Before you decide whether income is necessary to 'enhance the service offered', acknowledge two things.
1. A goodly portion of the net's desirable content IS produced by people doing it as a part time hobby. It is most often for free, and in a significant number of cases, they PAY expenses to put their offering online.
2. Income is only necessary to offset two costs, the cost of delivery and the (possible) cost of content.
Why aren't these costs being separated? It would be a wonderfully efficient way to value bandwidth and content.
The cost of of sending an email should be exactly that, the cost of SENDING it. (spam would no longer be a criminally cheap nuisance). The bandwidth cost of viewing a web page should be paid by the viewer, or pre-paid by the host if they're feeling generous. The problem of ads, banners and other generally objectionable marketing gimmicks goes away when your Junkbuster filter informs your ISP that you aren't accepting collect calls from 'GoatPr0n.com', and the ad doesn't even get SENT until GoatPr0n pays the bandwidth in advance. GoatPr0n either racks up an $80,000 bill with ZERO clickthru's from irate netizens, or serves up zero ads that noone wants to look at. Either way, they go away.
In short, the viewer pays the cost of looking at what he wants, and equally important, doesn't pay to look at what he doesn't want.
Slashdot Mirror
Before you decide whether income is necessary to 'enhance the service offered', acknowledge two things.
1. A goodly portion of the net's desirable content IS produced by people doing it as a part time hobby. It is most often for free, and in a significant number of cases, they PAY expenses to put their offering online.
2. Income is only necessary to offset two costs, the cost of delivery and the (possible) cost of content.
Why aren't these costs being separated? It would be a wonderfully efficient way to value bandwidth and content.
The cost of of sending an email should be exactly that, the cost of SENDING it. (spam would no longer be a criminally cheap nuisance). The bandwidth cost of viewing a web page should be paid by the viewer, or pre-paid by the host if they're feeling generous. The problem of ads, banners and other generally objectionable marketing gimmicks goes away when your Junkbuster filter informs your ISP that you aren't accepting collect calls from 'GoatPr0n.com', and the ad doesn't even get SENT until GoatPr0n pays the bandwidth in advance. GoatPr0n either racks up an $80,000 bill with ZERO clickthru's from irate netizens, or serves up zero ads that noone wants to look at. Either way, they go away.
In short, the viewer pays the cost of looking at what he wants, and equally important, doesn't pay to look at what he doesn't want.