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Stardate 20011115.1919 (On Screen): "How Stuff Works" suggests the possibility that web browsing cost one penny per page, flat rate. They are still making the assumption that if the web doesn't work for paid content then it must be a failure, because it "isn't living up to its full potential". But who says that is the direction the web must go? Why must it be dominated by professionally-produced content?

How can we build a successful electronic economy on the Web?

Why would we want to? And who says that it's a failure now? It doesn't permit the magazine-without-paper business model to work, but why do we necessarily need that? But passing by the whole question of why we're trying to fix something that isn't broken, there are a number of severe flaws in their concept. First, the bureaucracy required to implement this would be mammoth. Would it be mandatory for anyone who puts up a web page to participate in this? How could that possibly be enforced? What of their privacy; what if someone wants to put up a web page anonymously? If it is not mandatory, then you have the problem that free sites will be competing with pay sites, and the free sites will, on balance, be seen as desirable.

How do you implement payment? Does this mean that everyone who owns a computer with a browser and a modem would be forced to register and leave a credit card number in some (hackable) central database? Yeah, right.

But the problem pales when you realize that the web is a world-wide phenomenon. How do you charge for page hits from Botswana? The article mentions that the maximum charge for light browsing would be "no more than" $20 per month -- but to someone in a nation like that, that is a great deal of money.

Doesn't this also mean that there will be an accounting trail showing exactly what pages you've viewed? Sorry, I don't want that.

I also question whether a billing system can reasonably be set up which can perform such transactions for a fraction of a cent each (including amortized cost of the computers, and ongoing cost of the network bandwidth for all the tracking).

It's also subject to dramatic abuse. For instance, if as suggested there was a ceiling of a certain number of dollars per month, then it would be possible to create a proxy which many people worked through, which fronted for many people at once -- and hit the ceiling immediately. Without a ceiling, on the other hand, this becomes a way to make surreptitious payments to someone else, laundering the money. Want to pay someone? He puts up a web site and you program your computer to load it a million times. Another kind of abuse is popup advertising and window spawning: do I have to pay a penny for every popup advertisement which I don't voluntarily open? Or for every child window that some site spawns without permission?

The real effect that this would have is not to foster lots of new commercial sites, but to cause use of the web to collapse. Despite what they think, this would strongly inhibit many people from using the web. This is a really stupid proposal. (discuss)