The Internet Works Backwards

A few months ago while riding the train through downtown Portland I had a small epiphany: The Internet works backwards. I tweeted about this but didn’t explain much. I promised to blog about it and then quickly got wrapped up in other things.

This morning I stumbled across this post which comes painfully close to what I had in mind. Painfully because it heads in the right direction and yet is still thinking in a limited, old-media way about the nature of content.

We punish the value creators on the Internet. We should reward those who add value to the network. Instead, the more value a site adds to the network, the more fees the site owners have to pay.

What if the internet worked exactly the opposite from the way it works now? Instead of charging someone like YouTube for bandwidth, carriers would indirectly pay to carry that bandwidth. Consumers would still have a flat-rate ISP subscription, with part of that money being distributed to content providers.

In this way, users would quite literally vote with their attention. This is not the same as your cable company deciding what channels to carry. In this scheme, bandwidth is the only commodity that carriers need concern themselves with. Specific details of content would not matter. Consumers buy bandwidth. Then they hit the sites they like. Those sites receive a portion of the money collected from consumers. This is not on an individual basis; it is aggregate. So if 20% of my ISPs bandwidth went to Youtube yesterday, so did 20% of the allocated money for that day. From Youtube’s perspective, the bandwidth is free and they make money for hosting the content that the Internet values. Ditto for Flickr, Google, Gmail, the New York Times, or any other site that provides value.

This scheme would work much better than micropayments, mainly because it is dirt simple. Certainly people would try to game the system, and there will always be low-value websites and services which might get some trickle of bandwidth. But over time the wrinkles would be ironed out and the sites and services that create value would be the ones that consistently earn money.