Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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?
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?