I let automatic programs filter most of my spam, and the small trickle that gets through seems a small price to pay for the fact that I can have my creative projects on the Internet for free, without having to pay a premium to eliminate a special opportunity cost for potential readers. According to my stats, they are not utterly valueless wastes of space—I have some people who are willing to invest time in viewing my content—but I don’t doubt for a moment that I’d lose most, if not all, of my audience if they were obliged money (that didn’t even make its way to me, the creator of the content).
People drop or refrain from picking up new sites over very little provocation—I stopped reading Dr. McNinja when I started using an RSS feed instead of bookmarks to read my webcomics. Dr. McNinja didn’t become more inconvenient to read when I made this switch; I could have kept the bookmark—it simply didn’t get more convenient along with everything else. I didn’t care about it quite enough to keep it on my radar when it would have taken ten seconds of conscious effort three times a week—not even money and the hassle of providing money over the Internet. I can’t think of any (individual) website that I would pay even a trivial extra amount of money to visit.
The situation you describe is the one that currently exists without any net neutrality legislation though.
I’m suspicious of net neutrality because it uses the threat of imagined or potential future problems to push for more legislation and more government involvement in a market that seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far. This is a general tactic for pushing increased government involvement in many different areas.
The actions that have so far been taken that would be prohibited by net-neutrality legislation mostly seem to be about throttling bittorrent traffic. I’d much rather see a focus on eliminating existing government sponsored monopolies in the provision of broadband access and allow the market to sort out the allocation of bandwidth. I am very doubtful that any kind of legislation will produce an optimal allocation of resources.
The fact that something seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far could mean that it will continue to do so, or it could mean that it’s been lucky and taking no new precautions will cause it to stop working pretty well. I don’t have any antivirus software on my Mac; if more people start finding it an appealing challenge to infect Macs with viruses, though, it would be stupid for me to assume that this will be safe forever. More companies are starting to show interest in behaviors that will lead to biased net access. Regulation will almost certainly not yield optimal allocation of resources; it will, however, prevent certain kinds of abuses and inequalities.
I guess this comes down to politics ultimately. I have more faith that good solutions will be worked out by negotiation between the competing interests (Google tends to counter-balance the cable companies, consumers have options even though they tend to be limited by government sponsored monopolies for broadband provision) than by congress being captured by whoever has the most powerful lobbyists at the time the laws are passed. I take the fact that things are ok at the moment as reasonable evidence that a good solution is possible without legislation. Certainly bad solutions are possible both with and without legislation, I just tend to think they are much more likely with legislation than without.
This may or may not have to do with the fact that I am not paid by the hour. My stipend depends on grading papers and doing adequately in school, but if I can accomplish that in ten hours a week, I don’t get paid any less than if I accomplish it in forty. Time I spend on Less Wrong isn’t time I could be spending earning money, because I have enough on my plate that getting an outside job would be foolish of me.
Also, one cent is not just one cent here. If my computer had a coin slot, I’d probably drop in a penny for lifetime access to Less Wrong. But spending time (not happily) wrestling with the transaction itself, and running the risk that something will go wrong and the access to the site won’t come immediately after the penny has departed from my end, and wasting brainpower trying to decide whether the site is worth a penny when for all I know it could be gone next week or deteriorate tremendously in quality—that would be too big an intrusion, and that’s what it looks like when you have to pay for website access.
Additionally, coughing up any amount of money just to access a site sets up an incentive structure I don’t care for. If people tolerate a pricetag for the main contents of websites—not just extra things like bonus or premium content, or physical objects from Cafépress, or donations as gratitude or charity—then there is less reason not to attach a pricetag. I visit more than enough different websites (thanks to Stumbleupon) to make a difference in my budget over the course of a month if I had to pay a penny each to see them all.
In a nutshell: I can’t trade time alone directly for money; I can’t trade cash alone directly for website access; and I do not wish to universalize the maxim that paying for website access would endorse.
I let automatic programs filter most of my spam, and the small trickle that gets through seems a small price to pay for the fact that I can have my creative projects on the Internet for free, without having to pay a premium to eliminate a special opportunity cost for potential readers. According to my stats, they are not utterly valueless wastes of space—I have some people who are willing to invest time in viewing my content—but I don’t doubt for a moment that I’d lose most, if not all, of my audience if they were obliged money (that didn’t even make its way to me, the creator of the content).
People drop or refrain from picking up new sites over very little provocation—I stopped reading Dr. McNinja when I started using an RSS feed instead of bookmarks to read my webcomics. Dr. McNinja didn’t become more inconvenient to read when I made this switch; I could have kept the bookmark—it simply didn’t get more convenient along with everything else. I didn’t care about it quite enough to keep it on my radar when it would have taken ten seconds of conscious effort three times a week—not even money and the hassle of providing money over the Internet. I can’t think of any (individual) website that I would pay even a trivial extra amount of money to visit.
The situation you describe is the one that currently exists without any net neutrality legislation though.
I’m suspicious of net neutrality because it uses the threat of imagined or potential future problems to push for more legislation and more government involvement in a market that seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far. This is a general tactic for pushing increased government involvement in many different areas.
The actions that have so far been taken that would be prohibited by net-neutrality legislation mostly seem to be about throttling bittorrent traffic. I’d much rather see a focus on eliminating existing government sponsored monopolies in the provision of broadband access and allow the market to sort out the allocation of bandwidth. I am very doubtful that any kind of legislation will produce an optimal allocation of resources.
The fact that something seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far could mean that it will continue to do so, or it could mean that it’s been lucky and taking no new precautions will cause it to stop working pretty well. I don’t have any antivirus software on my Mac; if more people start finding it an appealing challenge to infect Macs with viruses, though, it would be stupid for me to assume that this will be safe forever. More companies are starting to show interest in behaviors that will lead to biased net access. Regulation will almost certainly not yield optimal allocation of resources; it will, however, prevent certain kinds of abuses and inequalities.
I guess this comes down to politics ultimately. I have more faith that good solutions will be worked out by negotiation between the competing interests (Google tends to counter-balance the cable companies, consumers have options even though they tend to be limited by government sponsored monopolies for broadband provision) than by congress being captured by whoever has the most powerful lobbyists at the time the laws are passed. I take the fact that things are ok at the moment as reasonable evidence that a good solution is possible without legislation. Certainly bad solutions are possible both with and without legislation, I just tend to think they are much more likely with legislation than without.
I must have misread, lifetime access to lesswrong isn’t worth one cent, but you’ll voluntarily spend hours of time on it?
This may or may not have to do with the fact that I am not paid by the hour. My stipend depends on grading papers and doing adequately in school, but if I can accomplish that in ten hours a week, I don’t get paid any less than if I accomplish it in forty. Time I spend on Less Wrong isn’t time I could be spending earning money, because I have enough on my plate that getting an outside job would be foolish of me.
Also, one cent is not just one cent here. If my computer had a coin slot, I’d probably drop in a penny for lifetime access to Less Wrong. But spending time (not happily) wrestling with the transaction itself, and running the risk that something will go wrong and the access to the site won’t come immediately after the penny has departed from my end, and wasting brainpower trying to decide whether the site is worth a penny when for all I know it could be gone next week or deteriorate tremendously in quality—that would be too big an intrusion, and that’s what it looks like when you have to pay for website access.
Additionally, coughing up any amount of money just to access a site sets up an incentive structure I don’t care for. If people tolerate a pricetag for the main contents of websites—not just extra things like bonus or premium content, or physical objects from Cafépress, or donations as gratitude or charity—then there is less reason not to attach a pricetag. I visit more than enough different websites (thanks to Stumbleupon) to make a difference in my budget over the course of a month if I had to pay a penny each to see them all.
In a nutshell: I can’t trade time alone directly for money; I can’t trade cash alone directly for website access; and I do not wish to universalize the maxim that paying for website access would endorse.