@PixelJones What I'd really like to do is to get away from the per-item / per-use payment model, and instead think of the infostream as a distribution utility for which access rather than use is the principle consideration, and in which payment ability (wealth & income) rather than content value is the basis on which payments are made.

The questions of both what content is made available and how that content is compensated I'm leaving somewhat vague, though in general we have systems which work for this, and which have worked for nearly a century now based on broadcast & cable media, audit-based measurement (Nielson, Aribitron, etc.), distributor-based negotiations (with individual broadcast stations or networks), and something closely approaching a common-carrier model for the actual access providers (that is, ISPs).

The points @dangillmor raised are valid: a gatekeeper monopoly is a critical hazard, and is worth addressing from a competitiveness standpoint, independent of this proposal.

Why "all you can eat"? Two principle reasons:

1: Need for information is strongly independent of capacity to pay, and often inversely associated.

2: There are entirely novel capabilities afforded by access at scale which a usage-based payment model largely forecloses on. Aaron Swartz's work which lead to his prosecution and suicide based on wholesale downloading of JSTOR scientific papers is a key case in point. It's possible to look through, over, and among a corpus to find relationships not otherwise manifest. (I'm doing something along these lines with my #HackerNewsAnalytics series posted here on the Fediverse.)

The notion of an individual or household account, associated with personal mobile devices and/or household Internet service, from which pro-rata payments are then allocated amongst various providers is one option for compensation, though even that might well not be ideal. That imposes a huge surveillance component itself (who is reading, listening to, or watching what), and could well disproportionately benefit or starve less substantial or more substantial works. More critically on that last: works which are far more expensive to produce at quality, such as investigative journalism or scientific research.

Some sense of local, regional, national, and global providers / publishers, within genres, funded with a specific budget and for a minimum guaranteed time period, would provide the institutional stability to provide certain classes of work: news, education, business and government publications, academic research, and of course, entertainment.

And, again, multiple revenue streams, including premium subscriptions, patronage, advertising, etc., could well be additional components. But an access-based automatic and universally-billed tier really does seem to be a possibility that's rarely mentioned or advocated.

@cobalt

#UniversalContentSyndication #PayingForJournalism

@danyork There's an inherent conflict between useful and large, where a further problem is that financially viable relies on large by way of advertising.

This leads to An Inevitable Spiral of Suck. Or #Enshittification as @pluralistic so eloquently puts it.

#EzraKlein has been looking at attention, media, and journalism this past year, with a notably segment this past February: "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html

There's also A.G. Sulzberger interviewed by David Remnick at the New Yorker, with some powerfully-motivated argument:

I think there’s often sort of an imaginary person who wants to read these sources but is being boxed out of reading quality news because of the cost. I really don’t believe that is a real population in any significant number.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a-g-sulzberger-on-the-battles-within-and-against-the-new-york-times

(In the audio version of the interview, Sulzberger compares this to the cost of a Starbucks coffee, though not, say, McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts.)

I'm increasingly convinced that rolling a basic news service including the local and national newspapers of record into basic Internet service, at rates indexed to local cost of living, is a preferable, viable, and necessary alternative to advertising-supported, subscription-based, or a'la carte media pricing. Actually, I'd like to see that extended to all published content. The per-household costs would be low, particularly against the $600/person annual cost advertising alone represents.

#Advertising #media #subscriptions #InformationIsAPublicGood #UniversalContentSyndication

The HN thread I'd linked above gives an example of how it's possible to usefully set a tone or narrative on a discussion.

HN's seen a number of Z-Library items posted in the past few weeks, as first domains were seized and later it was announced that two principals were arrested in Argentina, apparently at the behest of the US DoJ and FBI.

Several of those threads had been diverted, at least for a time, by copyright maximalists. I see that as disappointing.

I've been thinking about and studying the question for quite some time (a few decades in some form or another), I've come across, or come up with, a few alternative suggestions, and I've seen many of the standard, often bogus arguments for the present system.

So when a new post showed up, drop a considered, well-cited, bit onto it that anticipates the usual BS, address the usual attacks (the "Son of Sam Law" one was particularly juicy), and at least in this one small way, slant the narrative toward the side of light for a change.

My main and first drop was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698018

It also helps to keep your ego out of the discussion (as much as possible), and see challengers as opportunities.

And of course, if anyone wants to suggest improvements to my approach, I'm open to them.

#ZLibrary #Copyright #InformationIsAPublicGood #UniversalContentSyndication

@babelcarp UCS is my own label for a proposal I've made, and previously linked my own description here in this toot from yesterday: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109169456092632336

(I'm inconsistent in terms, and occasionally refer to it as "universal media payment syndication", though UCS seems to be what I've mostly settled on.)

The initial proposal and a starting definition: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/

Searching the terms will turn up multiple further posts there, either refining the concept or pointing to other similar proposals:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+syndication&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all

I'd suggested ISPs / mobile data providers as the gateway / billing point after that though occurred to me as an alternative to a governmental / tax-based approach a few years later in an HN comment. I've repeated that a few times, not sure this is the first instance but it's one of several substantively similar suggestions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033

Other variants / discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20universal%20%28media%7Ccontent%29%20syndication&sort=byDate&type=comment

UCS similar to numerous other suggestions, including those by Richard M. Stallman https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.html, "\@cabalmat" (Phil Hunt) https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/, and Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stigletz who's said "knowledge is a public good":

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325. http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf

@kensanata

#UniversalContentSyndication #InformationIsAPublicGood

Edit: That's UCS not USC as I'd originally had it. My inconsistency on nomenclature is ... consistent. Also markdown.

@babelcarp Also, since you raise the bogus argument, let's dismiss it: this isn't about not paying journalists: what I'm proposing is specifically a mechanism that will ensure that journalists, and other writers and creators, DO get paid.

For a world which seems hell-bent on marketising all aspects of life, when it's blindingly obvious that the market isn't working, there's a remarkable reluctance to assign blame where it's due: on the market and its failure.

There's never been a significant direct market for journalism. Benjamin Day proved this when he created the penny press in the New York Sun in 1833.

I've mentioned Hamilton Holt's excellent 1909 essay / speech on the significance, and consequences, of advertising in news, Commercialism and Journalism. It's short, pithy, hugely informative, and highly readable.

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

As for television news, many of its features and failures are evident in the 1972 book News from Nowhere by Jacob Jay Epstein. Technology's changed some parameters since then, many (such as time constraints and audience maintenance) it's only worsened.

http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=14C940300F3D0EA68652013E3046A701

Newspaper readership in the US has been in a long--term, largely consistent decline since the 1950s. This is NOT a new development, though the endgame is now here.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2010/05/moderating-declines-parsing-the-naas-spin-on-newspaper-circ-data/

Overwhelmingly, the best journalism is either largely publicly-available as government- or philanthropically-supported organisations (national broadcasters, The Guardian, Pro Publica, and recent US experiments with the Chicago Sun Times and Baltimore Beat, f'rex). OR the original bastion of solid news: business- and finance-oriented publications, the one place for which demand actually exists. And a handful of large national papers of record (e.g., the NYT, WashPo, LA Times), though even those are running rough.

Information is in the economic sense, a public good. Treat it as one for it to work.

@kensanata

#InformationIsAPublicGood #Newspapers #Media #Journalism #UniversalContentSyndication

@babelcarp Pragmatically, there are numerous present work-arounds:

• Major US city daily papers are frequently available in public libraries, at least within the US. They're also available to students in public, private, and community colleges (the latter with low basic enrollment costs) through their own library systems. This is the least convenient, though most robust of several options.

• Archive.Today manages to puncture numerous paywalls. That's accessible if you use DuckDuckGo as your primary search engine with the !ais keyword. So simply prepend !ais <your URL here> to your navbar and access most content. https://archive.today/

• 12ft.io offers a similar capability, relying generally on web caches. https://12ft.io/

• The Internet Archive may have either online or print materials: https://archive.org/

Note of course that utilising any of these services does create yet another data-gathering gateway. Internet Archive at least has robust privacy policies and practices, I'm not sure of the others. Archive.Today does pass along the IP of a request to archive (though not AFAIU to read an existing snapshot) to the origin.

From a policy perspective what I've been advocating is for media access to be bundled into extant Internet service offerings. The ENTIRE advertising market worldwide is about $800 billion, which works out to ... about $100 per head worldwide. If we instead assume that the world's wealthiest 1 billion (roughly: the US, EU, Canada, Japan, Australia, and AU, Jr., a/k/a ennzed) foot the bill for the rest, it's still $800/person. Mind that that feeds both publishers and advertising firms. The total print publication market is a subset of this, and at roughly $100/person annually ($8/mo) it would be possible to provide an unmetered, all-you-can-eat, universal content access. Publishers and authors could be compensated much in the same way that present on-the-air music royalties operate, perhaps with a scaled rate based on the type and quality of material.

This, to use your favourite word, could replace all the overhead of individual subscriptions, public-media fundraisers, micropayments, adtech, and a vast amount of surveillance.

I've been suggesting variants of this for years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/

@kensanata

#UniversalContentSyndication #Media #Advertising #AdTech #Privacy #Micropayments #MicropaymentsDieDieDie #Journalism #DeathOfNewspapers