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0 pointspessimizer1y ago0 comments

> This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet.

No, they'll be relegated to the charitable internet, the advocacy internet, the nerdy obsessive internet, the public science internet, the FOSS internet, the public domain internet, and the piracy internet.

And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.

> This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.

I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them. The US seems like it's on the verge of state licensing of speech and journalism, and that sentiment is easily moved to any sort of internet hosting of any service.

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LunaSea1y ago

> And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.

They absolutely will have to since they won't have the means to serve the content to the community otherwise.

Niche websites won't stay niche for very long if they are the only free option.

> I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them.

I don't see most of these free alternatives even existing in the first place. For example: free news reporting (not even talking about foreign correspondents & co).

bugtodiffer1y ago

> the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow

This is already happening.

They wanted to make us pay more because we are using netflix and other streaming services so much.

Everything important like internet and streets should be built and maintained by the gov and not some random companies, f*ck Telekom.

kjkjadksj1y ago

The issue is our government doesn’t function anything like that. We don’t build roads. We write checks to for profit contractors to build our roads. What would government internet look like? A massive check to meta and more or less the same environment we have today.

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