if one does careful engineering.
The biggest costs are usually the people. A UBI system would be a much more efficient solution and actually preserve privacy.