Yeah how about no? Knowledge should be free, I’m not gonna pay 5c every time I want to open Youtube or some shit. In a utopia you’d pay some small government tax that’d go towards keeping the web ad and paywall free, so the people get happy and the greedy corporate rats get their dirty money.
Katana314@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That assumes either all sites on the web deserve equal compensation for their acts, or some body can decide what the relative value of each is and compensate each creator accordingly. You’d go back to having click farms, but they’d claim the government owes them a billion dollars for their high traffic.
Even the government would usually prefer that citizen money go directly to the systems that they prefer to support, rather than go through taxes to a government program that sponsors them (that’s why you get tax deduction for transit usage and charities). That second route is just needlessly complex.