that's absolutely ridiculous and totally unfeasible.
the privacy implications alone are unfathomable.
the logistics? essentially impossible.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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Showerthoughts
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Fuck you. That sounds terrible.
…Yes.
But it would create a perverse incentive to load websites/data, somehow. That would be grifter/spammer heaven.
Only if they actually made a profit off the requests. If the request prices were forced to be just the exact incurred server cost, this would be neutralized. I agree that calculating and enforcing that would be very hard though.
And you're right, if they were allowed to make a profit, it would shift the incentive to minimize the number of HTTP requests from the web dev (where it lies today) to the website visitor,.
That's not possible, but don't throw good money after bad. The direction of your idea is sound
What you're describing is not unlike Brave browser's Basic Attention Token.
You're approaching something worth thinking about. You could say it's like ordering something to be delivered to your house and then paying the tolls for the delivery truck. But importantly missing from your analysis is that the delivery truck also has to pay the tolls. It's essentially a double-dipping situation.
From a data standpoint it's also pretty bad. Your request to Netflix is a few hundred bytes. Their response is gigabytes.
From a data standpoint it's also pretty bad. Your request to Netflix is a few hundred bytes. Their response is gigabytes.
And it's not the data transfer costs that's the monetary bottleneck. It isn't even the data storage costs (unless you run a media server, but let's ignore that for a moment). It's the computation costs that is the largest cost center for most websites. You can run simple static pages on a potato but if you have significant visitors you need CDNs or significant infrastructure to handle it. If you start to make dynamic pages, maybe even web apps, then your computational workloads will increase significantly too.
Paying for an HTTP transfer, for example, would not be able to distinguish between a simple HTML website or an AI prompt.
Capitalism may have some ugly sides but the fact that you pay to prompt Claude but can see my simple static HTML website for free is a way to distribute the money to where your activity costs money. If you want to burn down the rain forest to power your AI prompt, then you pay for that. If you want to see a blog about kittens, then you pay by seeing an ad (or maybe not at all if the website is run purely as a free hobby project). My personal website is running off of my old gaming PC so the only cost is the electricity. But I am running most of my services I need on there too, so the public website is negligible in comparison. A byte transfer wouldn't even be worth a penny while Claude probably could be measured in dollars.
So, you're CDN example is completely off-base. CDNs are complicated companies, to be sure, but the endpoint of a CDN is the closest thing to a potato possible. That's why CDNs exist. They are trying to colocate as much data as possible in the cheapest hardware possible in as many locations as possible to drive the cost of serving an HTTP request down as low as possible.
You're correct that the cost of running a website is not in the network, much like the cost of your home computer is not in the Internet service (it's in your computer), but that's not the point.
The point is that I am paying for my network and also the service is paying for their network.
Now, normally we can frame this as paying for infrastructure. I am paying to subsidize the infrastructure that brings my traffic to the backbone and the service is paying for the infrastructure that brings them to the backbone.
And we can leave it at that and it's fair. As soon as a network provider charges for volume, like mobile data caps, we're in a double-dip scenario. Now I am paying for the bits transiting the network from backbone and the provider is also paying for those same bits transiting the network to backbone.
I agree with most points but IMO CDNs are not just a potato, it is a ton of potatoes all easing the load on your server. The individual endpoint is not much but one endpoint does not a CDN make. You'd need the network to be able to lower the load on the server significantly (depending on the data type and caching method of course, but generally I'd say this is true).
Also agree with data caps in the current age. In the early mobile internet transfer was expensive but now it isn't. I cannot put words on how grateful I am for being able to have no data caps on 1Gig (up to 2.5Gig with same carrier, just in a location where they have upgraded the equipment) as well as no data caps on 4G/5G mobile.
From the perspective of the provider yes it's millions of potatoes. But from the perspective of the consumer, it's one potato. Their HTTP request is served by the dumbest, cheapest piece of equipment feasible. The fact that there is a complex network of millions of them only means that each HTTP request made is guaranteed to be served by the closest potato.
Hmm, I disagree with the analogy. Your ISP is like the toll you pay to use the highway... also it would have zero effect on real databrokers, why would they settle for ISP pennies when they have a billionaire industry?
why would they settle for ISP pennies when they have a billionaire industry?
Hmm, that's true. I don't know how to solve that bit tbh.
I think the analogy kibda breaks down there tbh. The water one works better, where your ISP runs the infrastructure (maintaining tbe pipes), and the websites are the water plants
Your proposal sounds like you're saying that road tolls should also cover the cost of any food, or anything else, delivered by road.
Currently a TB of server bandwidth costs $3. A single ad to a thousand clicks pays more than that.
It isn’t costs that ads are paying but billions of dollars in profits.
The desire for more profit means that this solution will not eliminate ads or anything else currently available to generate even more profit
With the added detail that the extra information needing to be sent, would only make privacy erode faster
Oh I see, so you're saying that server costs are small enough to be negligible, and the ads/data harvesting are there ti serve as an additional profit stream?
Yes. A site serving 10 million users can operate on 2 servers costing $10/month if one does careful engineering.
The biggest costs are usually the people. A UBI system would be a much more efficient solution and actually preserve privacy.
It would be a privacy nightmare, of course. Either we would all have to install monitoring software on our devices, or we would have to allow ISPs to break HTTPS.
I believe ISPs can already see the domain names you visit though, which would be enough data even for what I proposed
Multiple HTTP requests can be performed over a single connection, and not all connections are for HTTP requests in the first place. The only way to know that an HTTP request is being made (or how many) is to actually see the requests.
Step 1: Create page that makes 10k HTTP requests per second
Step 2: Rival Elon, except liquid
A better analogy: This would be like charging per word for telephone conversations
You're essentially suggesting a tax on our consciousness. That's... Rather Draconian.
Currently sites have no choice but to pay for their upkeep with advertising
Kind of like Lemmy?
Lemmy is a charity. As you can probably tell, most of the economy, including the internet, is unable to run on charity, else that would be the dominant funding model
My point is that you seem to be presenting ads as the only other option, but it's not - there are other ways to cover the cost ranging from financing it all yourself to making it subscription-based and everything in between. I don't even necessarily disagree with your core idea but I want to highlight that there are creative ways to go about it rather than just defaulting to ads. As an extreme example, I'm a paying member of a community that's subscription-based but anyone can just message the staff and get a year for free for whatever reason if they don't want to pay, and they can do it again the next year if they want to. They're handing out a crazy amount of free subscriptions but that doesn't matter because there's enough people paying to cover the costs.