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.
Kind of like Lemmy?
Lemmy is a charity. As you can probably tell, most of the economy, including the internet, is unable to run on charity, else that would be the dominant funding model
My point is that you seem to be presenting ads as the only other option, but it’s not - there are other ways to cover the cost ranging from financing it all yourself to making it subscription-based and everything in between. I don’t even necessarily disagree with your core idea but I want to highlight that there are creative ways to go about it rather than just defaulting to ads. As an extreme example, I’m a paying member of a community that’s subscription-based but anyone can just message the staff and get a year for free for whatever reason if they don’t want to pay, and they can do it again the next year if they want to. They’re handing out a crazy amount of free subscriptions but that doesn’t matter because there’s enough people paying to cover the costs.